Marketo's Automated Merging is Nulling Fields & Interrupting Attribution Campaigns

[Tyron_Pretorius]

Merging of leads is resulting in 3 issues with our attribution tracking:

1. It is nulling our first touch attribution fields

2. It is interrupting our attribution campaigns and stopping them from completing

3. It is stopping attribution campaigns from even starting in the first place

I have gone into detail to show each of the 3 issues in the Loom video below, which I made for Marketo support: https://www.loom.com/share/22e8a6eca5834ea6a03ef314de6d7423

Issue #1 definitely seems like a bug, merging should not be nulling out fields as is supported by this article: https://developers.marketo.com/rest-api/lead-database/leads/#merge

As for #2 Marketo should be able to stop the merge from interrupting a campaign that is running and for #3 if the merge happens first it should make a note to come back and put the merged lead through the campaign.

Are these all bugs? If not and there is nothing that Marketo support can do does anyone have suggestions to help stop this from happening?

I am testing out putting a delay in the flow of attribution campaigns to give the merging time to happen once the lead is created and then hopefully this attribution campaign will run after the merge has completed. However, issues 2 and 3 above make me think that the merge might mean this campaign never comes back to finish.

I appreciate any insight or advice people have on this matter, thanks.

[MitchellH]

Interested to hear the outcome of this... I can't see anything that would explain why the fields are null. If they had a value and were subsequently nulled, you should be able to see an activity record show up. I would expect this is a bug, and not one I've encountered, but interested if any other community members have any ideas.

[Katja_Keesom · Accepted solution]

Hmm, this is indeed an interesting one. A few thoughts based on my experience:

• For your issue 1, I know the new value sometimes takes a little bit of time to become available for use. As all your activities happen almost simultaneously, my best guess is that Marketo doesn't "see" your new acquisition values yet at the time of the merge.
• The other two issues I believe have a common cause. My guess is that the winning record in the merge is the pre-existing record. As that person did not trigger the smart campaign, nothing will happen anymore once the non-surviving record doesn't exist anymore.

That being said, I think your test with the delay will not solve the issue. As you do not stamp the values before the merge they will not end up on the winning record and if the winning record is the pre-existing one they will never go through the flow, as that record was not picked up by the trigger.

Of course, if the merge happens with a pre-existing known record this is not an issue at all, as the acquisition is not really acquisition at all. The main issue is if the merge happens with a pre-existing anonymous record.

Would the solution not simply be to capture your acquistion information as hidden fields on the form?

[Tyron_Pretorius]

Thanks for the reply Katja,

Your explanation of the reasons behind the issues and why the delay might not work make sense.

When it comes to storing the utm parameters in hidden fields, oftentimes people will visit multiple pages after the landing page before submitting a form on the site and we do not have a method to carry the landing page params all the way through to the final page where they submit the form

[SanfordWhiteman]

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..we do not have a method to carry the landing page params all the way through to the final page where they submit the form

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You should! That’s what a JS attribution library is for.

[Tyron_Pretorius]

Thanks I'll make an exploratory ticket for the front-end team to look into JS attribution libraries.

Are there any you would recommend?

What about instances where UTM params are not present e.g. Organic search, social, 3rd party sites?

We have attribution campaigns in Marketo that look at the referrer on the visits webpage trigger. In JS I am guessing that we would make up UTM params based on different referrers e.g. G2, Github etc, and then pass these through until the final form fill?

I also don't think capturing the FT fields in hidden form fields is bulletproof either. Say for example, a lead visits a webpage on day 1 with utm params from campaign 1 but does not fill out a form, then they come back on day 2 with utm params from campaign 2 and then fill out a form with hidden FT fields. The FT fields will be set according to campaign 2 even though we know campaign 1 was their first touch. At least with smart campaigns there is a chance that the smart campaign for campaign 1 will run 1st upon creation ( I know this order is not guaranteed) and get the FT attribution.

Also for known leads smart campaigns can still mark people as "Visited" in an ad campaign program if they do not fill out a form.

So I think smart campaigns will still be needed for attribution tracking but with hidden form fields as a potential supplement.