My Marketo wait step mysteriously doubled. Why?

[Anonymous]

Hey there,

I've a mystery problem, maybe you can help.  I created a fairly simple smart campaign for triggered email nurturing that looks like this:

Send email 1 --> wait 23 days  --> send email 2 --> wait 7 days --> send email 3 (end)

Looks great - launch! BUT a few months after launch I notice that for about a month the 23 day wait step had been doubled to 46 days.

Ohgodwhy. I quickly look at the smart campaign to make sure it was set up correctly with a 23 day wait period and it's all good. I see that the wait period went back to a normal 23 days - at least that's good. This particularly sucks because this nurturing sequence was for a free trial which included time-bound email like "7 days left on your free trial" so the timing was definitely way off because of this "glitch". It also affected about 10,000 lead. Ouch.

Why did my wait period mysteriously double?

I'll take any insight. This can't happen again.

[Devraj_Grewal]

Koko,

I would look at this smart campaign in the audit trail. It's possible another user was making an edit at the time, it was a typo, or it was edited to "23 days" but it was in a window that was logged out of Marketo at the time so the change never occurred. The audit trail in Admin will show you what changes took place and which user made those changes.

[Anonymous]

Hi Devraj,

Thanks for your reply. I'm the only one on the audit trail so there's no saving hierarchy issue here - but good idea.

Any other reason why this might happen?

[Devraj_Grewal]

I would look at the Audit trail to see what made the change to "46 days". I haven't seen an issue like this before.

[Anonymous · Accepted solution]

For example

1) Approved

Send email 1 --> wait 23 days  --> send email 2 --> wait 7 days --> send email 3 (end)

2) 10000 leads are into "wait 23 days" step

3) Insert any step before "wait 23 days" step

Send email 1 --> change score --> wait 23 days  --> send email 2 --> wait 7 days --> send email 3 (end)

In this case, 10000 leads wait 23 days again.

[Anonymous]

Hi Takehiro,

This seems right. It sucks, but I'm sure this is what happened. To avoid this in the future, best practice would be to clone the smart campaign,  modify the new campaign and activate, and deactivate the old campaign.

Correct me if there's a better way. Thanks again.

[Nicholas_Manojl]

I can't see how that is the correct answer personally.