NextGen Marketo Munchkin - Why no anonymous?

[Anonymous]

Cheryl Chavez​, Justin Cooperman​ & all of the other wonderful Product Managers.

Here's the FAQ if you're completely confused on "Next Gen Marketo Munchkin". https://docs.marketo.com/display/public/DOCS/Next+Generation+Munchkin+Tracking+FAQ

Did we determine that anonymous visitors were hogging up too much processor time? It is quite a transition to change this core definition.

For years I've been tracking my advertising campaigns using static lists & smart campaigns. I put an ad on LinkedIn, a user clicks through but doesn't convert, they get hit with a retargeting ad, and end up converting a week later. I then use a smart campaign to split FT credit with the LinkedIn ad and the retargeting ad.

Being able to see the anonymous visitors that an ad is driving helps me sanity check the click metrics that I see in those vendor's systems. It also allows me, if I really want to, to look up the IPs to see whether we're driving truly targeted ads to the companies that matter most.

I've been doing this for years. I've got a real routine to how this looks & how it works. I use it to dispute bot traffic & determine which of my ad platforms are performing best.

Is there any work around that I'm missing? Or is this entire philosophy of tracking anonymous visitors ending on 2/5? According to the FAQ, I would see when the anonymous visitors convert later on that they had originated from the LinkedIn Ad. However I won't be able to verify the number of clicks from a vendor with the number of visits on my static list.

Are we really eliminating that very useful function? //sad puppy dog eyes//

[Mike_Reynolds2]

Adam,

Going from 2 million web visits to 100 million web visits per day is an enormous improvement and it wouldn't be possible without these upgrades. On the back end, the web activity gets stored differently and doesn't create lead records (one of the largest resource-heavy activities). Without lead records being created for every web visitor, those resources can be allocated elsewhere.

As Marketo grows, and as the customer base grows as well, the needs of the servers will need to grow as well. Ideally every customer would be pulling 100 million web visits a day. In the meantime though, increasing the capabilities makes that kind of growth possible. Plus, even if your own instance isn't getting millions of web visits each day, other larger customers on the same servers could be and increasing the capabilities across the board opens up system resources across the board as well.

Smart campaigns will still trigger for a lead’s anonymous activity at the time they become known as long as that activity happened within the web activity pruning timeframe. All Change Score, Interesting Moment, Change Data Value, Add to List and Remove from List flow steps will still be run in these campaigns, so if you’re using static lists, you will still be able to add and remove the known lead records to these lists from their anonymous web activity. So let’s say you’ve got a campaign that triggers from the web page visits and it allows the leads to go through every time. When the lead becomes known, all anonymous activity that would have triggered campaigns will be processed in the order that it occurred, so each of these activities would still trigger your various campaigns.

Also, you may be interested in these other related discussion threads that have more details included:

Removal of "Is Anonymous" filters.

Integration (Adding) Score of an anonymous lead after Next Generation Munchkin Tracking

[Anonymous]

It is always a hard pill to swallow when standard functionality that has been available for years is changed without providing an alternative solution.

[Mike_Reynolds2]

Adam New-Waterson​

I've just gotten some Support KB documentation published that will give more detailed information about these upgrades. Here are the links

Anonymous Lead Upgrades Overview

Anonymous Lead Upgrades – Changes Inside Marketo UI

Anonymous Lead Upgrades – Customer Action Needed

Anonymous Lead Upgrades – Analytics Reports

Anonymous Lead Upgrades – Release Schedule

Anonymous Lead Upgrades – Under The Hood

Anonymous Lead Promotion to Known Lead – Munchkin V2 Behavior

[Guy_Goldstein6]

Like Adam, I've been been relying on this anonymous tracking for pretty much the same reasons - to track the events that happen prior to conversion.

The ability to track up to 100M web visits per day is very cool, don't get me wrong, but I think that my concern is that, given that most of the systems that already exist require some kind of "structured" logic, which in case of anonymous leads assumes that there are leads who are "pre-populated" on static lists that reflect certain anonymous activity.

My concern is that now, when a new lead is created a large number of campaigns will run in parallel, meaning that any sequential campaigns that are designed to assume that the data exists, will not necessarily run in the correct order and it'll throw off a lot of data processes (particularly those around acquisition programs).

Will we be given more control (or insight) into the way campaign priority works to account for this ahead of time?

[Mike_Reynolds2]

Guy Goldstein​,

I understand the concern, but this shouldn't affect your campaigns negatively. The campaigns triggering off of the anonymous activity will still process at the time the lead becomes known and will process in the order in which the activity occurred. Check out the Under the Hood documentation here for a full explanation: Anonymous Lead Upgrades – Under The Hood

[Grégoire_Miche2]

Guy Goldstein​,

We have been covering execution order a lot by the end of this thread : Re: Removal of "Is Anonymous" filters.  and came up with an idea as well:

-Greg

[Tara_Petre]

I agree, Adam. I think the removal of the filter as well as the ability for anonymous leads to process through smart campaigns is going to cause some headaches.

There will inevitably be system 'racing' issues. For example, if an anonymous lead comes in through a clicked PPC link, later through a social link and lastly via a content syndication link, but only becomes known after multiple visits via a conversion resulting from content syndication, we no longer have the ability to correctly attribute that lead's source to the channel that originally drove them to the site (PPC in this case).  We will have the ability to track the source by which the lead became known, but I know there is a lot of debate about whether source is the channel that drove a lead to engage initially (even if they didn't convert) or if it's the channel that drove a lead through conversion.

In this scenario we'll be inconsistently setting source because the source will likely be set on conversion and since the field is locked down, even though leads qualify for campaigns once they become known, we've already updated that value which can now not be overwritten via the campaigns the anonymous leads would have qualified for upon visit to indicate the correct original source.

Also, for anyone who has been using source to track original visits, as you have, will now be reporting inconsistently as their referential data is looking at original visits and sources set after 2/5 will be looking at conversion source.

I'm looking through the resources in Gregoire's reply, but if anyone finds a workaround let me know!

[Grégoire_Miche2]

Hi Tara,

The workaround is to use cookies to store some of the data you are referring to. For instance, you may store the very first visit in cookies (utm_XXX values), and then any subsequent visit into another set of cookies. You will at least be able to get in your lead:

• The source of the very first visit
• The source of the visit that triggered conversion
• The source of last visit to date (post conversion)

Not perfect, but my understanding is that for the rest, you will still have the "visit web page" data that will be made available.

-Greg

[Anonymous]

To my understanding and with what a Marketo Product Manager 'reassures' me is that when a lead becomes known, let's say for example after 3 page visits (1st anonymous page visit was from PPC, 2nd was from email, and 3rd was Web Direct), their first anonymous page visit should trigger the PPC lead source tracking campaign and associate the lead source as PPC. Since all anonymous activity will be running the triggered smart campaigns in chronological order at the time a lead becomes known, Marketo Product reassures me that we should still be able to attribute lead source to the first page visit, not the page where the lead converted on. But only time will tell once the release goes live tomorrow. Crossing my fingers I don't run into any issues.