Purging Anonymous Leads to Optimize System Performance

[Anonymous]

In the session "10 Ways to Optimize Marketo Performance," someone mentioned they purged anonymous leads who hadn't converted. We have more anonymous leads at this point than not (~500K), so I am hoping running a program like this may help increase performance.

I am curious how this can be done without losing any important information and what people have done in the past to get rid of some of their older, anonymous leads.

[Anonymous]

The article "Understand How Marketo Archives Inactive Anonymous Leads" explains the automatic process purging inactive anonymous leads
https://community.marketo.com/MarketoArticle?id=kA050000000L60JCAS

[Anonymous]

Hi Ann,

At the beginning of last Summer Marketo put some measures in place to "purge" inactive anonymous leads. Anonymous leads that have had no web activity in the past 90 days are automatically removed by Marketo. These anonymous leads are unlikely to return to your site with the same cookie. The visitor is likely to have switched browsers or cleared their cookies; you may already have the same visitor as a new, active anonymous lead or known lead.

https://community.marketo.com/MarketoArticle?id=kA050000000L60JCAS

If you want to take further measures to delete more anonymous leads then it would be all about identifying a criteria for leads that you deem unrequired and creating a batch campaign around the criteria (using the filter anonymous = true).

Rgs,
Cathal

[Anonymous]

Thanks.

I guess I should be more specific in that I am looking at what criteria/filters were used to purge the older leads that are not cleaned up by Marketo. We have 500K+ anonymous leads, and this can really affect my system's performance; I want to make sure not to lose tracking on people who are still being active on our site.

I understand Marketo purges after 90 days. But when I pull a smart list using: Anonymous = true, Last Web Activity = before 1 Jan 2013, almost my whole database of anonymous leads shows up. So perhaps I am missing something there?

[Anonymous · Accepted solution]

Hi Ann,

I was the person who mentioned running a batch to purge anonymous.  I purge all anonymous leads that haven't touched my site in the last 9 months.

This is the batch I have set up (which runs once a month during the night)

Smart List:
Anonymous is True
Not visited Web Page "is any" Date of Activity in past "9 months"

Flow:
Delete Lead - remove from salesforce is false (I do this to keep it from trying to ping SFDC - even though I know the lead isn't there)

Schedule:
Repeats on the Fourth Saturday of Every month  (It usually runs at about 11 pm

Feel free to email me if you want more details.... jjohnson@wealthengine.com

- Jocelyn

[Anonymous]

Thank you Jocelyn! I will give that a go and email you if I have more questions. Thanks!

[Josh_Hill13]

Jocelyn,

Do you find your Anonymous Purge technique works better than the standard 90 day purge Marketo has setup?

Or did you opt out of that for better control of your data?

[Anonymous]

Hi Josh,

I started my "clean anonymous" batch in July of 2011, since my database performance was really suffering and someone else on the community suggested cleaning up my anonymous leads as a way to improve it.  I think Marketo started their 90 day purge in August or September of 2012, since (based on the batch run history), the number of leads in each batch dropped off significantly then. 

I didn't "Opt Out" of the standard purge process, and (frankly) forgot to "turn off" my campaign, since it was quietly running in the background.  Interestingly, I'm still seeing leads in my batches, although a lot fewer than before, so I think I'll leave it on.  The standard Marketo purge clearly works well since the volume of leads in my batches did drop off, and with the exception of one month has stayed fairly low, but I'm still seeing some aged anonymous that aren't being caught. 

Take care!

- Jocelyn