Removal of "Is Anonymous" filters.

[Grégoire_Miche2]

Hi all,

We have been receiving today an information from Cheryl Chavez​ about the removal of the is Anonymous filter, as part of the release of Munchkin v2. See here for more details : Next Generation Munchkin Tracking FAQ - Marketo Docs - Product Docs

Although this new version of the munchkin and the way the V2 will work is promising, there is one thing we will be missing, though: the ability to look at the anonymous leads, display inferred and origin informations and create an understanding of where they come from and how they arrived here.

Also, some database providers use anonymous leads to read their IP addresses and provide in return some leads from the same IP address for retargeting. They will be in hard difficulty.

Your thoughts ?

-Greg

[Kenny_Elkington]

To an extent, yes.  You will no longer be able to retrieve lead details of an anonymous lead via lead ID, since there will not be any anonymous records which have lead IDs.  Promoting a lead via the inclusion of a <marketoCookie> parameter in a syncLead call will work the same.  There will not be any changes to the way REST works since access to anonymous leads has never been permitted via REST.

[Grégoire_Miche2]

Hi Kenny,

Suppliers that retrieve anonymous leads to get the IP address and provide some more info on this will hate you

I suppose this will reinforce the interest for RTP, but also for this idea :   so that at least we can make decent use of the Web Activity Report and the Company Web Activity report.

-Greg

[Kenny_Elkington]

Hi Greg,

I've never really understood this use case.  How and why have you obtained the lead ID of an anonymous lead if you don't even have the IP address and/or cookie?  If you know enough to know that there is an anonymous lead, it's likely that you know that there has been a visit, at which point it should have been trivial to obtain both the IP and the Marketo cookie of that lead.  Care to explain?

Thanks,

Kenny

[Grégoire_Miche2]

Hi Kenny,

We have some list providers on the market in a few EU countries (probably elsewhere as well, but I prefer to write about what I know for sure) that have database of emails and names linked with company names and IP addresses.

When an anonymous visits your web site, they can provide you with targetable email addresses with a given profile (for instance Finance) in the account. The assumptions behind it is that if you sell to Finance people and someone from Company ACME visited your site, sending an email to Finance people in ACME is more likely to make a hit.

This works of course only in countries where the opt-out is a valid approach on B2B.

Some of my customers are using this kind of service. From what I gather, these vendors will have to collect IP addresses through their own tracker, instead of using Marketo's.

-Greg

[Kenny_Elkington]

Right.  I just don't get where querying the anonymous record via api comes in here.  Where does this come into the flow you described?

[Grégoire_Miche2]

Hi again Kenny,

They connect to Marketo database to get the most recent (usually from the last 24h) anonymous leads and get their IP addresses. I suppose it was a quicker way to get these than developing their own web tracker.

-Greg

[Kailey_Belsher]

Hi Greg,

I'm with you there. The removal of the "Is Anonymous" smart list filter is concerning.

We distribute a daily report of Anonymous Web visitors from the day before, and it is widely used by our Sales and Marketing teams. It's especially great for Sales people that are looking for new accounts as we can see who the inferred company is. With this being removed, does that mean we lose the value of this report?

Any recommendations on how we can get information about Anonymous Leads in a easy-to-use way after this change?

[hena_wells]

Hi Guys,

The Web Activity Report and the Company Web Activity report will continue to work. Within this report:

1) The "Anonymous Visitors from ISP's" setting will still be there. You can choose "Shown" here for the report to show both known and anonymous web activity or "Hidden" to show just known web activity.

https://docs.marketo.com/display/DOCS/Hide+Anonymous+Leads+in+Web+Reports

2) If you use the Smart Lists in the Report, the "Is anonymous" filter is what will be removed.

Aj.

[Andy_Varshneya1]

Hi Arjun,

Our most powerful and insightful reports rely on anonymous lead data as we're able to populate the anonymous lead's ID into GA and do TRUE end to end reporting from anonymous user behavior all the way to Closed Won.

Sounds like that functionality will be removed as well, crippling our digital marketing and demand generation teams?

Surely there must be some alternatives for us?

[SanfordWhiteman]

Our most powerful and insightful reports rely on anonymous lead data as we're able to populate the anonymous lead's ID into GA

In theory, the GA join could be done using the cookie value (which you always have on the client) as the GA User ID, rather than using the Lead ID.

If you're popping the Lead ID into GA, are you doing that via webhook?

[Andy_Varshneya1]

So the way we're doing it is actually via Courtney Grimes​'s guide Integrating Google Analytics with Marketo

That integration relies on the Marketo User ID, so that's why I'm trying to understand if this change to anonymous leads will impact that. From my understanding of it, it will.

[Alex_Stanton1]

I use the "Is Anonymous" filter on a regular basis and it helps discovering patterns, inferred data, etc. Is there a technical reason why the filter is being discontinued and would you reconsider?

[Dan_Stevens_]

We, too, use this filter to analyze the anonymous activity (hitting our campaign landing pages) that's resulting from many of our paid targeting advertising efforts.  While we don't have the known lead data report on, some of the inferred data is still extremely beneficial.

[Mike_Reynolds2]

Dan,

Inferred data will still be populated in the known lead records. It still gets gathered and added into the lead records.

[Dan_Stevens_]

I understand that.  But the reports that we are running today for our account executives will no longer function and provide key data that they're used to receiving:

Are you saying that we will still be able to run these reports and produce the same results?  Because today, if the "is anonymous" filter is removed, only known leads are contained in the report.

[Mike_Reynolds2]

Anonymous lead web activity will still be able to be viewed in the Web Activity Report and the Company Web Activity Report. You'll need to make one small change to enable anonymous web activity, and that's shown here: Hide Anonymous Leads in Web Reports - Marketo Docs - Product Docs

The "Is Anonymous" filter will be removed wherever it can be added currently.

Not all Analytics reports allow smart lists, so not all Analytics reports will be affected by this upgrade. The reports below will be the ones affected:

• Web Page Activity
• Company Web Activity
• Email Performance
• Lead Performance
• Engagement Stream Performance
• Email Link Performance
• Lead By Revenue Stage
• Leads By Status
• Sales Insight Email Performance

[Dan_Stevens_]

Mike - the link you referenced (to turn on/off anonymous activity in these reports) - Hide Anonymous Leads in Web Reports - Marketo Docs - Product Docs - appears to me that this only turns on/off anonymous ISP activity, no? 

[Stilyana_Yanev2]

Mike Reynolds​ - as the anonymous leads will be stored differently and the Is Anonymous filter will no longer be available, 3 questions from our side:

1. What actually are we going to see as anonymous activity/leads in the Web Page Activity report and Company Web Activity report?

2. Will we still see the inferred data of each anonymous record in both reports?

3. Is there any preview on how both reports will look like after the change that you could share with us?

Thanks!

[Mike_Reynolds2]

Stilyana Yaneva​

The Web Page Activity Report and the Company Web Activity Report will both show the same data that they show currently. As long as you switch it to show the anonymous activity shown here: Anonymous Lead Upgrades – Analytics Reports  then it will still give you all of that same data.

[Stilyana_Yanev2]

Mike Reynolds​ - Thanks for the reply, much appreciated.

[Dan_Stevens_]

So the short answer is, no - the reports we're providing to our sales execs today will not be possible once this is deployed.  This is actually quite surprising, given Marketo's desire to eventually offer more account-centric views within the platform.