Removal of "Is Anonymous" filters.

[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.

[Grégoire_Miche2]

And also, I have a question : does this impact API's as well ?

-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

[Casey_Grimes]

I'm actually rather annoyed at the announcement surrounding anonymous leads. The under-utilization of anonymous leads isn't due to their lack of usefulness; it's due to a lack of awareness and the possibilities they hold.

Tracking anonymous records on their path to becoming known to the system is a key piece of seeing how various inbound marketing programs work—because measuring who was touched by a campaign before they later convert is vital to measuring long-term campaign influence. I've been using anonymous records in conjunction with Smart Campaigns and static lists as a way to monitor this for a while; if anything, I've been bummed that I can't do more with anonymous records in terms of comparing them to known records. When you're honing in on specific actions, it's more than just scoring or flagging an Interesting Moment.

This change will effectively ruin the ability to do that.