Removing Test Data from Marketo

[Tim_Madel1]

We run a number of email campaigns each week (usually 2-3 for 17 different countries).  Each one of these cmapaigns is tested by at least two people but often more.  This reuslts in leads being created and conversions being recorded that skew our stats. (Sometimes we have motre tests than real submissions)

What are some folks doing to work around this?  I saw an Idea submitted to mark leads as tests or to reset the stats on the program after testing is done.  Anybody doing anything else?

Tim

[Anonymous]

I've instituted a "Do Not Count" checkbox that we use to filter on - in order to do a full cycle test we need the leads to be able to move over, so we simply use this as report filters both on Marketo and SFDC. Not the most glamourous - would love to see a future feature that allows us to define "testers" and not have their activity impact reporting.

[Anonymous]

Hi Tim,

I build several hotmail or gmail accounts which have "MKTGtest" as part of the email address (MKTGtest1@gmail.com, MKTGtest2@gmail.com, etc.). You can have other testers build their own test accounts, just make sure to all your testers that the email address names they define has the root "MKTGtest" in the email address name.

I run one of these leads through each of the creation modes (New Lead, import from list, Fill out Form) in order to see what the system (entire instance) does with a new lead.   Once I have seen this activity (through view in Activity Log), I build filters in each of the affected trigger campaigns to ensure that any lead in which Email Address "NOT CONTAINS MKTGtest" is blocked from executing (eg., sync lead to SFDC, Change Data Value, etc.). This ensures the tester that the email campaign will behave as expected.   Any abnormal point scoring or other situation can be dealt with at a later time.

After running your campaign to completion, and you are satisfied with the outcome, you can DELETE the lead from Marketo, so that the metrics of the leads which ran through your email campaign will not be skewed by all the test lead addresses.   If you don't want to delete the test leads, just make sure that the query has the additional Email Address filter to "NOT CONTAIN MKTGtest".

Hope this helps.


Don

(Marketo Certified Expert)
(former Marketo Sr. Tech Support Engr)