Request campaign - good or bad?

[Andy_Varshneya1]

Over the years, I've heard a lot of information in favor of or totally against the use of the "Request Campaign" flow step. Some have said that it is the lowest priority and thus can be skipped altogether during times of heavy workload for your instance, and that in general it is also very slow. Others have said the exact opposite, saying that it is actually the highest priority and also one of the fastest ways of executing workflows.

Is there someone on Marketo's product team that can definitively say one way or the other regarding if the Request Campaign step is good or bad for building an instance that scales up with higher lead volumes?

[Grégoire_Miche2]

Hi Andy,

My understanding is that campaign priority is more a factor of the first step in the flow rather than of the trigger. See https://nation.marketo.com/message/139533#comment-139533

-Greg

[Andy_Varshneya1]

Thanks for sharing that Grégoire Michel​! I don't understand why it's impacted by the first flow step vs second or third or etc. Is it because one a flow has started executing, every step will be executed upon regardless of resource constraints, therefore resources will be allocated to flows based on the priority of the first step?

[Grégoire_Miche2]

My understanding is that the priority is set for the whole flow, not step by step. And this priority is set based on the first step in the flow.

When the 1st flow step priority level is the same on 2 flows, then the time stamp at which each smart campaign was fired determines the priority.

One exception, obviously: the first step after a wait. In this case, I just cannot remember what the rule is

-Greg

[Nicholas_Manojl]

Not answer your actual question, unfortunately.. but here's my 2c:

I am officially not a fan of request campaign.

Of course it has its uses but more often than not it is a bad design choice, and makes a campaign hard to read from a marketers perspective.

[Dan_Stevens_ · Accepted solution]

When used properly, they are a huge time-saver.  A perfect use-case is when several smart campaigns need to reference the same flow steps.  Rather than build those flow steps in each smart campaign, build it once and then request that campaign.  For example, campaign response alerts.  Many of our programs are designed to send out an alert to the campaign manager and/or country marketer upon conversion/success.  Since there are many choices within the flow step that send out the alert to the appropriate country marketer, we build these centrally and then request them for whichever program/campaign needs them.

Another example is a central campaign for syncing leads to CRM.  Rather than include a flow step with 23 or so choices (by country) in every smart campaign where a lead may need to be synced to CRM, build it once and reference it across all the campaigns that need it.  Makes it so much easier to maintain as marketers come and go.

[Josh_Hill13]

I agree.

Request Campaign/Campaign is Requested can be a powerful tool.

It does help if you can keep track of the reference points flowing into the trigger.

I know of one particular expert who loathes these, but it's really not that big a deal.

[Grégoire_Miche2]

+1 on Dan for the simplification of maintenance tasks.

-Greg

[Andy_Varshneya1]

Yup, I completely agree on the use case, my curiosity is more regarding around the performance compared to going the Add to List route or consolidating flows route.

[Justin_Norris1]

I've long been a fan of Request Campaign. I actually find it pretty elegant for a lot of use cases and I've never understand the argument that it is hard to audit/track (I find the opposite is true, since the "Used By" tab on a smart campaigns easily shows you every place a campaign is requested from).

However I did get a bit concerned at one point about whether it is less performant than other triggers and I sent a question to support. They said,

It really depends on how you have this set up and how many campaigns you have listening with the trigger 'Campaign is Requested'. If it's a 1 to 1 campaign then it wouldn't take up more resources then other triggers. If it is a lot of campaigns with the 'Campaign is Requested' trigger listening for that Campaign is requested flow step (1 to Many) then it will take up more resources then other triggers, especially if there are a lot of leads or a lot of campaigns working like this.

I'm not sure whether a higher tier of support might have given a more nuanced answer, but practically speaking I think this makes sense and it reflects the design choices I typically make. If you are just trying to daisy-chain two campaigns together, there is often a more natural option, such as keying off a data value or a static list.

However, for central flows where it is one campaign that needs to be invoked from multiple places (like a central MQL processing flow, where many forms might need to send someone down that path, for example), then request campaign is logical and still quite efficient. It lends itself well to a modular architecture and separating responsibilities in a sensible way.

I talk about this a bit more here: How to Control Order of Operations in Marketo