Requesting campaign to set acquisition program?

[bcouture]

Hey everyone,

Are there any drawbacks to using the "Request campaign" flow step to call a smart campaign to set an acquisition program on a lead within the same program? Opposed to just adding a flow step to "Change Data Value- Acquisition program" with a choice " if acquisition program is empty within the same smart campaign?  We're using this in a web content program and I'm concerned that there'd be ramifications if I build out a couple dozen web content programs that all include smart campaigns requesting other smart campaigns on our instance? Is there a best practice here?

This is what is currently looks like

Versus:

[SanfordWhiteman]

It's fine but adds a level of indirection (and latency) that I don't know why you'd want.

[bcouture]

gotcha- thanks for your input. Our team is rather new to Marketo and we're just wrapping up migrating over from HubSpot. I know there are a ton of different ways to accomplish the same thing when it comes MAPs, I'm inclined to consolidate the smart campaigns (even though it some extra manual work) into one with the additional flow step just to have things be a lot cleaner, your thought as far as best practice goes?

[SanfordWhiteman]

Cleaner is better here.

[Amy_Goldfine]

Request campaigns can be super helpful but you don't want to over-use them. Typically they're best for

1. Controlling order of operations. For example, you may have some lifecycle processing campaigns that need to run in a certain order, and RCs can help with this.

2. Requesting a centralized smart campaign. If you have a set of flow steps that often need to happen in the same order, but the triggers are going to be different, it can be cleaner to have one smart campaign that you request from a bunch of different places instead of putting those same flow steps in a whole bunch of different campaigns.

[bcouture]

This is super helpful- thank you!

[Darshil_Shah1 · Accepted solution]

As per the best practices are concerned Marketo recommends not to use Request Campaign where one can simply accommodate it in the flow step (as in the later approach). As adding the Request campaign flow step would result in dependency to another campaign and would certainly add it to the execution time. So adding to  @SanfordWhiteman comment try to make the cmapiagns as simple and as independent as possible so later you can isolate the errors/descripency easily if some campaign does jot work as expected.

[bcouture]

That's what I figured, thank you for confirming!