Retroactively setting Acquisition Program on new Marketo instance

[Aaron_Dear]

Hey everybody,

My current organization just moved to Marketo a year ago, but have been on Salesforce since inception (4 years). We were planning to use RCE as our current attribution platform so I wanted to retroactively add the data required to explore first-touch attribution.

From what I gather from the docs, that means I need each lead to have an Acquisition Program and a Program Status within that Acquisition Program.

The issue I'm running into: every person record has multiple campaigns associated. And while I have the data in SFDC that shows which campaigns the record was part of (and I see that Marketo has a "SFDC Campaigns" field on the records) I don't know how I can manipulate that particular data via SmartCampaigns to assign those leads correctly.

A few things I've thought I might be able to use:

1. Lead Source fields - currently ours are a little scattered - and not entirely accurate - so they don't map correctly to every SFDC campaign.
2. Registration Source Info - works for some leads

I feel this is too piecemeal - and was hoping there would be a more definitive way to grab each record's first campaign association so I can run their program-specific SmartCampaigns to add Acquisition Program correctly. Any thoughts? I feel like I'm missing something obvious!

[Anonymous]

Unfortunately this always ends up being a pretty manually intensive process. Within Marketo, you'll need to update the Acquisition Program after the fact through a smart campaign. Make sure to first set the Acquisition Program, then set the Acquisition Date (doing in the opposite order will not work).

The unfortunate reality right now is that when doing batch updates to leads for Acquisition Program, there are no tokens that will work properly, so you'll need to manually select the program in the flow steps. Acquisition Date will be able to use a datetime token (e.g. Created At, or SFDC Created Date).

I've seen other comments in the community mentioning that an API would potentially be able to bulk updates, but I can't speak to that personally.

Useful fields in Marketo for telling where a lead came from are the: Original Source Type and Original Source Info fields.