Setting up an alert when there's no activity on a campaign

[Scott_McKeighe2]

Hey community,

Does anyone have experience building alerts or reports designed to notify when there's a lack of activity for a given campaign?

The use case would be something like this:

"Main Campaign" trigger campaign fires when a lead's created and does something, but if it doesn't see activity of any kind for over an hour, send an alert out.

Any insight would be helpful. Thanks!

[Anonymous · Accepted solution]

I call this the "dead man's switch" because it's where you want something to take action based on inactivity instead of activity. 

Just to clarify, are you looking for an alert when there is no activity on the lead or no activity in the campaign itself?

In either case, here's the approach I'd take, there could be other methods that work too, but I have found this approach gives a good amount of flexibility on criteria. 

EVENT - lead is created
--> Trigger your main campaign
--> Triggeryour alert campaign

Alert campaign flow steps would be: 
- wait for [x] [hours/days/weeks]
- send alert 

At the same time you have another triggered campaign listening for whatever activity it is you are monitoring for -- whether that is web page visits or the particular flow step in your given campaign that you want to be notified about the absence of. 

Smart list trigger: [whatever event/activity you are monitoring for]
Flow step: remove from flow [your alert campaign]

Essentially this is creating a parallel flow to the main campaign you want to monitor that will send out an alert as the default condition. If the activity you are monitoring for occurs, the lead will get removed from the alert campaign and no alert is sent. If it does happen, keep them in the flow and send the alert. 

[Scott_McKeighe2]

Hey Justin,

Thanks for the reply. We're looking to monitor the campaign itself, since for us it's a primary mover and indicates that we're receiving data from an external source—in this case, lead creation sync.

So to clarify even more, before this main campaign is fired, there's no lead record data in Marketo. That might make this somewhat of a nonstarter.

[Anonymous]

Interesting. So in your scenario, how would you know that the inactivity indicated a synch failure? 

Is there a certain quantity or frequency of leads you are expecting to be created? 

[Scott_McKeighe2]

In this case, we have a priori knowledge that there should be lead data syncing over to Marketo from an external, non-Salesforce source.

The lack of activity happening in our Marketo instance (specific to this 'master campaign' program described above) would then indicate a problem with that sync, and an alert that effect would allow us to triage the sync process without relying totally on a manual process.

We've tried unpacking this from several different angles, and it seems that the only solution is to build something outside of Marketo to handle alerts on sync failure.