Significant delay in leads getting into a smart campaign or getting through a smart campaign

[Jill_Lacey]

Hi there,

Has anyone experienced significant delays (close to 2 hours for some leads), from when a lead is created and then should either, get into a smart campaign or a major delay in getting through a smart campaign once it is in it (especially smart campaigns with requested campaigns in the flow logic)? 

We noticed an issue this morning where all of our forms, including unsubscribes, all our website forms, and forms that we were going to launch for a new External Marketing/Retargeting program where leads were getting created, and then taking anywhere from half an hour to 2 hours just to get into the beginning of the smart campaign. The leads met the criteria they needed to which is why they eventually got in, it was just taking a long time. 

The other issue we noticed is that once in the smart campaign it was also taking a long time, again anywhere from half an hour to two hours, to get through the campaign and sync over to SFDC. This was very concerning for obvious reasons  

In a lot of our smart campaigns we do have a lot of conditions (through "request campaign" triggers) but nothing that has a lot of conditions/additional requested campaigns other than our new External Marketing program. 

I spoke with Marketo support - they are looking into it, but they said sometimes if you have too many smart campaigns it bogs down the system, and that leads can only run get into 2 smart campaigns at a time, which I was not aware of. However, we had the same number of smart campaigns, including the new External Marketing program last week and everything was working fine. I know sometimes there are delays but it's strange to me that this was across all forms and for as long of time that it was.

Has anyone else experienced this or something similar and if so how did you resolve it, or did you just have to wait?

Any insight is greatly appreciated. Thank you!

Jill 

[Rachel_Noble]

Hey Jill,

If you go to your Campaign Queue in the main view of Marketing Activities, do you see a lot of items in there?

If you go into your Campaign Inspector (next tab over), and filter by Active Triggered Campaigns, how many do you have in total?

Rachel 

[Jill_Lacey]

Hi Rachel,

Thank you so much for your response! We were seeing a lot of items in the Campaign Queue when we were seeing the delay, but normally we don't see anything there. In the Campaign Inspector it looks like we have 202 active smart campaigns. 

Thank you again!

Jill

[Wyatt_Bales4]

202 active smart campaigns isn't necessarily anything to be concerned about. It's more about what types of triggers you have across the different campaigns. You should always try and put as many of the smart campaigns into batch instead of trigger. If there are some critical smart campaigns you need to fire asap, ensure you put a Wait Step or empty Lead Scoring flow step on the non-critical smart campaigns.

The Wait Step or Lead Scoring flow step gives the smart campaigns lower priority (as you can see in the campaign queue priority column) while an Email Send gives it the highest priority.

[Jill_Lacey]

Hi Wyatt,

Thanks for the info - I appreciate it. They're mostly all considered "medium priority" campaigns which Marketo support said that was the issue is. The problem I'm having is that it's kind of difficult to change the priority because they are mostly all getting triggered off of similar criteria and going through similar flow steps (i.e. based on form fills that we can't unfortunately really cut down on) or smart campaigns triggering to add or remove or send people through nurture streams. I'm hesitant to have them be batched smart campaigns instead of triggered because they really do need to fire asap but maybe that is an easier approach given my hesitations above of changing the priority of them. 

[Mark_Price]

You can put a 'send alert' step at the top of the flow and set it to not send an email. This will trick the system into raising the priority of your campaign. 

In Marketo Sky (the new UI) you can change the priority but I haven't tested it. 

[Wyatt_Bales4]

Per Mark's and others' feedback, take those steps to make it higher priority and if you're still seeing delays--it most likely means you have some other really busy customers on your pod. If you have <30 form fill-out triggers across your entire instance and it's still taking longer than 15min to send out an email, that's definitely outside of normal Marketo SLA. 

Support can pull Splunk logs to see activity on the pod from other customers to see if there's correlation but in theory, there's a dedicated "worker" to your instance which listens to all triggers. As long as that worker isn't firing constantly to 100's of other triggers, you should be firing emails within 3-7min of the form fill-out. 

[JD_Nelson]

I was just commenting the other day that it looked like a list upload was taking ~7 minutes to trigger the Smart Campaign watching for Person Created with the List criteria.... I've seen a few other delays like this as well. Nothing too drastic, but at times noticeably delayed.

[Jill_Lacey]

Good to know thank you!