Tip: Do NOT use smart campaigns for your reports!

[Anonymous]

If you invest any time maintaining the quality of your database, do NOT refer to Smart Campaigns in your programs or reports because Marketo's latest feature of not auto-refreshing the campaign members will throw all your numbers off, as we just learned the hard way.

By not refreshing automatically, reports that refer to Smart Campaigns in the smart lists will use the older, cached numbers and properties, thus resulting in very inaccurate numbers.

Be sure to go in and manually refresh every Smart Campaign that's referred to in a report before generating the report.

[Anonymous]

Thank you Andy!  This is really helpful.

[Anonymous]

Yeah, thanks Andy!

[Anonymous]

Thanks for the note Andy. One more thing for us to keep an eye on.

[Anonymous]

I agree, big thank you!

[Anonymous]

Hi Andy,

I'm not quite sure I follow this tip, and it sounds like less than ideal functionality. Can you give me some more details? Happy to chat about it offline too- I'm at erik@marketo.com

-Erik

[Anonymous]

Hi Erik,

I think it would be easiest to explain if I share a hypothetical (or in our case, the actual) scenario. We ran an email campaign using a Smart Campaign. A couple weeks later, we did some data cleansing by deleting all leads from Marketo that did not have an email address. We then visited our email performance reports for that campaign, and saw that the numbers were not matching up with what was coming up in a smart list with the same filters.

After quite a while of troubleshooting, we realized we have to hit refresh for campaign members in each Smart Campaign that was used in the report. Once we did that, all of the numbers matched up again.


Huge flaw in Marketo if you ask me. Completely defeats the purpose of the Analytics tab, and as every modern marketer knows, without statistics, you have nothing.

[Anonymous]

When you say "Smart Campaign Used in the Report" can you be a little more specific?

Does this mean you had a single performance email report, created in the Analytics section of the application with one row per Smart Campaign? 

-Erik

[Anonymous]

Nope, I stated in the smartlist "Member of Smart Campaign" and limited it to 6 smart campaigns.

[Anonymous]

So then you have an Email Performance Report which has a Smart List attached to it. That Smart List has the rule "Member of Smart Campaign is (6 campaigns)"

When running that report, you found you got incorrect results until refreshing the referenced Smart Campaigns?

Do I have that right?