Tracking Variable Data in Email - Best Way to Track Who Was Shown What?

[nhabischWings]

Hello,

Our analytics team is setting up a "Campaign Tracker" that takes activity output from the Marketo API and stores in in their system.

We have some emails that use variable data based off a Lead's record (products, etc) basically if they have A show B and if they don't have A show A type of thing. The analytics team wants to be able to track who was shown what variable data with the email.

-- Person A sees content block A
-- Person B sees content block B

Since we use Custom Object data, is there even a way to track what someone was received without making multiple variants of the email? Would it require almost a Custom Activity setup in order to push it to the activity tracking being pulled down?

[Darshil_Shah1]

One way could be to extract the CO data and mimic the same VTL logic you have for content display in the analytics platform too in order to anticipate the content that a person would have received (assuming that the CO data wouldn't have updated b/w the email was sent and you pulling the CO data out of Marketo). Additionally, for the click engagements, you can use the UTMs to track the content engagements (and also anticipate what content was shown to the person based off of that!) Keen to hear if there's a simpler way to pull this off accurately as well.

[SanfordWhiteman · Accepted solution]

As Darshil says, you might store copies of your Custom Objects in your data lake/analytics db and query them using the same logic that’s expressed in Velocity.

And in theory, rather than translating Velocity into another language, you could paste the token code as-is and use the Velocity interpreter to re-generate the output! (Not suggesting this is easy, but all else being equal, if you’re already a Java shop it’s easier than having to port all the logic to another language.)

I can’t see another way to reconstitute the content of an email at scale, because the Get Full Content endpoint can’t be called for everyone who received the email — you’d quickly consume all your API calls.

[nhabischWings]

Got it, thank you and @Darshil_Shah1 for the responses. I figured it wouldn't be inherently easy since tracking clicks is one thing, but tracking content on load is another.

Got some ideas to think about!

[nhabischWings]

Sorry for the additional post but random idea - would it be possible to utilize the Lead scoring system and do something like:

If Person A shown content A add 3 points

If Person A shown content B add 5 points

Since this scoring activity would flow to the activity and would be visible with the API?

Guess I'm not sure if Scoring can be done through Velocity versus the flow steps in a campaign. Assuming not?

[Darshil_Shah1]

You cannot write/update data to fields via Velocity script; it can only read data from standard/custom Marketo/CRM objects to personalize the emails. However, you can trigger/run batch campaigns based on CO records associated with a person to update their Scoring fields. You'd need to build logic in the campaign's  SL so people with the right product preferences get scored correctly in the flow.