Trigger Smart Campaigns Aren't Working

[Grégoire_Miche2]

Hi Danielle Boenisch,

First the "Created Date" on the lead is created trigger is not welcome. It set's a limit that may cause problems, especially if there is some lag between the creation instant and the moment at which the trigger is executed. I really do not see the interest. You just need the trigger to fire soon after the lead is created (which will happen only once, since a lead is created only once). Remove it.

Second, your set of filters is quite long. I recommend that you create a smart list with the exact same filters, and only use a "member of smart list" filter with your trigger in the smart campaign. This will enable you to control that the smart list has members, and that the set of filters are not actually driving an empty list. It may happen for instance that a change somewhere else has replaced values and that no lead can go through this series of filters

-Greg

[Anonymous]

Good suggestions Greg.

Danielle, when you create a smart list with all these filters, it will help you to debug much easily. For example, if your smart list with these criteria contains 0 leads, then we know that the issue is with the smart list or the values in the leads profile. So we can focus on isolating the issue further.

If the smart list gives you leads that you were not expecting, or lesser number of leads than expected, you can check why the other leads were excluded. You might have to split the smart list into separate smartlists to debug even further.

Hope this helps

Rajesh

[Anonymous]

Couple of quick observations:

- "Member of Smart List" is expensive (slow) to process, depending on the filters it contains.

- "NOT Member of Smart List" is even more expensive, as it must process the Smart List and then check the negative case.

- You have "ALL Filters", meaning a lead must meet every criteria, including all those "Not member of Smart List" and other negative criteria.

As implied in other responses, it's possible that your leads are just not qualifying.  Having a separate smart list with all the same criteria might help you debug whether your filters work.

You indicated that all of your triggers stopped working.  Is there a simple one that is also failing?

[Anonymous]

I have even gone through and updated all of the campaigns as our support rep mentioned and what you have listed above and nothing is triggering. Plus, if what you mentioned was the case why would they have previously been working fine and then all of a sudden stopped working? It makes no sense.

Additionally, the support rep only focused on one of the problems and seemed to ignore anything that she didn't have an answer for by saying "it should be working fine", but it's not.

[Bruce_Jeffers]

Our instance is dealing with something very similar. Batch and Requested Campaigns are flat out missing some leads that they should be catching for processing. I'm going to follow this thread to see the result. I have my own support ticket open on this issue as well.

[Geoff_Krajeski1]

It is possible that if no one qualified in the last 6 months, and met all the criteria to pass through, that Marketo automatically would disable this trigger campaign.

Now, I don't know if you had leads going through as the results are not posted, but I would ensure that you did have leads qualifying and check the results tab.

[Geoff_Krajeski1]

Marketo automatically "helps" to speed up your instance for triggered campaigns that have not had any results in the past 6 months.

[Grant_Booth]

One other thing you could try (apologies if someone already mentioned this) is to go to Marketing Activities, and check your Campaign Queue. If there's a long list of trigger campaigns queued up there, it could be that you're simply trying to use too many of them and the system is getting overwhelmed.

If you're dissatisfied with Support's response, you might try asking them for a counter example of a smart campaign in your instance which IS triggering, to demonstrate that the problem must be with your campaign's smart list.

All of that said, in my experience, 99.9% of the time these issues are due to someone using a very complex smart list and logic when they're still new to the system and not comfortable with it yet. Also - Support doesn't have a magic super tool to see why a lead isn't qualifying. They have to analyze the lead's activity log, check filter by filter, and check the campaign's smart list (and all the other smart lists referenced using Member of Smart List) for changes since the lead should have triggered it. It's a process that quickly becomes exhausting the more complex the smart list is. I recommend that you avoid using the Member of Smart List filter whenever possible, and review Marketo's list of smart list best practices:

Best Practices for Smart Lists - Marketo Docs - Product Docs

Grant

[Dory_Viscoglio]

I'm not sure if this is related to the removal of "Is Anonymous", but if you take out the Anonymous IP filter does your campaign work? I have noticed that with this update, some things that previously functioned are now either not functioning, or are functioning differently than they used to.

[Dory_Viscoglio]

Also, to check that trigger campaigns are actually working on your account (and it isn't a setting issue, although I've never seen this), you could create a very simple triggered campaign using a data value change or something similar, and then change the data value on a test record to ensure that the triggered campaign actually works.

I highly doubt there is a general issue with your triggered campaigns and think it's much more likely that you're dealing with a smart list issue, but it can't hurt to try this as well.