Triggers vs. Batches for Lead Scoring

[Anonymous]

I followed the instructions for setting up a lead scoring program found in this Product Doc: Create a Lead Scoring Program - Marketo Docs - Product Docs . As you can see from the screenshots, they show all of the campaigns (both demo and behav.) as triggered campaigns, but when I imported the program, it automatically made all demographic campaigns batch campaigns and all behavior campaigns triggered campaigns. See screenshot. This is intuitive to me, but I'm concerned that what I've created doesn't match the documentation. Thoughts?

[Josh_Hill13]

It's up to you.

Do you need to score immediately or not? Generally batch campaigns are less load on the system, but most behaviors and some demographic flows should be triggers if you want to push MQLs faster or as soon as they qualify.

[David_Gaible · Accepted solution]

Hi Christine,

What you've created makes sense for just about every business case I can imagine. These demographic scores you've got built aren't time-sensitive triggers, so a batch campaign makes sense. If you're just getting started with Marketo and/or have a small database batch vs. trigger doesn't make too much of a difference from a performance standpoint. However, as your database grows it is very important to watch the number of trigger campaigns you have - having too many trigger campaigns can have a huge negative impact on system performance.

What you have looks great, good luck building out your system.

[SydneyMulligan]

I came here to say the same thing that David Gaible​ did above. The batch update will be good to update things like your demographic score that aren't really time sensitive. You can set it to run every night at like 3am when no one will be in Marketo (I hope!) which will help with performance in your instance as you scale up and have more and more trigger campaigns running. For behavior scores, especially if you are using scoring in your Revenue Cycle Model, I would use the triggers so the leads can be passed to sales immediately and not the next day. To change to using a triggered campaign, just change your Smart List to use a trigger filter (like "Fills Out Form" or "Data Value Changes") and it will update automatically.

[Anonymous]

What you have done is correct.

I have worked with customer who want to see the change on their scoring values reflected immediately so they use triggers with "Data Value Changes" instead.

[Anonymous]

Thank you all for the helpful answers.