Using "Visits Web Page" as trigger and "Visited Web Page" as flow choices?

[Anne_Sample]

I'm trying to streamline the number of real-time triggers in our Marketo instance, and one area that we could stand to improve is our behavioral scoring for web pages. We have different ratings for high-, medium-, low-, and negative-value web pages, and currently, we have one triggered campaign for each. Since each is triggered by "visits web page" with additional filters, all four campaigns attempt to run each time any record visits any web page, and that doesn't seem super elegant.

I was hoping I could create some sort of "controller" campaign that's triggered by any web page visit, and then use flow step conditions to request the high, low, medium, and negative scoring campaigns - so that only one campaign relies on a trigger instead of four. However, it's my understanding that "visited web page" filters look at the complete history of the lead visiting a web page, not just the most recent visit. So, if the first option is "visited one of our high-value pages," and the lead had ever visited one of our high-value pages, that option would be selected every time.

Am I understanding this correctly? Is there a better way to handle this? Or is the idea of a controller campaign just not feasible?

[SanfordWhiteman · Accepted solution]

I wouldn't use the expression "attempt to run" exactly, the qualification criteria (trigger constraint) is checked but that's pre-run.

Anyway, you're right, you can't consolidate this into a single always-triggered Visit Web Page campaign and use Add Choice flow steps nor Smart List filters.

Across your 4 triggers, it sounds like you have the equivalent of an always-triggered campaign, unless there are some pages that never match.  Are there pages that don't qualify someone for any of the 4?

[Anne_Sample]

Thanks for the insight. There are currently some pages that aren't included, but I was hoping to change that during the consolidation so that it would be always triggered. Sounds like I just need to modify the low-value criteria to exclude the other 3 categories so that it can serve as the default.

Do you know if there are any discussions of best practices in regard to the number of trigger campaigns that should be in a standard Marketo instance? I remember reading a very serious-sounding article a few years ago that talked about how too many trigger campaigns would slow down your whole instance, but it sounds like maybe it's not as much of an issue as the article made it out to be? I guess I don't really understand what it means for the criteria to be "pre-run."

[SanfordWhiteman]

Sounds like I just need to modify the low-value criteria to exclude the other 3 categories so that it can serve as the default.

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Well, yes... but I worry about any instance that's triggering on every Visit Web Page. 

Depends on the load on your site(s), but this isn't sustainable if you're getting over, say, 100,000 hits per day (just speaking generally, different instances have different characteristics overall due to other processes).

I guess I don't really understand what it means for the criteria to be "pre-run."

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Meaning if the trigger is constrained to particular webpages, then the back end has to do the least possible work to determine that it shouldn't continue (i.e. that the trigger's campaign doesn't even need to start running). This is very, very different from running the campaign, then having a lookback Add Choice that parses the Activity Log, only to determine that there's no work to do. (Not to mention that qualifying everyone regardless of work done means you can't even use one-time qualification rules to reduce load.)

There's not a hard-and-fast number of listening triggers. Some say 500, some 1000.  But it closely depends on whether the action you're triggering on is happening 100 times a day or 100,000. You could have one constantly-firing trigger and kill the instance.

In your case you might think about doing the web page-based scoring in a batch if/when performance suffers.