What Operator to use for Country Normalization Campaigns

[Parfitt_David]

Hi Everyone

I am going through all of the (inherited) country normalization campaigns in my instance, and some of them use CONTAINS or IS.  Here's an example:

One campaign has USA Normalization - "Country IS USA" Change to United States

Another example is "Country CONTAINS United States of America" change to United States. (Yes I know its bizarre to have two differnent campaigns doing normalization for United States - but I stress the statement "inherited instance").

Is it better to use CONTAINS or IS?

Thanks,Dave

[Devraj_Grewal]

David,

"IS" is the best scenario since it is the most precise. However, the issue with "IS" is that it will not include all possible scenarios and thus, will not subsequently normalize all people. The issue with "CONTAINS" is that it may qualify people who should not have been qualified.

For example, neither of your campaigns will normalize "U.S.A". What I would do is look for all possible values that should be normalized and then use the "IS" filter and list every single one of them:

Smart list:

Country IS

USA

U.S.A

United States

Flow:

change data value: United States of America

When you discover a spelling or abbreviation that did not qualify, add it to the smart list so it qualifies in the future.

[Parfitt_David]

Thank you for the quick reply! I think I will go with "IS" and just continue to add to the scenarios.

-Dave

[SanfordWhiteman]

Frankly the lack of wildcard matching, let alone true regular expression matching, makes doing this within Marketo Smart Lists pretty useless IMO. For example, you need a regex like U[ .]*S[ .]*A[ .]* to just match the real-world permutations of the abbrevation USA.

If you watch my blog posts, you'll soon see a way to do this kind of thing by via real-time lookups in a Google Sheet.

[Jon_Wright]

Hi Sanford Whiteman‌ just wondering if you wrote the blog post for doing real-time lookups using Sheets, couldn't find anything on TEKNKL?

[SanfordWhiteman]

Not yet, though it's in use on several instances... as usual my documentation is always so far behind the tech, even though I'm always writing.

[Jon_Wright]

No problem! Just wondering did you set it up to use OAuth 2.0 or or API Keys, seems can only use API keys if sheet is Public. OAuth 2.0 sounds like would need some additional smart campaigns to manage access tokens.

[SanfordWhiteman]

 In this case the sheet is Public and doesn't even need a (Google) API key because of the way it's being accessed... but more later.