Will hiding fields in Marketo speed up SFDC sync?

[Eric_Stone1]

We are merging two Marketo and Salesforce instances, and will have very long sync times since our total database is over a million contacts. Sync times are already increasing, so I've begun looking into ways we might clean up the newly merged instance post-merge.

We have almost 1,000 fields. If I hide many of these, will it speed up sync? Does Marketo still sync the data even though the field is hidden?

There are some great resources on instance clean up and speeding up sync but I haven't found an answer to this question.

For those who have found their way here through search, you might find these articles helpful: Load Balancing in Marketo​, How to Conduct a Marketo Audit - Marketing Rockstar Guides

[Matilda_Miglio]

Hey Eric,

We just had the same issue and these are the steps to start removing fields from your sync:

1. Remove field visability in Salesforce.
2. Disable the SFDC Sync in Marketo
3. Hide the field in Marketo
4. Refresh the Schema in Marketo
5. Turn the SFDC Sync back on

We spent a few hours and did this in mass since we had so many objects/fields. Let me know if that helps!

Matilda

[Eric_Stone1]

Hi Matilda Miglio -

Thanks for your input on this, I appreciate. While countless others who search this in the future will 100% find these steps helpful, I'm more curious about impact.

Did you notice that this exercise sped up your Marketo-SFDC sync? Do you happen to have data on fields before/after and average sync speed before/after?

Thanks for your help!

[Matilda_Miglio]

Sure, I hope this helps your team! We originally started on this project because we had some major sync and backlog issues and we found that we had a TON of fields syncing between the two systems.

We have just started this major cleanup and it immediately helped clear the backlog, but still waiting on the overall normal sync speed now that our backlog is beginning to clear. I sadly don't have data on this.

[Eric_Stone1]

I'm super eager to hear an update once things normalize. Please keep us updated!

If impact is dramatic, it'll really help me push this up the priority chain.

[Floyd_Alvares2]

Hi Eric,

"We have almost 1,000 fields. If I hide many of these, will it speed up sync? Does Marketo still sync the data even though the field is hidden?"

Preventing Marketo from viewing these fields in SFDC will prevent Marketo from syncing the data from SFDC and pushing updates to SFDC.

If you are just hiding fields in Marketo, the data will still be pushed through if SFDC has access to these fields.

Hiding 1000 fields from the object layout will definitely improve the sync times for each sync duration. Every time a record is updated in SFDC/Marketo, every field is technically compared and the updates are pushed through, this is regardless if you have 1 field updates or 10 fields updates on the record. Hence the syncing time will change if Marketo has limited number of fields to review for every single record.

The additional approach you can use is to use a custom sync rule for your leads/contacts to ensure you are only syncing data that you require between Salesforce and Marketo.

Hope this helps

Thanks

Floyd

[Mark_McGriff]

Question along these lines: We are finding Marketo to be quit slow when trying to access/build reports. Will hiding fields speed up the Marketo instance itself or will they have to be removed altogether? Has a solution be created to remove unwanted fields in the instance?

[Veronica_Holme4]

The number of fields in your instance will have no impact (in my experience) on how quickly your reports load. The amount of overall persons in your database and how large the report is that you're trying to run will impact this.

[Mark_McGriff]

Thank you!

M~

[Mark_Price]

Hi Eric,

I have seen this issue a few times. In the most recent iteration, 1/2 of the speed improvements were gained from hiding fields. The other 1/2 came from fixing various issues specific to the setup. Matilda Miglio​ has a great list to get you started.

few additional things I would add to list:

- use the 'object info' supportTool to inventory fields and see if they are set to sync or not: https://app-###.marketo.com/supportTools/sfdcObjInfo <- change ### to your app pre-fix. (you'll be able to download the field lists this way)

- request a report of the 'top 50 updated fields' in the system from Marketo Support (this will help you check for erroneous updates that could be occurring)

- Use the syncStats tool and refresh throughout the day to try and see which object has a lot of updates. For this, I would check for any spikes in data or for large numbers of objects pending sync.

https://app-###.marketo.com/supportTools/sfdcSyncStats <- change ### to your app prefix. If the sync is really slow, try a 2-3 hour window within the tool

Note: When hiding fields, there isn't an alert if the recent change broke something other than the admin notifications. If you use the field in email scripting, it will just break without warning. So- it is recommended to make sure it is not being used before hiding it. You can do this under 'admin -> field management'.