Angelica_Krott

Hi Osman. The advantage over a custom build is flexibility and also being able to fine tune the extract more to improve your processing time. There’s a lot of variables to the best route to pursue. At first, we chose the connector route but the processing time through it proved to be problematic. So not, we don’t use it for everything now and more so rely on the custom web client. Building a custom web client though to handle it could be done in under a week’s time if you have a skilled dev team. If you outsource, be prepared to know every speck of the data and how it relates to the overall reports you are trying to create. https://www.stitchdata.com/docs/integrations/saas/marketo Just be aware that many connectors, especially ones that have an existing Marketo connection, will only push to a data lake/data warehouse or SQL server. Try looking at something like Stitch. Stitch does have a connector to both Marketo’s REST API and Bulk Extract API. And look through the Marketo dev documentation as well so you understand what type of calls / extracts you would need to do. I haven’t used them myself though so I can’t speak to how efficient their connectors are. It’s just an example for you. But I strongly recommending first starting out with drawing what your reports should look like, then determining the necessary datasets / fields you’d need to pull from Marketo and map it to your storage repository. Finally, understand the volume of data you’d need to extract and at what frequency. There’s also some gotchas in how Marketo stores data. And just a heads up that the data out of the box is not in relational format. If you’re looking to create a relational database like we did, then you have to know how to extract all the needed datasets / activities appropriately and how all the tables would come together, etc. It’s not an easy undertaking but it is possible. Just take it one step at a time and know the data. ... View more

We use PowerBI for reporting as well. The Marketo out of the box connection is very limited and only gives you the data that Marketo wants to provide. For our reporting needs, we needed to be able to see by email the total performance which included Sends, Delivered, Opens, Clicks, etc. We also need to supply lead data to our advertisers as well. The amount of data you need to retrieve from Marketo goes back to how much activity / leads you have to report on. We have to report on over 1MM newsletter deployments a day and also on just under 1MM subscribers. With the REST API, it has a limit on not just the calls (50,000) but also the amount of data you can retrieve. For our purposes, since we needed multiple marketo activities along with the lead database changes, we were well over the REST API limits and had to connect with the BULK EXTRACT API and pay more for increased data extract size allotment. So now, we have a custom web client built which pulls the extracts needed daily into an Azure MySQL database. The database then we connect to in PBI. With a little bit of post production work and categorizing of those deployments, we're able to provide robust dashboards with full metrics at an email level, advertiser level, etc. Also, keep in mind that Marketo does not capture Gross Opens. They don't even record Gross opens which support has confirmed for me. While many marketers do prefer to report on uniques, that's not what our advertisers want. So we had to also implement a custom email beacon to record opens and that data too is pushed into our Azure MySQL database. The hardest part is the planning and knowing exactly what data (by field name) you want to extract from Marketo. You might want to explore 3rd party connectors. Some of them have been engineered to work not just with the REST API but the BULK EXTRACT API as well. However, they would be an additional cost. ... View more

Interesting.  So far our interactions with them have been great. We're also using a consulting team to work with the Boomi processes as well. Boomi has recently updated their out of the box connections to Marketo as well I believe although we're setting up everything using HTTP client connectors. But I'll keep your comments in mind. ... View more

Hi Sanford, I stumbled on this and don't know if you are still looking into this or not but in case you are - Marketo does have their Data Transfer Hub. They would create the extractions through the Bulk Extract API for you and push to an SFTP. There's a cost for it though and it has its limitations. We had looked into that route and then ultimately decided to go with Dell Boomi. Boomi lets you create the connectors / processes you need to extract data from the bulk extract API and push to your desired endpoint. You don't have to have extensive coding knowledge but you do need an understanding of APIs and how they work. The Boomi team was great in getting us started. With Boomi, you pay by endpoint and unlike the Data Transfer Hub, you have complete control and schedule / modify your calls. ... View more