Tyron_Pretorius

Issue: Currently, you have to go to individual campaigns to see their priority as explained in the thread below: https://nation.marketo.com/t5/product-discussions/campaign-priority-override-see-all-overridden-campaigns/m-p/326202/highlight/true#M184136   Goal: To see all smart campaigns, their priority, and whether they have been overridden in one place   As per Darshil Shah: "It'd be great to have a couple columns added to added to the Campaign Inspector tab that'll show if the campaign priority and whether the default campaign priority has been overriden or not for all the trigger campaigns at one place."     ... View more

  Ever made a big MOOPs where a field value was incorrectly changed to the wrong value and you want to change it back to the original? Well the Bulk Extract API, Postman, and Google Sheets can help you fix it!   Before we get started here take a look at the Quick Start Guide to the REST API to see how to set up your environment and variables in Postman and how to make your first GET & POST requests. DM me if you want to receive a copy of the Marketo API Postman Collection that I created, which contains 100+ pre-configured API requests to get you started 🙂         Bulk API Introduction   Have you ever wondered how business intelligence tools like Domo, PowerBI, and Tableau pull in the plethora of lead and activity data from your instance? You guessed it! The Bulk API and in particular the Bulk Extract API.   The Bulk API is a powerful means to import or export large amounts of data into or from your instance for leads, activities, custom objects, and program members. In this post, we will be focusing on the bulk extract API, however, if you are interested in the bulk import API then still tune in because the setup and job flow for the bulk import API are very similar and all the Postman steps below will still be very useful to you.   The Bulk extract API works with a queue system to extract information from an instance, where new jobs are added to the end of a queue and will be completed after the jobs already in the queue are completed i.e. first in - first completed.   Every Bulk Extract API flow can be broken down as follows:   Create a job Put the job in the queue Query the job status periodically until the status is marked as complete Extract the job data   Bulk Activity Extract API Job Flow   We will be using the all-too-familiar example of needing to revert a field back to a previous value for a large number of leads because it was accidentally changed (I know we've all been there!). I'm sure if you have ever manually had to go through the activity logs to see what the previous value was for each lead in a list and manually update it, you will be bouncing up and down with excitement once you see how the bulk extract API can make this a breeze!   The TLDR summary of the scenario described in the YouTube video above is that the "Behavior Score - 7 Day History" field in our instance was incorrectly changed for a lot of people by the "Trim BS7DH" webhook.   Therefore we want to create a job to extract the activity data for the "Change Data Value" activity for the "Behavior Score - 7 Day History" field in the time window that we know the campaign ran.   Finding Activity IDs   Getting activity ids   To find the activity id for the "Change Data Value" activity, which we will need when creating the job, we need to make a GET request to the Activity Types endpoint and search the response returned to Postman.   Finding Field IDs   Getting field ids   To find the field id for the "Behavior Score - 7 Day History" field, which we will need when creating the job, we need to make a GET request to the Describe Lead endpoint and search the response returned to Postman.   Creating a Job     When creating a bulk activity extract job using the Create Job endpoint, the body of the request needs to contain the starting time point and ending time point for the time window you are interested in (the maximum span is 31 days, see the "Bulk API Limits" section below) along with the activity ids that you are interested in and if applicable you can filter even further by specifying field ids.   If a smart campaign was responsible for changing the field you want to revert to an original value then you can narrow down the time range using the "Results" tab of the smart campaign and using a view filter to only select the activity of interest (see the YouTube video above for a visual walkthrough of this).   N.B. The timestamps that you use for defining the time window must be in UTC time.   The response to this "create job" request then contains the job id in the "exportId" field. Since we will be using this job id in all subsequent bulk extract API requests we can create a new "job_id" variable in our Postman environment and automatically populate this variable by placing the code below in the "Tests" tab of the request.   var jsonData = pm.response.json(); pm.environment.set("job_id", jsonData.result[0].exportId); Code used to automatically populate the job_id variable   Postman environment containing the populated job_id variable     Queueing a Job   Once the job has been created the next step is to put the job in the queue (see job and queue limits in the "Bulk API Limits" section below) using the Enqueue Job endpoint, which uses the job_id environment variable we populated using the test code above.     Canceling a Job   If for some reason you made a mistake and need to cancel a job then you can use the Cancel Job endpoint to do so.     Querying Job Status   Next, you need to intermittently query the status of the job until the "status" field in the response says "completed". Notice that the returned response also includes the file size in bytes of the data contained within the job.         Extracting Job Data   Finally, you are ready to extract the job data and save the response to a CSV file that can be imported into Google Sheets so that the previous values for the field of interest can be extracted using Google Sheets formulas.         Extracting Previous Values Using Google Sheets   When you import the job data into Google Sheets you will end up with a tab similar to the Bulk Extract Data tab in the "Bulk API Extract Change Data Value" workbook.   Next, the "New Value" and "Old Value" values can be obtained by parsing the "attributes" column using the regexextract function as shown below.   New Value = REGEXEXTRACT(attributes_value,"""New Value"":""(.*)"",""Old Value""") Old Value = REGEXEXTRACT(attributes_value,"""Old Value"":""(.*)"",""Source")   Then in the example that I mention in the YouTube video, I wanted to identify all the people who had their "Behavior Score - 7 Day History" field incorrectly truncated by getting the length of the "Old Value" rows and filtering on those less than 5000 characters in length.   Once the affected people had been identified, the vlookup function was then used to pull in their email address because when importing lists into your instance you cannot use the ID as the identifier, you need to use the email address instead.   As the "attributes" column shows, the "Reason" for the change data value action, in this case, was marked as "Webhook Updated Lead : Trim BS7DH" so we can create a Smart List using this reason and the activity date to obtain a 2 column list of people affected, containing each person's ID and Email Address. We can then import this information into the ID-Email Mapping tab and use them in our vlookup formula.   Then we can copy the "Email Address" and "Old Value" columns for the filtered rows into the Export tab, export this list, and then finally import this list to revert these people's "Behavior Score - 7 Day History" fields back to their original value.   Smart list used to identify affected people     What's Next?   Now that you are well warmed up with using the bulk extract API take a look at how you can use the API to automate and streamline different workflows:   Bulk Merge Duplicates according to your own custom rules Streamline your email creation process using Google Sheets templates and Zapier Automate your UTM creation and tracking using Google Forms, Google Sheets, and Zapier   Bulk API Limits   Bulk Extract   You are only allowed to have 10 jobs in the queue at once. Note that this queue is shared between the leads, activities, custom objects, and program member bulk APIs. Only 2 jobs can be in the "Processing" state at any one time The total amount of data that you can export is limited to 500MB per day unless you have purchased a higher data limit. This 500MB limit resets daily at 12:00AM CST. The data extracted from a job will only be retained for 10 days When using the "createdAt" or "updatedAt" values to define a time window for your request the maximum width of this interval is 31 days Bulk Import   You are only allowed to have 10 jobs in the queue at once Only 2 jobs can be in the "Processing" state at any one time You are limited to importing a maximum file size of 10MB Bulk API FAQs   Do I need special authentication to access the Bulk API?   No, you can use the same authentication that you normally use for the API to get an access token to use in subsequent Bulk API requests. You can then store this access token in your environment as a variable in Postman to make it easy to use in all other requests.   It is worth noting that only the API user who created the job can make requests related to that job e.g. querying status, retrieving data, etc. How big are the files from the job?   The size of the job data will depend on the parameters you specify when creating the job e.g. the time frame or the number of activities or leads being exported. Once the "Query Job Status" request is complete it will show you the file size of the job in bytes so you then know before extracting the data how big the file will be. Is there a maximum file size for job size?   No, there is no limit to the size of the job created when using the bulk extract API. The only constraint is that you are restricted to exporting a maximum of 500MB per day unless you purchased an additional quota. When using the bulk import API you are limited to importing 10MB at a time. How can I tell how much of my daily 500MB extraction quota is left?   In order to tell how much of your bulk extract API quota you have used, you will need to make 4 requests to each of the Lead, Activity, Custom Object, and Program Member endpoints below to get a list of all jobs created within the last 7 days. Each of these jobs returned will contain a "filesize" attribute in bytes.   Start by filtering on jobs that have a "Completed" status and a "finishedAt" value with today's date, remembering that these "finishedAt" values are in UTC time, and then sum all of these values for the current day to see how much of your 500MB quota is left.   Get Lead Jobs within the past 7 days Get Activity Jobs within the past 7 days Get Program Member Jobs within the past 7 days Get Custom Object Jobs within the past 7 days   Can the Bulk API pull data from all of the workspaces in my instance?   Yes, the Bulk API pulls data from all of your workspaces and it is not possible to limit the scope of your request to a particular workspace.     The content in this blog has been reviewed by the Community Manager to ensure that it is following Marketing Nation Community guidelines. If you have concerns or questions, please reach out to @Jon_Chen or comment down below. ... View more

Cloning in Zapier         Fingers cramping up from all the clicking you are doing to clone that boatload of programs? Learn how you can automate the cloning of programs using the API and Zapier according to monthly, quarterly, or yearly cadences.         Why should I clone my Programs?   I am guessing that your company, like my own, likes to sync programs to Salesforce campaigns to enable campaign influence reporting in Salesforce. One reason you might want to periodically clone is to get greater resolution into campaign tracking to improve your multi-touch attribution modeling.   Due to the way that programs are set up, once someone becomes a member and gets added to a campaign in Salesforce if they do not change status we have no way of knowing if they interacted with that campaign again.   For example, if you have an attribution campaign that tracks visits to your website from Google and puts people in the visited status in the "Organic Google" program then they will be added to the corresponding Salesforce campaign in the visited status. Now, what if this person visits your website again next month? Well, they are already in the visited status in the "Organic Google" Salesforce campaign and so when it comes to campaign influence and multi-touch attribution it is as if this person never came back to your site.   So what can we do to get greater resolution? .... You guessed it: Periodic cloning.   Now, if we were to clone the "Organic Google" program once every month then we can capture a new touchpoint for a person in this campaign every month. If they visit twice in a month then, yes, we will not be able to track this touchpoint so it is up to you what balance you want to strike between the resolution you want in your campaign influence reporting and how often you want to clone programs.   Even if you do not sync your programs to Salesforce you might still be interested in periodic cloning so that the number of program members in your programs does not become too large.   N.B. While I can show you how to automate cloning using the API, there is no API request available that will let you sync a program to a Salesforce campaign so unfortunately there will still be some manual clicking necessary to sync all the newly cloned programs to Salesforce campaigns.   Options for Cloning in Bulk   Regardless of your reason for wanting to clone programs (there is no judgment here!) there are 2 ways you can go about cloning programs in bulk:   You can bookend your Zap with webhooks and use these webhooks to create an iterative loop to clone all your programs (see the "Looping with Webhooks" section below) You can use the inbuilt "Looping by Zapier" action to clone all your programs (see the "Looping by Zapier" section below) Why would you choose one over the other?   The "Looping by Zapier" action is easier to use but it is limited to 500 iterations and you have to use a hack in order to get the iterations to execute sequentially and avoid API limits . On the other hand you can loop as much as you want with the webhook method and you are guaranteed that the iterations will execute sequentially with no fear of exceeding the REST API limits.   Before diving into these more complex examples where looping is needed, let's start with a simple example without looping just to get you comfortable making cloning API requests.   Since this will be an API heavy post, I recommend checking out the Quick-Start Guide to the REST API if it is your first time using the API or you need a quick refresher. It will show you how to make your first API requests in Postman before transitioning to making requests in code or in the Zapier automation tool.   Cloning Simple (No Looping)     Folder hierarchy for Facebook, LinkedIn, and Twitter programs       In this example, we want to clone 3 programs responsible for tracking visits from Facebook, LinkedIn, and Twitter using UTM parameters and setting a person's first and last touch attribution fields accordingly (see the UTM Tracking & Automation post to learn how the programs and their smart campaigns are set up to achieve this).   N.B. All the Python code used in the "Code by Zapier" actions below can be found in the organic_social_campaign_creation repository in Github.     The first 3 actions of the simple cloning zap         On the first day of every month at midnight, this zap will run and:   Get the access token that is needed to make all subsequent API requests (get_marketo_access_token.py) Since each program name follows the same structure i.e. YYYYMM - Organic Social - Platform , we can get the program ids for last month's programs by using a "for loop" and the Get Program by Name endpoint (get_latest_program_ids.py) If it is the first time that this zap has run this year i.e. every January, then a new "YYYY OSoCT FB LI TW" folder will be created to house the constituent programs. Otherwise, the folder already exists and the id of this folder will be returned (get_or_create_latest_folder.py).   Cloning using the REST API and Python       Next, the old program ids from Step 3 are used in requests to the cloning endpoint to clone these 3 programs into the parent folder obtained from Step 4.   Since each Zapier action has a 10-second timeout limit and cloning a program using the API takes several seconds, I recommend that you separate the cloning of these programs into their own actions instead of grouping them all together in a single action (I learned the hard way so trust me haha).   When making the cloning API request the description of each program is set equal to the UTM parameters used for this platform for the current month i.e. utm_source=organic_social&utm_medium=platform&utm_campaign=rc_yyyy_mm for the sake of convenience.   clone_facebook_program.py clone_linkedIn_program.py clone_twitter_program.py   The final 3 actions of the simple cloning zap       The smart campaigns within a program use the local "My Tokens" of the program in order to set the values of attribution fields (see the UTM Tracking & Automation post to learn how the smart campaigns are set up to achieve this). As can be seen from the image below, only the {{my.campaign}} and {{my.utm}} tokens need to be updated when the program is cloned each month since they are date-dependent.   In Step 8, nested "for loops" are used along with the Tokens Endpoint to loop through each program and update the {{my.campaign}} and {{my.utm}} tokens (update_program_tokens.py).     Local "My Tokens"       Finally, in the last 2 steps, the smart campaign ids within the programs are obtained so that their descriptions can be updated with the UTM parameters that are being tracked for each platform. Since the smart campaigns use these parameters in their smart lists, pasting these parameters into the description makes it easier, later on, to copy the parameters straight from the description into the smart list (get_smart_campaign_ids.py & update_smart_campaign_descriptions.py).     Attribution smart campaigns     Setting Cloning Frequency   The above workflow for cloning the 3 social media programs is straightforward but what if you want to clone 10's or 100's of programs and what if some programs need to be cloned quarterly or yearly rather than monthly?   This is where we need to introduce looping in Zapier along with a Google sheet and Google Scripts that are used to schedule when programs should be cloned.   Evergreen Cloning   Evergreen programs with cloning frequency     The Evergreen Programs tab of the Google Sheet contains a list of evergreen programs i.e. they are going to be running for the foreseeable future, along with the frequency at which they need to be cloned. Once the new version of a program has been cloned the zap will use the Program Base column to look up the row for which it needs to update the Clone column to the name of the newly cloned program.   Evergreen programs grouped by their cloning frequency       A simple Google sheet filter formula is then used to group all the evergreen programs together into either the "Monthly", "Quarterly", or "Yearly" columns.   The concatenated strings of program names     Then at the start of every month, 3 Google scripts run to concatenate the program names in each column and then put the concatenated string in the corresponding "Monthly Programs", "Quarterly Programs", or "Yearly Programs" columns in the Evergreen Submissions tab in the first available empty row.   The setMonthlyValues.gs script will populate the "Monthly Programs" cell every month and send a webhook to trigger the "Monthly Cloning" zap which then iterates through each program in the "Monthly Programs" concatendated string and clones a new version of the program for the new month. Although the setQuarterlyValues.gs script runs every month, an if statement ensures that it only populates the "Quarterly Programs" cell and sends a webhook to trigger the "Quarterly Cloning" zap when it is a new quarter. The zap then iterates through each program in the "Quarterly Programs" concatenated string and clones a new version of the program for the new quarter. Although the setYearlyValues.gs script runs every month, an if statement ensures that it only populates the "Yearly Programs" cell and sends a webhook to trigger the "Yearly Cloning" zap when it is a new year. The zap then iterates through each program in the "Yearly Programs" concatenated string and clones a new version of the program for the new year. The three aforementioned scripts are scheduled to run at 2-3am, 3-4am, and 4-5am respectively on the 1st day of every month. The scripts are scheduled apart to avoid exceeding concurrent API call limits.   N.B. If you want to learn about how to trigger a Zap using a Google Script then DM me for a link to the relevant blog post 🙂   Paid Cloning   Paid programs being marked for cloning     Contrary to the evergreen programs, the Paid Programs might not need to be cloned again. For example, if an ad campaign is underperforming and is being turned off at the end of the month then there is no need to clone the corresponding program next month.   As a result, the "Live Next Month" checkbox column needs to be updated on the last day of the current month to indicate all the programs that need to be cloned for the upcoming month.   The setMonthlyValuesPaid.gs script then runs at 1-2am on the 1st day of every month to concatenate all the program names marked as "Live Next Month" and then store them in the first empty row in the Paid Submissions tab in the "Monthly Programs" column.   The webhook sent by this Google Script then triggers the "Monthly Paid Cloning" zap to iterate through the program names in the concatenated string and clone new versions of these programs.   N.B. The reason the script is set to run at 1-2am instead of 12-1am is because there were issues in the past with clocks going back an hour causing this script to run on the last day of the previous month instead of the 1st day of the current month.   Again this script is set to run before any of the other aforementioned Google scripts to avoid exceeding concurrent API call limits and because we want to set up attribution tracking for our paid campaigns first since we are putting money into getting these leads.   Cloning with Looping   Once either of the 4 Cloning zaps has been triggered by receiving a webhook from a Google script then there are 2 ways to loop through the programs that need cloning.   Looping with Webhooks   Looping in Zapier using webhooks     N.B. The code for each zap can be found in the corresponding Github repositories.   Monthly Cloning: monthly_attribution_campaign_cloning Monthly Paid Cloning: monthly_attribution_paid_campaign_cloning Quarterly Cloning: quarterly_attribution_campaign_cloning Yearly Cloning: yearly_attribution_campaign_cloning // Google Script code used to send a webhook to Zapier var url = "https://hooks.zapier.com/hooks/catch/###/xxx/"; var options = { "method": "post", "headers": {}, "payload": { "Timestamp": ts, "Index": '0' } };   Zap webhook trigger and Google Sheets lookup     The inbound webhook from the Google Script contains the timestamp needed in action #2 to look up the latest row in the Evergreen Submissions or Paid Submissions Google Sheets tab containing the monthly, quarterly, and/or yearly program names. This webhook also contains a value of 0 for the index field which is used to keep track of loop iterations.     Folder hierarchy for Organic Search attribution programs     API requests to get the lowest level folder id     The parent folders (Level 1) for each attribution channel are already known i.e. Organic Search Campaign Tracking, Organic Social Campaign Tracking, Organic Referral Campaign Tracking, and Paid Campaign Tracking.   Therefore once the access token has been obtained, there are 3 subsequent API requests to find the Level 2 folder for the year then the Level 3 folder containing all the monthly folders, and finally the level 4 folder for the current month. If any of these folders do not already exist then there is a fallback in the Python code that will create the folder.   The code in the "Get Lv2 Folder or Create Lv2 Folder" action also:   Uses the Index value provided from the webhook to determine which program from the array of programs needs to be cloned e.g. if it is the 5th iteration of the loop then the index will be 4 (since Python array indices start at 0) and the 5th program in the list at index 4 will be cloned. The value of Index is incremented and if the index is still less than the number of programs in the array then the More boolean flag is set to True so the zap passes through the filter at the end of the zap so another webhook will be sent to restart the zap with this incremented index.   Cloning the old program     The "Get Old Program" step takes the program name to be cloned from the "Get Lv2 Folder or Create Lv2 Folder" action and obtains the program id. This old program is then cloned into the folder designated in the "Get Lv4 Folder or Create Lv4 Folder" action and named for the current year and month e.g. YYYYMM - Organic Search - Google. Although the "Clone New Program" step should return the id of the newly cloned program, oftentimes I found that Marketo would not return a successful response to Zapier before the 10-second timeout limit. Consequently, this step might be marked as failed in Zapier even though the program was successfully cloned.   Therefore, a redundancy step is introduced where the newly cloned program id is obtained by searching for the new program by name e.g. YYYYMM - Organic Search - Google. Then all subsequent steps use the id obtained from this action (in Step 9) rather than the cloning action ( in Step 8 ) so that if Step 8 is marked as failed the rest of the zap will be able to continue.   Activating/Scheduling/Deactivating/Deleting smart campaigns     All the ids for the smart campaigns that exist in the newly cloned program are obtained. Then a for loop is used to cycle through the smart campaign ids in the new program and either schedule them or activate them based on the name of the campaign. All the ids for the smart campaigns that exist in the old program are obtained. Then a for loop is used to cycle through the smart campaign ids in the old program and either delete them (batch campaigns schedules cannot be turned off using the API) or activate them based on the name of the campaign.   Updating the current program name     The row containg the old program that was cloned is looked up in either the Evergreen Programs or the Paid Programs tabs. Then the name of the program is updated to the newly cloned program's name so that the next time the zap runs it will clone the most recent program.   Sending a webhook to trigger the next iteration     If the More boolean flag set in the "Get Lv2 Folder or Create Lv2 Folder" action is set to True then zap will progress to send a webhook with the incremented index value to restart the zap at the next loop iteration. Otherwise, if More is set to False then the zap stops at the filter and the loop terminates meaning that all programs have been cloned.   Looping by Zapier   Looping in Zapier using the "Looping by Zapier" action     // Google Script code used to send a webhook to Zapier var url = "https://hooks.zapier.com/hooks/catch/###/xxx/"; var options = { "method": "post", "headers": {}, "payload": { "Timestamp": ts } };   Cloning using the "Looping by Zapier" action         Looking at the Google Script code above, you can see that this time, only a timestamp is sent to Zapier because the "Looping by Zapier" action will handle the tracking of loop iterations.   Again this timestamp is used to look up the latest row in the Evergreen Submissions or Paid Submissions Google Sheets tab containing the monthly, quarterly, and/or yearly program names. Then the access token is obtained before the "Looping by Zapier" action is started.   Notice that these first 2 actions are outside the looping action meaning they will only be executed once. You could move the access token action inside the looping action so that the token is requested at the start of every iteration. This will ensure that the limited token life will not expire in the middle of the loop executing.   "Create Loop From Text" action setup     The "Create Loop From Text" option with the * text delimiter is used to split the array of program names from Google Sheets so that each iteration of the loop will clone one of the programs.   If you want to learn more about how the "Create Loop From Text" action works and how to trigger it using a Google Script then DM me to get a link to the relevant blog post 🙂     Dynamic delay used to schedule zap iterations     It is worth noting here that the "Looping by Zapier" action does not carry out the loop iterations sequentially. Instead, the loop action executes the iterations simultaneously and you cannot be guaranteed that the program at index 0 in the array will be cloned before the program at index N in the array. This then presents issues with API limits of having a maximum of 10 concurrent API calls and a maximum of 100 calls in 20 seconds.   Far from ideal!   However, thanks to some helpful folks in the Zapier forum I found out that using the loop iteration number in the "Delay After Queue" action will mean that each successive iteration will be further delayed than the previous iteration i.e. the first iteration will be delayed for 1 minute before executing and the 2nd iteration will be delayed for 2 minutes before executing.   Therefore, we can get the iterations to execute sequentially as desired. It might take some experimentation to find the correct delay between iterations which is long enough so that one iteration is completely finished before the next one starts.   As shown in the video walkthrough all the remaining actions in this "Looping by Zapier" zap are identical to those in the webhook looping zap. The only difference is that there is no filter or send webhook action at the end of the zap because these are not needed to restart the loop since this is now all being handled by Zapier.   Cloning Follow-Ups   If you have not done so already I recommend checking out these 2 posts on UTM tracking and anonymous leads so that you can set attribution correctly:   UTM Tracking & Automation Anonymous Leads & Attribution   Finally, if you want to see what other cool stuff you can automate with the API then take a look at the following posts   Design Studio Upload Via API Email Process Automation Using the API & Zapier Merging Leads in Bulk using the API   The content in this blog has been reviewed by the Community Manager to ensure that it is following Marketing Nation Community guidelines. If you have concerns or questions, please reach out to @Jon_Chen or comment down below. ... View more

CDP Connection Diagram     Customer data platforms have been a hot topic of late haven't they! But what even is a CDP in marketing? Worry no more! This post will walk you through the nuts and bolts of a CDP and give you concrete examples of why you might want to integrate a CDP with a marketing automation platform (MAP) such as Marketo.   If you want to jump ahead and get a look inside the hood of a CDP or you want to get an idea of how to integrate your MAP then check out the posts below:   Overview of the Segment CDP Integration with Marketo Integrating Marketo with Segment: Mapping Custom Activities & Fields   Customer Data Platform (CDP) Explanation   A customer data platform is a centralized repository that aggregates data for the leads in your database from numerous sources and can distribute this information to numerous destinations (you can think of a CDP as analogous to a router or switchboard). This data can range from website behavior to demographic information that allows you to build a complete profile of your customer.   Segment Connections Overview     You might be wondering why you would need to integrate a MAP with a CDP since MAPs can already track a lead's web behavior and store lead values in fields. While MAPs can be a source to your CDP contributing behavior and field values, they can also be a destination receiving information from other sources routed through your CDP.   I will give a concrete example of how we use the Segment CDP at Telnyx to send important customer information to Marketo.   Telnyx is a telecommunications provider that has an online portal where customers can log in and conduct activities such as purchasing a number, creating a messaging profile, and adding a payment method. These activities are important parts of a customer's journey that we want to be able to track and score on in Marketo.   All of these portal activities are synced into the Segment CDP platform as track calls in real-time and then sent to Marketo using Custom Activities that then appear in the customer's activity log. Since the sign-up form to the Telnyx portal is not a Marketo form (since we wanted to enable "Sign up with Google" and "Sign up with Microsoft" options) we send new sign-up information from the back-end to Segment as an identity call, which then creates/updates a lead in Marketo with the sign-up information using Custom Fields to map identity traits to Marketo fields.   Ok so there might be a few terms in here that have raised even more questions e.g. track calls, identity traits, custom field mapping, so take a look at the Overview of the Segment CDP Integration with Marketo to clear these up!   CDP Vs MAP: Is Marketo a CDP?   The short answer is no, not quite.   Marketo can collect and store information about the people in your database from munchkin tracking code on your site or form-fills. Marketo can also sync bidirectionally with Salesforce and offers integrations with other platforms through the launchpoint service. Additionally, you can use the Marketo REST API to receive and transfer data into your instance as well as using webhooks to make requests to the APIs of other platforms.   So while Marketo may be able to exchange data with other platforms and integrations, if you want to gather data from a bespoke data source e.g. the Telnyx portal mentioned above, or store this data in Postgres databases or AWS buckets this is where Marketo falls short of the CDP gold standard for ease of integration and data transfer. It is just not as seamless as a platform like Segment.   On the flip side of things, Marketo is a fully-fledged marketing automation platform and offers capabilities that a CDP cannot achieve. For example, in Marketo you can   Send emails to your customers based on certain actions Subscribe people to different content based on where they signed up Create emails, landing pages, and forms In summary, while Marketo does have elements of a CDP it is a much stronger marketing automation platform and for the cost of this platform, you will only get value out of it by using it as such.   Take your CDP Knowledge Further!   Now that you know the difference between a marketing automation platform and a customer data platform, the next stage in your journey is to take a look inside a CDP platform and see how you can go about integrating this with a MAP.   Overview of the Segment CDP Integration with Marketo Integrating Marketo with Segment: Mapping Custom Activities & Fields   The content in this blog has been reviewed by the Community Manager to ensure that it is following Marketing Nation Community guidelines. If you have concerns or questions, please reach out to @Jon_Chen or comment down below. ... View more

Segment Diagram   Segment is a powerful platform for gathering customer data from different sources and distributing it to multiple destinations, such as Marketo, seamlessly. If you have bespoke data sources e.g. activities from your portal, that you cannot get into Marketo using the launchpoint service then Segment is your knight in shining armour!   This post will give you an introduction to the Segment platform covering these basics   How Segment is setup with Sources and Destinations The different event types in Segment How to test events and debug delivery issues   If you want a recap on the definition of a CDP and how it is different from a marketing automation platform then check out my first post on this topic   The difference between Marketo and a CDP.   Or if you want to get straight into the nitty-gritty then check out the Integrating Marketo with Segment post to see how to set up Marketo custom activities and fields.   The Segment Platform   Segment Event Types   Page: An event for pageviews of your site Identity: An event for when someone is identified on your site e.g. they fill out a form, they sign-in to your portal Track: Bespoke events that you can define and send to Segment Screen: An event for when someone views a screen on your mobile app Group: An event to associate a user with a group Alias: An event to merge two identities   For a more in-depth look into each of these identity types you can take a look at the   Segment Spec Overview.   Segment Source Overview   Entering the “Sources” section will reveal all the incoming sources that are contributing data. Clicking into a particular source will reveal all the destinations that are receiving data from this source in the “Overview” tab. Within a source, two tabs that are useful for testing and insight are the “Debugger” and “Schema” tabs.   Source Debugger   Segment Source Debugger   The “Debugger” allows you to see all the event types that are coming into Segment from this source, live, in real-time, with different filters and keyword search allowing you to narrow in on certain events.   Selecting a certain event from the Debugger stream will bring up the contents of that event in a pane on the right hand side. The contents of the event will be in JSON format with the “Pretty’ tab offering a filtered and condensed version of the event information from the “Raw” tab. If you want to edit the contents of this event payload then you will need to talk to the engineers that are responsible for sending this event to Segment from either the front or back end of your site.   Segment Debugger Event Detail Pane   In the “Raw” tab you can see the integrations section of the event payload that details all the destinations that will receive information from this event. You can explicitly set each destination to true or false as follows:   "integrations" : { "Destination 1" : true , "Destination 2" : false , "Destination 3" : True }   Alternatively, you can use the “All” key to set the default for all sources and then list exceptions to the rule. In the example below this event will be sent to all destinations except for the Marketo destination.   "integrations" : { "All" : true , "Marketo V2" : false }   Finally, if you want to test sending this event to a particular destination then click on the “Validate” option in the top right-hand corner, which will allow you to select a destination and then bring you to the event tester for that destination. The “Event Tester” will already be populated with the exact contents from the event that you selected (see more in the “Segment Event Tester” section below)   Source Schema   Segment Source Schema Overview   The schema overview is useful for checking that Segment is receiving events as normal from the various different sources.   The graph at the top of the page shows the distribution of the total number of event calls day over day within the time period while the table below the graph shows the event count for all the different events within the time period.   Segment Source Schema Event Detail   Clicking into a particular event will reveal a day over day graph showing the distribution of this event over the time period, while the table below illustrates the number of time event properties were actually present in the event payload. For example, in the image above we see that over the 7 day period there were a total of 252,383 “Page Viewed” events but only the “path” and “url” properties were present in every single call.   If there are other event properties e.g. “referrer” and “search”, that are also meant to be present in every “Page View” event then you know that not all of the required information is being passed from the front or back end (front end in this case for a page view).   Marketo Destination Overview   Event Tester   The “Event Tester” is a handy tool that allows you to send test events to your destination and see exactly what Segment is sending to the destination and the response the destination sends back.   There are two ways to create a test event. You can paste the JSON payload for the event (either Track, Identity, Page, Screen, or Group) in the window. Alternatively, you can use the “Event Builder” tab to build the event from scratch by filling out the event type, name, and properties as well as the user id that the test event is being sent on behalf of.   As mentioned in the “Segment Source Debugger” section above, if you are in the “Debugger” for a source and you click into an event, then you can send this event to the “Event Tester” of a destination using the “Validate” option in the top right-hand corner.   Segment JSON Event Tester   Segment Event Tester Builder   Event Lifecycle   Once you press “Send Event” then the “Event Lifecycle” field will populate on the right-hand side of the screen. There is a number in the top right-hand corner that shows how many request-response interactions there were along with arrow keys to page through these different interactions. Within a particular interaction, you can use the “Request from Segment” tab to see the JSON payload of what Segment sent to the destination. The “Response from Destination” tab then shows the JSON payload the destination sent back indicating whether the request was successful.   The first request that Segment will always make is to get the Marketo lead id of the person who carried out the event. Segment will lookup the lead id using the email address if it is present (as shown below) or it if the email address is not present it can also use a custom id field to lookup the lead in Marketo.   Segment Event Lifecycle First Segment Request   Segment Event Lifecycle First Marketo Response   Once Segment has obtained the lead id it then sends a request to the external activities endpoint specifying this lead id along with the primary key value for the Marketo custom activity and any other event properties that have been mapped to custom activity fields (see the   Marketo Custom Activities  section in the “Integrating Segment with Marketo” post).   Segment Event Lifecycle Second Segment Request   Segment Event Lifecycle Second Marketo Response   Event Delivery   Segment Event Delivery Summary & Trends   Segment Event Delivery Issues   The “Event Delivery” section is useful for checking that events sent to this destination are going through successfully.   The time period for the “Delivery Summary”, “Delivery Trends”, and “Delivery Issues” can be adjusted from 10 minutes to the past 2 weeks. The “Delivery Summary” is useful for getting a snapshot view of average performance over the time period while the “Delivery Trends” graph allows you to dig further and see the times when errors are most prevalent or when latency is highest.   Clicking into a particular delivery issue will bring up a pane on the right-hand side of the screen, which will show up to 20 examples of the sent-request-response interactions related to the delivery error.   Segment Event Issue Detail Pane   A lot of the errors you will see are out of your control. They are due to Segment not adhering to   Marketo’s API limits   and protocols e.g. the 6XX errors below, or system issues between Segment and Marketo e.g. the non 6xx errors below. All of the errors below are usually temporary meaning when Segment later retries sending the event it should go through successfully.   601: Access Token Invalid 602: Access Token Expired 606: Max rate limit of 100 requests per 20 secs exceeded 615: Max concurrency rate of 10 concurrent calls exceeded Etimedout 502 Bad Gateway Econnreset   Instead, focus on error codes that you do have the power to fix e.g. 1XXX or “Message Rejected”. The “Message Rejected” error for example occurs because there is an event being sent to Marketo that has not been mapped to a custom activity or does not include all of the required properties e.g. the primary key (see the Marketo Custom Activities   section in the “Integrating Segment with Marketo” post)   You can use the “Event Tester” described above to test out potential fixes and see if the event goes through to the destination successfully.   What's Next   Now that you have taken a look under the hood and you know how Segment receives, handles, and distributes the data it receives, it is time to setup Marketo custom activities and fields so that you can get this juicy info into Marketo!   Setup Marketo Custom Activities & Fields Recap of the difference between Marketo and a CDP   The content in this blog has been reviewed by the Community Manager to ensure that it is following Marketing Nation Community guidelines. If you have concerns or questions, please reach out to @Jon_Chen or comment down below. ... View more

  Mapping a custom activity in Segment     The Segment documentation does a very good job at getting you up and started with setting up Marketo as a destination. Build on top of this by adding Marketo Custom Activities and Fields so that you can get events and lead field values into Marketo.   In particular, this post will help clear up some prickly points like “What is a primary key in a custom activity?” and “Can custom activity fields populate lead fields?”.   In case you missed my first two posts on this topic or need a quick refresher before diving in below take a cheeky glance at these posts:   The difference between Marketo and a CDP Overview of the Segment-Marketo Relationship    Custom Activities   Primary Key & Other Custom Activity Fields   Before diving into the creation of a custom activity in Marketo and mapping this activity to a Segment event, it is best to start by explaining the primary key and how properties of the Segment activity map to fields on the custom activity.   The custom activity primary key, designated by the asterisk in the image below, is the field that will always be present in the event properties sent from Segment. As explained by Justin Norris, the primary key for a Marketo activity usually refers to the object that the activity refers to:   For “Visits Web Page” the primary field would be “web page” For “Fills out Form” the primary field would be “form” For “Opens Email” the primary field would be “email”   So for example in the images below a more applicable primary field could have been “number” for the “Number Search” custom activity, provided that the event sent from Segment always has a “number” property present.   As you see in the images though, the “timestamp” property from the Segment event was used as the primary field and you can see how it is displayed as the primary constraint on the trigger and filter for the custom activity. When you are merely trying to trigger or filter for the custom activity the value of this primary constraint does not matter, hence why the “is not empty” condition is used in the images below.   Consequently, the choice of primary field does not matter so long as it is always present in the Segment event properties being sent to Marketo allowing the custom activity to work correctly.   Custom Activity Fields       Custom Activity Trigger and Filter Showing Available Constraints       You only need to have the primary key set and mapped to a Segment event property for the custom activity to function correctly. However, if you want to have additional constraints available on the custom activity filters and triggers then you will need to create a field on the custom activity (see below) for each Segment event property you want as a constraint.   N.B. It is not possible to update Marketo lead fields with the values that come into the custom activity fields from Segment event properties. You can read more about this in this Marketo forum post.   Creating a Custom Activity   Custom Activity Details       Navigate to “Admin” > “Marketo Custom Activities” Click on “New Custom Activity” Fill out the “Display Name” and modify the “API Name” if you wish Click “Next” Fill out the “Filter” and “Trigger” names Click “Next” Fill out the “Name” and “API Name” of the primary field Click “Submit”   For any additional Marketo fields that you want to map to properties of the Segment event:   Navigate to the “Fields” tab Click “New Field” Select the field “Data Type” Enter a “Name” Rename the “API Name” field if you wish Hit “Save”   Finally, to approve the custom activity and get the “Marketo Custom Activity ID” for Segment:   Click the “Custom Activity Actions” dropdown Select “Approve Activity” Copy the Custom Activity ID that appears once the activity is approved   Mapping a Custom Activity to a Segment Event   Mapping a Custom Activity in Segment         Once the Custom Activity has been created in Marketo then follow the steps below to map a Segment event to this custom activity.   Navigate to “Connections” > “Destinations” Click into your Marketo destination Click on “Marketo Custom Activities” Click on “Add Another Event” If you already have existing custom activities then you will have to scroll past these to see this button Fill out the “Segment Event Name” Paste in the “Marketo Custom Activity ID” obtained from the previous section Fill out the “Segment Property Name” that you want to map to the primary key you designated in Marketo Fill out the “Marketo Field Name” using the API name of the primary key Select the “Marketo Field Type” Select the “Set as Primary Key” Select “Add Another segmentProperty” and repeat steps 7-9 for every additional Segment event property you want to map to a Marketo custom activity field Click “Save” If you already have existing custom activities then you will have to scroll up past these to see this button   N.B. All the properties for a Segment event can be found by searching for the event in the “Schema” section of the source responsible for sending this event to Segment. Once you have found the event and clicked into it you will see all the properties present in its payload. For more info check out the "Segment Source Schema" section of the Overview of the Segment-Marketo Relationship post.   Custom Field Mapping in Segment   Custom Field Mapping in Segment       The “Marketo Custom Fields” section is used for mapping the traits in Segment “Identify” events to Marketo fields. Every time you add new traits to the identify payload being sent from the backend or frontend to Segment make sure that you complete this mapping or else the Marketo field will not be updated when the Identity event gets sent to Marketo.   All that is required to complete the mapping is to include the “Segment Trait Name”, the “Marketo Field Name” (the API name of the field), and the “Marketo Field Type”. Once this is done successfully for each field, a lead in Marketo will either be created or updated with these values from Segment every time an Identity event is sent to Marketo.   What’s Next?   Young padawan your journey has just begun!   Take a look at how you can use the API to automate a lot of your repetitive marketing operations tasks:   Quick-Start Guide to the API Integrating Dropbox, Marketo, Rebrandly, and Airtable APIs with Zapier Merging People in Bulk Using the API   The content in this blog has been reviewed by the Community Manager to ensure that it is following Marketing Nation Community guidelines. If you have concerns or questions, please reach out to @Jon_Chen or comment down below. ... View more

  Program details         Take the first step towards becoming an attribution master by learning how to set up UTM programs and smart campaigns to match website visitors to particular ad campaigns, set first and latest touch attribution fields, and track downstream conversions to signup or contact sales forms.   This post will focus on tracking UTM parameters but if you want to learn how to track organic referral, social, and search visits with your campaigns so they DON’T STEAL ATTRIBUTION FROM YOUR PAID CAMPAIGNS then take a look at the Anonymous People & Attribution post.   As a bonus for the eager beavers among us, I will also show you how you can streamline the process from a marketing team member requesting UTM parameters all the way to setting up tracking for these parameters in Marketo.   Tracking UTMs   UTM Program   Program Tree         Within the UTM program there are 4 different smart campaigns responsible for tracking visits or conversions and moving a person to the appropriate status in the program. Moving people to these program statuses is important because this allows us to report on cost per lead and cost per success.   The “UTM Campaign” and “Conversion Tracking Campaigns” sections below detail the setup of the 01 Visit , 02 Contacted , and 02 Converted smart campaigns. The setup of the 03 Anonymous smart campaign is detailed in the Anonymous People & Attribution post.   The first step when creating a UTM program is to create a “Default” program type and set the “Channel” to your paid advertising or attribution channel. In this example the “PPC” channel is being used which has the “Visited” status to track anyone who visits our website from an ad campaign and the “Converted” or “Contacted” status to track anyone who signs up or contacts sales straight from the ad campaign.   Advertising channel statuses             The 01 Visit campaign, uses local program tokens within its flow steps to update attribution fields to these token values. Since these token values can be populated using the API (see the “Preparing UTM Smart Campaigns” section below) this means that the values the attribution fields will be set to can indirectly be changed by the API.   Program Local Tokens           If you want to see possible values that the lead_source, lead_source_detail, source, medium, and campaign tokens can have then check out the Key tab of the “UTM Builder” sheet. To see how these tokens are used in the “Change Data Value” flow steps then read on!   UTM Campaigns   UTM tracking is achieved by using the “Visits Web Page” trigger along with the “Querystring” constraint to ensure that only web page visits with the desired UTM parameters matching our ad campaign are tracked.   Campaign Trigger         Then the flow kicks off to:   Change the person’s program status to “Visited” Set the person’s Latest Touch field to the UTM querystring using the {{ my . utm }} token. This Latest Touch field will be used in the conversion campaigns below to see if this ad campaign was the last thing the person interacted with before signing up or contacting sales. If the person’s Person Source field is empty then update the Person Source and Lead Source Detail fields to be the {{ my . lead_source }} and {{ my . lead_source_detail }} tokens respectively. These are a person’s first touch attribution fields that can be used for attribution reporting later on.   Updating the program status, latest touch, and first touch attribution fields       4. Update the utm_source , utm_medium , and utm_campaign fields to each of the corresponding UTM parameters. These 3 fields are supplemental to the Person Source and Lead Source Detail fields to provide more information, the utm_campaign field especially, about where a lead came from. The utm_source and utm_medium fields can be removed, if desired, since their information is already contained in the Person Source and Lead Source Detail fields.   Storing the parameters in their respective fields       5. If the person’s Acquisition Program is empty then set the Acquisition Program to the parent program of this smart campaign and the Acquisition Date to the {{ system . dateTime }} token. Setting these 2 fields is the most important requirement for doing program performance and attribution reporting.   Setting the Acquisition Program and Date     Conversion Tracking Campaigns   Remember that “Lastest Touch” field we set in the UTM campaign flow above? Well whenever we get a person who signs up or contacts sales with this “Lastest Touch” field equal to the UTM querystring of our ad campaign then we know this ad campaign was the last thing they interacted with before carrying out these actions.   This is achieved by including the Lastest Touch = UTM Querystring as a filter along with the triggers and other filters mentioned below.   A Contact Sales Conversion occurs whenever anyone fills out one of the contact sales forms and the Reason for Contact is a Sales Inquiry because in my company’s case we did not want to mark support or legal requests as conversions. A Signup Conversion occurs whenever a person’s online portal id i.e. mc user id , gets populated (for people who already exist) or someone is created from the Web Service API with their mc user id already populated   Tracking contact sales conversions from the ad campaign       Tracking sign-up conversions from the ad campaign     Then we will set this person’s status in the UTM program to either Converted or Contacted depending on which of the above smart campaigns they passed through.   Changing program status to reflect contact sales conversion       Changing program status to reflect sign-up conversion       Automating UTM Programs   Now that you understand how the UTM program and campaigns are set up, I will show you how you can automate the creation of these programs and campaigns using the API and Zapier.   To do this we will use:   A Google Form that will send UTM requests from marketing team members to a Google Sheet triggering a Zap in Zapier to run This Zap will then take the inputs to the Google Form and create the desired UTM parameters using formulas within another UTM Builder Google Sheet The Zap will then create a UTM program and smart campaigns specific to the newly created UTM parameters Finally, a Jira ticket will be created for Marketing Operations to check that the UTM program and campaigns were created correctly and then activate the smart campaigns   All the Python code used within the “Code by Zapier” actions can be be found in this directory in Github.   N.B. If it is your first time using the API or you need a quick refresher then check out the Quick-Start Guide to the API to see how to make your first requests in Postman before transitioning to making requests in code or in the Zapier automation tool.   Collecting UTM Requests from Google Forms   The first step in the whole process is to create a Google Form that will allow a marketing team member to fill out their ad campaign details so that we can automatically create the necessary UTM parameters later on in the UTM Builder sheet. The important thing here is to not require any text entry and only allow the marketer to select from existing options so that you will always know the options available in your form and can thus configure your UTM Builder Google Sheet to create the corresponding UTM parameters for these inputs.         Every new submission to the UTM Request Form gets logged in the UTM Request Form Responses sheet, which in turn triggers the Zap to run in Zapier.   Request Form Responses     Creating UTM Querystring using Google Sheets Formulas   Zapier actions to create a querystring from the request form submission         Once the Zap has been triggered, the next step is to take the row ID of this latest submission and use that to search for the row currently filled with “Next Row #” in the UTM Builder sheet.   Looking up the next row in the sheet     Originally, this zap was set up so that this step searched for the next empty row in the “UTM Builder” sheet, however, when multiple form submissions were made in quick succession it would turn out that the same row in the “UTM Builder” sheet was being written to/overwritten for each of the submissions.   To get around this race condition, the Campaign Name column in the “UTM Builder” sheet is populated with Next Row # where the row numbers being used correspond to the next available empty rows in the “UTM Form Responses” Google Sheet. This way each successive UTM form submission will be in a a different row in the “UTM Form Responses” sheet and thus will lookup a different row in the “UTM Builder” sheet.       Once the correct row in the “UTM Builder” sheet is found, the Channel and Sub - Channel values are populated from the form submission, at which point the formulas in the Google Sheet take over to create the UTM parameters and querystring automatically.   Putting ad campaign information into the sheet       Putting ad destination into the "UTM Builder" sheet     Creating a UTM Program   Now that the UTM querystring for the ad campaign has been created we want to create the UTM program and campaigns.   Creating the UTM program       The next 5 “Code by Zapier” steps use Python code to make requests to the API to:   Get the access token that is needed to make subsequent requests to the API (get_marketo_token.py) Get the yearly paid campaigns folder for the current year or create it if it does not already exist (get_year_folder.py) Get the monthly paid campaigns folder for the current month or create it if it does not already exist (get_month_folder.py) Get the most recently created previous program for the sub-channel of the ad campaign we want to track or if a previous program cannot be found then default to using a template program (get_latest_program.py) Clone the previous program for this sub-channel, creating it within the current monthly paid campaigns folder (clone_program.py)   UTM folder hierarchy       Preparing UTM Smart Campaigns   If Step 8 to clone the latest UTM program for a particular sub-channel is successful then the program ID of the newly created program will be returned. However, I often found that although Marketo was able to successfully create the new program it did not return the successful response and program ID to Zapier within the 10-sec timeout limit imposed on every Zapier action. Therefore, Step 8 would fail along with all the subsequent steps in the zap, which depend on the returned program ID.   In order to remove the dependency on Step 8, Step 9 (get_new_program.py) was added for redundancy and gets the program ID of the newly created program by looking up the name of the program we know was created in Step 8. Now all subsequent steps will use the program ID returned from Step 9 so if Step 8 is ever marked as failed the rest of the zap can continue.   Updating the UTM program and smart campaigns       The next 3 “Code by Zapier” actions:   Take the channel, sub-channel, and utm parameters for the ad campaign from Step 3 and use these to populate the utm , lead_source , lead_source_detail , source , medium , and campaign local program tokens (update_program_tokens.py). Get the ids of the 4 smart campaigns nested under the UTM program (get_smart_campaigns.py). Update the description of these smart campaigns to be the UTM parameters querystring so that it is easy for us as the marketing operations person to copy this value and use it within the smart campaign (see the “Manual Input Required from Marketing Operations” section below)(update_smart_campaigns.py).   Example of campaign description containing querytring       Notifying the Marketing Operations Team   Once the UTM program and campaigns are ready, we then need to create a ticket for the marketing operations team so that they can review the program and campaigns and do the small bit of manual work outlined below.   Creating a ticket for marketing operations     The email address associated with the “UTM Request Form” submission is used to lookup the Jira ID for this person This Jira ID is then used in the “Reporter” field when creating the Jira ticket (see image below) The Jira ticket is then moved from the backlog into the “To Do” column of the marketing operations person assigned to the ticket   Populating the ticket       A Slack message, email, or SMS notification containing the same information as in the Jira ticket could also be added here.   Manual Input Required from Marketing Operations   Since the Jira ticket contains a link to the UTM program that was created by the Zap, it is very easy for marketing operations to open up this ticket and go straight to the program.   While tokens can be used in “Change Data Value” flow steps they cannot be used in the “Querystring” constraint of the “Visits Web Page” trigger in the “01 Visit” smart list or in the “Lastest Touch” filters in the “02 Contacted” or “02 Converted” smart lists.   This is why manual input is required to update the smart lists with the UTM querystring for the ad campaign. Thankfully, our zap updated the description of these smart campaigns to be the UTM querystring so we can copy the querystring right from the description before pasting into the smart lists.   Once all the smart campaigns have been activated or scheduled the last piece of manual work required is just to set up the “Salesforce Campaign Sync” so that the leads generated from this program can be sent to a corresponding Salesforce campaign.   Related Content   Now that you have mastered UTM programs and you have streamlined the hand-off from your marketing team to the marketing operations team you can move on to tracking organic visits to your site and reporting on the effectiveness of each of your marketing channels.   Anonymous People & Attribution: Understand the nuances of anonymous leads and what you need to be aware of when building the organic attribution campaigns that these leads can qualify for. If you want to get started on adding period costs to your paid ad programs so that you can report on “Cost Per Acquisition” then take a look at the Updating Period Costs using the API & Zapier, which shows you how to automate this process.   The content in this blog has been reviewed by the Community Manager to ensure that it is following Marketing Nation Community guidelines. If you have concerns or questions, please reach out to @Jon_Chen or comment down below. ... View more

      This post sets out to demistify the enigma of anonymous people and how they interact with your attribution smart campaigns. Once we have gone through the quirks of tracking attribution for anonymous people I will show you how to modify your smart campaigns so that these leads will always get their first and last touch attribution fields set correctly.   While this post focuses exclusively on attribution, if you want to learn more about anonymous people in general then see the Understanding Anonymous Activity and People documentation.   Attribution Program Setup   Before beginning with this post, I first recommend taking a look at the UTM Tracking & Automation post where I walk through how to set up attribution programs and smart campaigns to track visits and conversions from ad campaigns where UTM parameters are being used. The same setup outlined in this previous post can also be used for tracking organic search, social, and referral visits and conversions with only changes to the “01 Visit” campaign being needed.   Attribution Program Overview     Tracking Organic Page Visits   Since organic search, social, and referral visitors to your site are not tagged with UTM parameters the “Visits Web Page” smart campaign trigger needs to be modified to use the “Referrer” constraint to filter for the organic search (e.g. google), organic social (e.g. reddit), or organic referral (e.g. g2) platform that led the person to your site.   The “Querystring” constraint is then used to exclude any visits that contain UTM parameters from campaigns that we are tracking with other smart campaigns. This is to stop these organic smart campaigns from stealing attribution from these other UTM tagged campaigns, which are typically paid campaigns who we want to be prioritized in getting attribution.   Tracking web page visits for organic channels     Tracking web page visits for campaigns that use UTM parameters     Anonymous People Attribution Issues   While anonymous people can qualify for campaigns with “Visit Web Page” triggers while anonymous, they will not appear as members of these smart campaigns until they become known i.e. they fill out a form on your site or get un-anonymized another way.   Additionally, when a lead becomes known they will pass through the flows of all smart campaigns that they qualified for when they were anonymous BUT here’s the rub:   The Change Program Status step will not work. They are not guaranteed to pass through the smart campaign flows in the same order that they actually qualified for the campaigns. For example, if they do Action 1 to qualify for Campaign 1 at 1 o’clock and then do Action 2 to qualify for Campaign 2 at 2 o’clock, we are not guaranteed that the person will go throw the flow of campaign 1 before the flow of campaign 2 once they become known. As shown in the video below, this can be troublesome because attribution can be stolen away from your paid attribution campaigns and the person’s “Latest Touch” field may not be accurate.   Setting Program Status Of Unanonymized People   The 03 Anonymous smart campaign (from the “Attribution Program Overview” image above) is scheduled to run periodically and take anyone who is a member of the 01 Visits campaign and add them to the program in the Visited status if they are not already a member of the program i.e. they have not passed through the 02 Converted or 02 Contacted smart campaigns. Detecting unanonymized people who need to be added as program members   Adding unanonymized people to the program in the visited status   You might be wondering how they can be known without having passed through the 02 Converted or 02 Contacted smart campaigns of the attribution program and already being made a member. Well, this can happen when anonymous people become known from a campaign in a different program e.g. another attribution program, a webinar program, an email program etc, and while they will be a member of this other program they will not be a member of this current attribution program until the 03 Anonymous smart campaign runs.   Since the 02 Converted and 02 Contacted campaign triggers are based on a person filling out a form, being created i.e. unanonymized, or an existing known lead’s data value changing, the lead is already known when passing through the flow of these campaigns so the Change Program Status step works (see the “Conversion Tracking Campaigns” section of the UTM Tracking & Automation post).   Setting the Priority Order of Attribution Campaigns       As shown in the example in the video, the former anonymous people passes through the flows of all the campaigns they qualified for while anonymous but the order that they pass through these campaigns is not the same as the order that they actually triggered the campaigns. This caused the organic Google attribution program to steal attribution from a paid search Google attribution program.   In order to stop the stealing of attribution from paid campaigns, delays are introduced in the flows of the organic search, social, and referral campaigns so that these campaigns are de-prioritized in the queue of smart campaigns, thereby ensuring that the paid attribution campaigns will always run first.   Within the “My Tokens” section of the overarching “Operations” folder, which contains all attribution programs, the delays for the organic search, social, and referral channels are set. In the example in the image below, we see that organic search will have the lowest priority and will run last since it has the longest delay.   The choice of the delays for each attribution channel is arbitrary. You can shorten the delays for each channel but make sure that you do not make the difference in delay between the channels too small such that Marketo no longer de-prioritizes the campaigns with the longer delays.   "Operations" folder hierarchy   Delay tokens for each organic channel   Once anonymous people become known and pass through any of the organic campaigns, a temporary time field is updated to the current time plus the delay for the organic channel. Then this time field is used in the “Wait Until” flow step to delay for the appropriate amount of time for this organic channel. Remember that since the paid attribution campaign flows do not have any delays they will always run first followed then by the organic social, referral, and search campaigns in this order.   Flow steps used to delay organic attribution campaigns   Stop High-Frequency Updates to “Latest Touch”   As shown in the video above, when former anonymous people pass through all the campaigns they qualified for while anonymous at the same time when they become known, this causes their “Latest Touch” field to update multiple times in quick succession.   According to the prioritization logic we have above, paid attribution campaigns will run first before any of the other organic attribution campaigns. While this means the former anonymous people will have their first touch attribution fields prioritized to be set to paid values, their “Latest Touch” field could be overridden by any organic attribution flows that may run afterward.   To prevent this from happening 3 smart lists are created to track recent changes in a person’s “Latest Touch” field and any recent web page visits they’ve had with UTM parameters in the querystring. Then the flow of all the organic attribution campaigns will only update the “Latest Touch” field if people are NOT members of the smart list for that organic channel.   Organic social campaigns will check that people have not visited any web pages with paid UTM parameters in the querystring in the past 30 minutes and have not had their “Latest Touch” field updated to a paid value in the past 5 minutes ( UTM Activity Recently Paid smart list) Organic referral campaigns will check that people have not visited any web pages with paid or social UTM parameters in the querystring in the past 30 minutes and have not had their “Latest Touch” field updated to a paid or organic social value in the past 5 minutes ( UTM Activity Recently Paid + Social smart list) Organic search campaigns will check that people have not visited any web pages with paid, social, or referral UTM parameters in the querystring in the past 30 minutes and have not had their “Latest Touch” field updated to a paid, social, or referral value in the past 5 minutes ( UTM Activity Recently Paid + Social + Referral smart list)   Smart lists used to decide whether to update "Latest Touch"   Updating the "Latest Touch"   The choice of 30 minutes as the constraint for the “Visited Web Page” filter was arbitrary but we thought that any web page visits within the same 30 minute period should all be classified as the same session and only lead to 1 change in the “Latest Touch” field.   Similarly, the choice of 5 minutes for the “Data Value Changed” constraint is also arbitrary but we thought that 5 minutes was long enough for former anonymous people to pass through all the backlogged attribution campaigns. Since we used a 2-minute delay for organic search attribution campaigns we had to at least wait this long and 5 minutes seemed like a good marker to choose as a result.   Anonymous People Cleanup?   After reading this post and finding out that organic campaigns might have been stealing attribution from your paid campaigns all along you might have some serious backdating to do to fix the first touch attribution fields on former anonymous people.   While this might sound like a nightmare, the API was made for doing bulk updates and might be able to help make this cleanup easier. So take a look at the Quick-Start Guide to the REST API post to learn how to make your first API requests and then see how it can be applied to modify leads and programs in bulk in the examples below:   Merging Leads in Bulk using the API Bulk Updating Period Costs via API   The content in this blog has been reviewed by the Community Manager to ensure that it is following Marketing Nation Community guidelines. If you have concerns or questions, please reach out to @Jon_Chen or comment down below. ... View more

  Zoom Calendar Event     Once you have added Zoom as a launchpoint service and created your webinar event program in Marketo you might be wondering how to set up your registration confirmation email to include “Add to Calendar” links that contain the unique join URL for each registrant. This post will show you how to create these calendar links and how to test that these links are working correctly.   Before jumping into the details I will answer a few questions that might be on your mind.   FAQs   Why should I use Marketo for webinar communication instead of Zoom’s communication features?   While Zoom does have a landing page with an embedded registration form and associated confirmation, reminder, and followup emails, you do not have a lot of control over how the landing page or emails look.   Instead, embedding a Marketo form on your Marketo landing page or on your 3rd Party CMS page will allow you to gain registrants while staying true to your branding. Similarly, using your existing Marketo email templates to communicate with registrants gives you more control over how the email looks and functions and again helps you stay consistent with your brand.   N.B. If you do decide to use Marketo for emailing registrants then make sure you have your Zoom webinar email settings configured not to send out any emails. You do not want to be double-emailing people!   Zoom webinar email settings   Will status changes from Marketo sync to Zoom and vice versa?   Yes, there is bi-directional syncing of member statuses between Zoom and Marketo once the Marketo program has been associated with a Zoom webinar. So for example, if you use a smart campaign to change the program status of someone to “Registered” they will automatically be added as a registrant in Zoom.   Similarly, once the webinar is complete everyone who attended the Zoom webinar will automatically have their program status changed to “Attended” while those registrants who did not attend will have their status changed to “No Show”.   Adding Zoom Calendar & Join Links to Emails   Configuring Zoom “Add to Calendar” Links   If you intend to use Marketo to send out webinar registration confirmation emails with the same “Add to Calendar” links as the Zoom confirmation email then the links will need to have the following format:   https://yourcompany.zoom.us/webinar/{{my.webinar id}}/ics?user_id={{member.registration code}}&type=icalendar https://yourcompany.zoom.us/webinar/{{my.webinar id}}/calendar/google/add?user_id={{member.registration code}}&type=google https://yourcompany.zoom.us/webinar/{{my.webinar id}}/ics?user_id={{member.registration code}}&type=yahoo   N.B. Make sure to set this confirmation email as Operational so that people who have unsubscribed will still be able to receive their joining info for the webinar.   Since the program is synced to the Zoom webinar, Zoom returns the unique registration code for every newly registered person and Marketo then stores this value in the {{member.registration code}} token.   The {{my.webinar id}} is a local program token that involves some Sherlock Holmes style investigation to obtain. Create the webinar id token before commencing with the steps below.   Getting the Zoom Webinar ID   Click on the hyperlinked “Event Number” from the “Summary” view of the program Make sure you are logged into the Zoom account that you used to create the webinar Navigate to the “Email Settings” tab in the window that opens up Click on “Edit” beside “No Confirmation Email Sent to Registrants” Check the “Send Confirmation Email to Registrants” checkbox and click “Save” Navigate to the “Invitations” tab Copy the “Registration Link” Paste this link into a new browser tab and press enter Fill out the required information and click “Register” in the new browser tab Go to the inbox of the email address you just entered Open the Zoom registration confirmation email The registration email will arrive from the email address associated with the account that you used to create the webinar Right-click on any of the calendar links and click “Copy Link Address” Paste the copied link anywhere that will allow you to view the link The link will look similar to the link below https://yourcompany.zoom.us/webinar/tJErcuurrjoqE9CWX9sxw6G5WZ-qOukT5uK0/calendar/google/add?user_id=uF9GtMTISiaZwLYZ6lNKkQ&type=google https://yourcompany.zoom.us/webinar/{{my.webinar id}}/calendar/google/add?user_id={{member.registration code}}&type=google As mentioned above, since the program is synced to Zoom the {{member.registration code}} is automatically populated for every person that signs up for the webinar Copy the text from bullet 2 above which is designated by {{my.webinar id}} in bullet 3 Navigate back to the program Click on the “My Tokens” tab at the top of the screen Click in the “Value” cell of the {{my.webinar id}} token Paste in the copied Zoom webinar string Navigate back to the Zoom webinar “Email Settings” Click on “Edit” besides the “Confirmation Email to Registrants Send upon registration” Uncheck “Send Confirmation Email to Registrants” checkbox and click “Save”   Zoom calendar links in a Marketo email   Getting the Unique Zoom Join Link   In contrast to getting the “Add to Calendar” links, getting the unique Zoom join link for each member is actually pretty simple. Similar to the {{member.registration code}} above, the {{member.webinar url}} is a webinar program member token that automatically gets populated when the program is synced to a Zoom webinar and a person’s status in the program changes to registered.   Testing Zoom Calendar & Join Links in Emails   Once you have created your registration confirmation email with the 3 “Add to Calendar” links from above, create a smart campaign to send this email once the registration form is filled out. Then follow the steps below to make sure that the webinar registration flow works as expected.   Testing Zoom “Add to Calendar” Links   Fill out the registration form Check that you receive the registration confirmation email to your inbox Open the registration confirmation email Open the “Add to Google Calendar” link in Gmail on your desktop Give Zoom the necessary permissions to modify your calendar (if you have not done this previously) Check that the Title, Date, and Time of the webinar are correct in your Google calendar Click on the join url Make sure that you can join the webinar and that the Title, Date, and Time of the webinar are correct in the Zoom pop-up window Download the “Add to ICalendar” link on your desktop Follow the steps below to import the ICS file into your Google calendar Open Google Calendar In the top right, click the gear icon and then “Settings” In the menu on the left, click “Import & Export” Click “Select file from your computer” and select the Icalendar file Choose which calendar to add the imported events to Click “Import” Check that the Title, Date, and Time of the webinar are correct in your Google calendar Click on the join url Make sure that you can join the webinar and that the Title, Date, and Time of the webinar are correct in the Zoom pop-up window If you have a Yahoo account then you can repeat step 4 This should not be necessary once the Google link has been proven to work since both links are the exact same as provided by the Zoom confirmation email   Testing the Unique Zoom Join Link   Use a smart campaign to send the webinar reminder email to the email address that you used to register in the previous section The email address used must be registered for the webinar or else the join link will not work Open the webinar join email that got sent to your inbox Click on the link to join the webinar Check that the join link leads to the correct webinar   N.B. I always recommend using a smart campaign to send email tests because this will ensure that the email we receive in our inbox is the exact same as the customer will see. The “Send Sample” option in the preview window does not send the email as the customer will receive it 100% of the time. I have had issues in the past with sending samples of emails with dynamic content that appeared fine but then links in the dynamic content section 404’d when they were sent to customers.   What Next?   Now that you have your calendar links set up successfully you should take a look at how to set up SMS notifications to confirm registration and later on remind people to attend.     The content in this blog has been reviewed by the Community Manager to ensure that it is following Marketing Nation Community guidelines. If you have concerns or questions, please reach out to @Jon_Chen or comment down below. ... View more

  Webhook for Chili Piper Routing         Want more control over how or when your people are routed in Salesforce? Leverage the power of webhooks and the Chili Piper API to control your routing in Salesforce.   Chili Piper is a tool that makes it easy for inbound people to schedule a meeting with your sales team and then handle the distribution of these meetings to the members of your team.   You can connect Chili Piper to your forms to automatically route people that are created. However, if you want more control over when people are routed then you can use the Chili Piper REST API. This in turn means that routing within Salesforce can be controlled by Marketo, since the API requests can be made using webhooks.   Before jumping into the implementation of the Chili Piper routing request in Marketo lets take a quick look at how Chili Piper can be configured to route people in the way you want.   Chili Piper Introduction   The distribution of inbound people and meetings is handled by the “Concierge || Inbound Router” which specifies the rules for how people are distributed to the members of your sales queues.   A queue in Chili Piper is a method of grouping sales team members. Within a queue, you can specify the routing algorithm e.g. Round Robin, Ownership based, and other rules that will determine what events will be directed towards this queue. For example, you can specify that o nly events for people with an “A” value quality score can be passed to the “A Quality Score” queue .   Additionally, you can also adjust the weights assigned to “Active Assignees” using the percentage field next to each assignee. For example if we want Mclain to receive double the amount of people than Colin then we will set Mclain’s percentage to 200%.   Chili Piper Queue Settings     Following on from the example of having an “A Quality Score” queue, an inbound router can then be set up so that any people sent through this router can be distributed to different queues based on their quality score. Once the person has then been matched to a queue, the routing algorithm of the queue and the different assignee weights will determine how this person gets routed to the sales members within this queue.   Chili Piper Router Settings         Now that you know what Chili Piper can do and how it will handle your people, take a look at the section below to see how to control the routing of your people in Salesforce using webhook actions.   Setting up the Webhook   To route a person that exists in Salesforce using the Chili Piper REST API, the email address of the person along with the router that they are supposed to go through need to be sent in a POST request to the https : //api.chilipiper.com/marketing/$DOMAIN endpoint.   In Marketo, this POST request will be made using a webhook, which in turn uses a person token to pull in the email address and the campaign description token to pull in the router name from the campaign description (see below).   { "form" : { "Email" : "{{lead.Email Address}}" }, "options" : { "router" : "{{campaign.description}}" } }   Chili Piper Webhook       After pasting in the “URL” and “Payload Template” and copying the rest of the settings in the image above, the final step of setting up the webhook is to set a custom header:   Click on “Webhook Actions” Select “Set Custom Header” Click “Add” Put “Content-type” in the “Header” column Put the word “application/json” in the “Value”   Webhook Custom Header       Using the Webhook   Once you have created the Chili Piper webhook following the steps above the next step is to call this webhook from Smart Campaigns and set up an email alert in case the routing fails.   The “OPS – Chili Piper Routing” program channel type is “Operational” which has a single status of “Member”. In each of the campaigns below there is an optional “Change Program Status” action that changes the status of people who pass through each of these campaigns to “Member” so that we can keep track of all the people who pass through these campaigns within the program members list.   Chili Piper Program       Smart Campaign Setup   For each Chili Piper router that you want to be able to call from within Marketo follow the steps below:   Paste the Chili Piper router name into the campaign description Choose the “Campaign is Requested” trigger in the “Smart List” Choose the “Call Webhook” and “Change Program Status” actions in the “Flow” Select the webhook you created above in the “Call Webhook” action Set the “New Status” of the “Change Program Status” action to an applicable status for your program channel type Activate the smart campaign in the “Schedule” tab and adjust the smart campaign settings so that “Each person can run through the flow every time”   Smart Campaign with Router Name in Description       Smart List with "Campaign is Requested" Trigger     Flow with "Call Webhook" and "Change Program Status" actions     Schedule set with "Each person can run through the flow every time"       Requesting the Smart Campaign   Once each of the smart campaigns has been set up with the “Campaign is Requested” trigger they can be called from a flow action in any other smart campaign.   By using the router name in the description of the smart campaigns this allows us to use a single webhook to route people through different routers.   N.B. If the person is newly created then you will want to ensure that the person has synced to Salesforce before requesting any of the routing campaigns. You can either wait until the “SFDC Type” field on the person has changed to a non-null value to request routing or you can use a “Sync Person to SFDC” action before requesting routing.   If you do the later you might need to use a “Wait” action so that ample time has elapsed for the person to be created in Salesforce before making the route request. Alternatively, you can be strategic with the order of your flow actions and place intermediary actions in between the sync action and the request action.   Flow action to request the different routing campaigns       Handling Chili Piper Routing Failure   Identifying a Chili Piper Failure   Contrasting the successful and failed person assignment responses below it can be seen that for a successful response ? id = follows the “https://telnyx.chilipiper.com/book/test/” URL, whereas for a failed response ? routeID = follows the url.   This knowledge will be used in the “Failure Alert” section below to send an alert whenever the response from the Chili Piper webhook fails.   N.B. If the person already has an owner then the response from the webhook will include the person owner name (see the “FAQs” section below) but will still include the ? id = string so it will not trigger our failure alerting campaign unnecessarily.   A Successful Person Assignment   { "routeId" : "601ab36d2e05cd00019e8303" , "url" : "https://telnyx.chilipiper.com/book/test/?id=00Q3a00000stAcwEAE&routeId=601ab36d2e05cd00019e8303&marketing=true" , "redirect" :{ "enabled" : false , "closeStrategy" : "Landing" , "timeout" : 5 , "phoneCallRedirectEnabled" : false , "redirectCallTimeoutStrategy" : "AfterCallEnds" , "redirectCallTimeout" : 5 }}   A Failed Person Assignment   { "routeId" : "601ab16799ad880001fa863e" , "url" : "https://telnyx.chilipiper.com/book/test/?routeId=601ab16799ad880001fa863e&marketing=true" , "redirect" :{ "enabled" : false , "closeStrategy" : "Landing" , "timeout" : 5 , "phoneCallRedirectEnabled" : false , "redirectCallTimeoutStrategy" : "AfterCallEnds" , "redirectCallTimeout" : 5 }}   Failure Alert   The “Webhook Response Lister” campaign uses the “Webhook is Called” trigger to listen out for anytime the webhook is called and the “Response” does not contain ? id = (see the examples above for why this string can be used for detecting routing failure).   Webhook Response Listener Trigger     Whenever this event happens, the “Send Alert” action is used in the flow to send the “Alert – Failed Chili Piper Routing” email to members of your marketing and/or sales operations team who own the routing process.   Failed Routing Alert Email     Manually Routing a Person After a Failed Assignment   Once you receive the failure notification email above follow the steps below to identify why the routing failed and how to manually route the person:   Identifying the Router Name and Reason for Failure   Click on the hyperlinked person name to bring up the activity log for the person Type “Chili” into the search box at the bottom of the screen and press enter Search for the latest “Call Webhook” event with “Chili Piper” in the name with a response indicating an unsuccessful routing (see the “Identifying Routing Failure” above to tell if a request was unsuccessful) Find the campaign listed in the “Campaign Name” column of this event Identify the router name specified in the description of this campaign. You will use this same router name below when manually routing the person. Before proceeding to manually route the person below make sure that you have addressed the reason the first routing attempt did not succeed. This is most likely because a newly created person did not sync to Salesforce   Manually Routing using Postman or the Terminal   To route a person using a terminal follow the steps below:   Open up the command line on your computer Copy all the code below to a text editor Change the email to that of the person you are trying to route Change the router to match the router you want them to run through Copy all of your updated code Paste into the command line Hit Enter export DOMAIN = "theworkflowpro" export ROUTER = "new-portal-signup" cat > 'data.json' <<- EOM { "form" : { "Email" : " tyron@theworkflowpro.com " }, "options" : { "router" : "$ROUTER" } } EOM curl \ -- header "Content-type: text/plain" \ -- request POST \ -- data @data . json \ https : //api.chilipiper.com/marketing/$DOMAIN   Chili Piper Routing from the Terminal     Alternatively, if you have the free API testing tool Postman downloaded then you can make a POST request as shown in the image below.   If you want an introduction on how to get started with Postman I walk through how to set up an environment and make your first API requests in the Quick-Start Guide to the API   Chili Piper Routing with Postman     What’s Next?   Now that you have the Chili Piper integration nailed, check out the posts below to see how you can integrate Marketo with all sorts of other platforms.   Integrating Dropbox, Marketo, Rebrandly, and Airtable APIs with Zapier Unique Zoom Join URLs in Calendar Links Overview of Integrating with Segment   FAQS   How does Chili Piper handle duplicates?   If there are multiple people in Salesforce with the same email address then Chili Piper will pick one of the duplicates to update.   What happens if Chili Piper routes a person with an existing owner?   Chili Piper will only change the owner of a person in Salesforce if the owner is not a part of the router being called or if the current owner does not comply with the rules of the router.   Simple Round-Robin Routing Example   For a simple round-robin router consisting of X salespeople, if you try and run the round-robin router on a person that is already owned by one of these X owners then the owner will not be changed. Additionally, the response of the Chili Piper API request will return the name of the existing owner.   { "routeId" : "601ae9d48dd8e3000149b71e" , "url" : "https://telnyx.chilipiper.com/book/ sfdc-record-ownership/tyron-pretorius ?id=00Q3a00000stAcwEAE&routeId=601ae9d48dd8e3000149b71e&marketing=true" , "redirect" :{ "enabled" : false , "closeStrategy" : "Landing" , "timeout" : 5 , "phoneCallRedirectEnabled" : false , "redirectCallTimeoutStrategy" : "AfterCallEnds" , "redirectCallTimeout" : 5 }}   Routing with Custom Fields Example   For a router where people are assigned based on a custom field, let’s say “Person Quality Score” then even if the person is already owned by one of the salespeople in the router then it can still be re-assigned if the current owner does not match the rules associated with this custom field.   Tyron Pretorius: person Quality Score A Jango Fett: person Quality Score B Luke Skywalker: person Quality Score C   For example, if Jango Fett already owns a person who has an “A” quality score then when the person is passed through the quality score router they will be reassigned to Tyron Pretorius.   Can Chili Piper route people based on custom fields?   Yes! You can use any Salesforce field in your routing logic. As shown in the “Chili Piper Introduction” and the “Routing with Custom Fields Example” above you can configure your router so that your best salespeople get the best quality people.   Does Chili Piper handle people and contacts differently?   No, thankfully Chili Piper does not. You can use the exact same API request and webhook to route both people and contacts and the responses returned by Chili Piper will be the exact same as the 3 examples given in this post.     The content in this blog has been reviewed by the Community Manager to ensure that it is following Marketing Nation Community guidelines. If you have concerns or questions, please reach out to @Jon_Chen or comment down below. ... View more

      Your marketing team churning out content? Uploading this content to the Design Studio (DS) and setting up content performance tracking programs taking up a lot of your time? Take a look at how you can automate this process using the Marketo, Dropbox, Rebrandly, and Airtable APIs in Zapier.   As part of the marketing operations role, it is necessary to take content from the product marketing team and upload it to the DS so that the content can be accessed when shared via blogs and social media posts. Since the Marketo content link is long and LinkedIn posts share the entire URL, ReBrandly can be used to get a custom branded and shortened link, which is more aesthetically pleasing e.g.   Original Link: https://go.telnyx.com/rs/telnyx/images/Content_eBook_YourGuidetoChoosingtheRightVoiceAPI.pdf Rebrandly Branded Shortened Link: https://tlyx.co/eb-voiceapi   Additionally, Airtable can be used to store and categorize all the content links from your DS for easy location by either the sales or marketing team. Last but not least, a program should be set up to track visits to the blog post containing the piece of content and email the content link when the download form is filled out.   Of course the process of    Downloading the content (pdf, png, etc) from Dropbox Uploading the content to the DS Getting a shortened version of the content link using ReBrandly Uploading the Rebrandly link to Airtable Creating the program to track content performance and to send content to customers   can be done manually, but if you have multiple pieces of content to upload on a weekly basis then it is worth streamlining the handoff from the content marketing team and then automating the 5 tasks above using the Dropbox, Marketo, ReBrandly, and Airtable APIs from within Zapier.   The Github repo containing all the code used within the Zapier actions described below can be found here.   N.B. If it is your first time using the API or you need a quick refresher then check out the Quick-Start Guide to the API to see how to make your first requests in Postman before transitioning to making requests in code or in the Zapier automation tool.   Take a look at the video below to get a walk-through of how each step within Zapier is set up and get a look inside the content performance tracking program.       Upload Request Google Form   The first step in the process is to obtain the Content Type, Content Name, ReBrandly Slash Tag, Dropbox Asset Path, and hosting page URL from the content marketing team using a Google form.   Content Name   The file will be named as Asset_ContentType_ContentName in the DS by the Python code in Zapier so when filling out the form the Content Type should not be included in the Content Name or else it will appear twice in the Marketo file name.   For example the “Apple” case study Content Name should just be “Apple” so that the name in the DS will then be Asset_CaseStudy_Apple   Only use spaces as separators i.e. no underscores, colons etc should be used to separate words, and avoid long names since this name will be used in the Marketo file name e.g. “Your Guide to Better Leveraging Conversational AI” should be shortened to just “Conversational AI” so that the filename will be Asset_eBook_ConversationalAI.   Rebrandly Slash Tag   This is the part of the Rebrandly url that appears after the custom domain i.e. for an ebook the slash tag could be “eb-market2020” and the full Rebrandly link would be https : //yourcompany.co/eb-market2020   As a suggestion, the slashtag can follow the following formats for each piece of content where name is an abbreviated version of the content’s title (so that the ReBrandly URL stays short and looks nice) without any separators between words and in lower case e.g. the abbreviated names for “Modernize Your Call Tracking Application For Today’s Marketing” and “The Better Twilio Alternative” can simply be “calltracking” and “twilioalt”.   Case Study: cs-name eBooks: eb-name Fact Sheets: fs-name Infographics: in-name Whitepaper: wp-name Guide: gd:name   Dropbox Path for Content   The path should look similar to the example below and can be obtained by right-clicking on the desired asset from a list view and selecting “Copy Link Address” (see demo video). Note that when copied there may also be querystring parameters appended after the asset path such as in the example below, these can be left alone or removed if desired.   https://www.dropbox.com/preview/Telnyx/Departments/BizOps/Growth/Design/Messaging/Fax/Factsheets/Factsheet_Fax/Factsheet_Fax.pdf?role=work   Blog post link   This is the link to the web page that will host the content download form and the link is provided here so that visits to this webpage can be tracked.   Dropbox > DS > Rebrandly > Airtable   Once the content information is obtained from a Google form the information then gets stored in a Google sheet row, which in turn triggers the “Get Submission from Google Form” action of the zap in Zapier.   N.B. Although there is a Python library for the API, which allows you to make requests in one line of code by passing parameters to functions of the library, the Python integration in Zapier does not have this library installed. This is why in each of the Marketo actions defined below, we have to make the HTTP requests to the API endpoints using the Python requests library as well as specifying all the ancillary information needed to make the request i.e. headers and payload.   So be wary when building Python scripts outside of Zapier. Always check in Zapier first that the libraries you want to use are installed (I will share an ordeal I had when finding a workaround for Beautiful Soup not being installed on Zapier’s version of Python in a future post…. spoiler alert: it was not fun!).   Uploading a file from Dropbox to the Design Studio     Get Dropbox Link   The “Get Dropbox Temporary Link” action (get Python code for Zapier Step 2: Get Dropbox Temporary Link) makes a request to the get_temporary_link endpoint passing the path to the asset in Dropbox and then parses the response to obtain the link to download the asset using the Python regular expression below.   link = re . search ( 'http[s]?://(?:[a-zA-Z]|[0-9]|[ $-_@. &+]|[!*\(\),]|(?:%[0-9a-fA-F][0-9a-fA-F]))+' , response . text ). group ( 0 )   It is important that this asset path from Dropbox is correct or else the request to the get_temporary_link endpoint via the Dropbox API will not work (see the “Dropbox Path for Content” section above).   Upload Via REST API   After receiving the access token (get Python code for Zapier Step 3: Get Marketo Access Token), the zap then proceeds to make a request to the files endpoint to upload the piece of content using the Dropbox temporary link (get Python code for Step 4). The urlib . request . urlopen method is used to access the Dropbox file, from which the file extension and mime type can be extracted for later use in naming and then uploading the file.   f = urllib . request . urlopen ( dropbox_temporary_link ) mime_type = f . info (). get_content_type () f_ext = f . info (). get_content_type (). split ( "/" )[ 1 ]   The final preparation step before uploading the content is to use the content_type dictionary to identify the folder that the content should be uploaded to as well as to get part of the name for the file. This is done by passing the content type to the dictionary as a key and then accessing the first and second elements of the list returned to get the naming piece and the DS folder ID respectively.   content_type = { "Case Study" : [ "CaseStudy" , "169" ] , "eBook" :[ "eBook" , "1569" ], "Fact Sheet" :[ "FactSheet" , "2076" ], "Infographic" :[ "Infographic" , "2070" ], "Guide" :[ "Guide" , "2076" ], "Whitepaper" :[ "Whitepaper" , "2067" ]} After the upload request is made, the response is parsed to obtain the URL of the newly uploaded file in the DS.   Rebrandly Aesthetic Link Shortening   The first step of the “Get Rebrandly Link” action (get Python code for Zapier Step 5: Get Rebrandly Link) is to determine the destination URL of where the Rebrandly shortened link should point. In order to track visits to PDF content, Sanford Whiteman’s redirector page is the initial destination. Then using JavaScript code embedded on this page you will get redirected to the URL of the PDF asset ( http : //example.com/redirected.pdf ) that is appended to the redirector landing page URL ( h ttp : //pages.example.com/redirector ).   http : //pages.example.com/redirector#http://example.com/redirected.pdf   Note that this redirector does not work for images (png, jpg etc) and so if the asset is an image, conditional logic ensures that the redirector URL is not prepended to the asset link.   Once the destination URL has been obtained, it is passed along with the Rebrandly domain, and slashtag in a request to the https : //api.rebrandly.com/v1/links endpoint (see Rebrandly docs here).    The returned response is then parsed to obtain the Rebrandly shortened link, which will have the following format: https : //rebrandly_domain/slash_tag   where the slash tag is the string provided by the marketing team in the Google form fill (see “Rebrandly Slash Tag” section above).   Uploading to Airtable Via API   Content stored and categorized in Airtable     Airtable has a similar layout to Google sheets, where there will be a collection of assets e.g. “Marketing Assets”, which will have a table (similar to a tab in Google sheets) for each content type e.g. “eBooks”, “Fact Sheets”, “Guides” etc. Airtable has cool API docs specific to each collection of assets you have in Airtable. Once you arrive at the API landing page, you can then select the collection of assets you want to interact with and then you will be brought to a REST API docs page tailored to that collection of assets (get the Python code for Zapier Step 6: Upload Row to Airtable).   The content_type dictionary takes the c_type variable as a key and returns the list of values for that key, where the first index contains the content type id and the second index contains the URL encoded name of the table in Airtable. This URL encoded name is then appended to the base Airtable URL to get the full post_url that will be used as the post request destination: post_url = "https://api.airtable.com/v0/apppRyxNabc5LTYeR/" + content_type [ c_type ][ 1 ]”   Next, the payload of the response is populated with the values for the “Content Name”, “URL”, “Content Type”, and “Last Updated” header values. The “Content Type” field is a dropdown menu and in order to select a dropdown value the id of the value needs to be known. These dropdown id values are then accessed through the first index of the list returned for a content key from the content_type dictionary (see paragraph above).   If you are wondering where to find the ids for a dropdown list in your table, comment below and I’ll help you find them 🙂   Once the payload has been populated it is then put in JSON format using the json . dumps () method and passed in the post request to the post_url . The response text is then returned at the end of the script so that it can be analyzed once the script has run to make sure that the new row was added successfully.   Creating Content Program   Cloning a program to track performance of the content     Get Folder ID   The first step of the “Get Marketo Folder ID” action is to make a request to the folder by name endpoint to check if the folder name “YYYY Folder_Name” exists for the content type (get the Python code for Zapier Step 7: Get Marketo Folder ID). If the folder does not exist then the content_type dictionary is used to find the parent folder id for the content type and a request is then made to the folders endpoint to create the “YYYY Folder_Name” folder within this parent folder. The folder id is then stored as a string in the info variable i.e. info = "New:" + fid . Else the program was found successfully and the folder id is stored as a string in the info variable info = "Existing:" + fid .   Get Latest Program ID If “Existing” exists in the folder_info string then this means that there is at least one program in this folder from the previous time that this zap ran. Therefore, the id of the folder that needs to be searched can be parsed straight from the folder_info variable (get the Python code for Zapier Step 8: Get Latest Marketo Program ID).   Else “New” exists in the folder_info string meaning that the “YYYY Folder_Name” folder was newly created in the previous step and is empty of any programs. This means that the previous year’s folder id i.e. “YYYY-1 Folder_Name”, must be obtained, by making a request to the folder byName endpoint, in order to find the most recent program for this content type.   Once the correct folder id has been obtained, it is then passed as the root to the folders endpoint to return all programs within this folder. The findall regex function is then used to find all instances of the regular expression below from the response that is returned from the previous request.   "createdAt" : "\d*-\d*-\w*:\d*:\w*\+\d*" , "updatedAt" : "\d*-\d*-\w*:\d*:\w*\+\d*" , "url" : "https://app-ab20.marketo.com/#PG\w+" , "folderId" :{ "id" :\d*, "type" : "Program" }   The list containing these instances i.e. dates , is then sorted in reverse order so that the instances with the most recent createdAt date will be at the top of the list. Once the correct order has been established the "folderId" :{ "id":( \d *), "type" : "Program" } regular expression is used with the findall function to isolate all program ids in the same order and store them in the program_ids list. Therefore, the program id of the most recently created program will now be the first index of the program_ids list. N.B. That there is a simpler way to obtain the latest program id by using the max method in Python as shown below. Each successive program will have a program id number 1 digit higher i.e. program_id = n + 1 than its predecessor program_id = n . Therefore, the most recent program in a list will have the highest program_id number and can thus, be extracted using the max () method.   raw = response . text pattern = '"folderId":{"id":(\d*),"type":"Program"}' program_ids = re . findall ( pattern , raw ) latest_id = max ( program_ids )   Clone Latest Program   The latest program id is then passed in a request to the program clone endpoint along with the parent folder id to create a new program for the piece of content just uploaded to the DS (get the Python code for Zapier Step 9: Clone Latest Marketo Program).   Get UTM Parameters from Google Sheet   UTM parameters are appended to each link within the piece of content (if it is a PDF) so that any visits to our site from the PDF can be tracked by a smart campaign (see how page visits with UTM parameters can be tracked in theUTM Tracking & Automation post). This step searches from the bottom up of the UTM Builder Content sheet to find the latest row which will contain the querystring of UTM parameters that are appended to each link within the PDF.   Updating the content performance tracking program and smart campaigns     Update Program Tokens   The token names to be updated are collected in a list called token_names and a corresponding list token_values contains all the values that the respective tokens need to be updated with (get code for Zapier Step 11: Update Marketo Program Tokens). Once all the token values have been populated within the token_values list, a for loop is then used to iterate through each token name, passing each name and the corresponding value to a request to the program tokens endpoint, thereby updating each token with the desired value.   Get & Rename Email   The content performance tracking program contains an email that is used to send the piece of content out to someone when they fill out the form to request the content. Provided that the piece of content is not a factsheet or infographic, which are not gated and do not get emailed out, then a request is made to the emails endpoint to get the email id from within the parent content program (get the code for Zapier Step 12: Get Marketo Email ID). Then in Step 13 this email id is appended to the email endpoint url so that the name of the email can be updated for the current content program (get the code for Zapier Step 13: Rename Marketo Email).   Get & Update Smart Campaigns   The content performance tracking program contains smart campaigns that are used to track when someone views/requests a piece of content, when they open a link within a piece of content leading to our website, and to track any conversions (contact sales or sign-up) that occur after they have interacted with the content (see how to track conversions after page visits with UTM parameters in the UTM Tracking & Automation post).   A request is made to the smart campaigns endpoint passing the content program id in order to get all the smart campaign ids within this program (get the code for Zapier Step 14: Get Marketo Smart Campaign IDs). In Step 15 these ids are parsed from the response and stored in a list (get the code for Zapier Step 15: Update Marketo Smart Campaign Descriptions).   A for loop is then used to iterate through the list of smart campaign ids and make a request to the id specific smart campaign endpoint i.e. /rest/asset/v1/smartCampaign/+sc_id+.json, to update the campaign description to contain the querystring that is appended to links within the content PDF.   These two steps are not strictly essential but since a lot of these smart campaigns require this content querystring in their smart list or flow it makes it easier to populate these smart campaigns by just copying the querystring from the description.   Unlock More With The API   Now that you have seen how the API can be used to automate repetitive workflows, take a look at the posts below to get more inspiration and ideas for processes that you can automate:   UTM Tracking & Automation: Streamline the process of creating UTM parameters and tracking these parameters in Marketo using Google Forms, Google Sheets, and the API. Email Process Automation Using the API & Zapier: Learn how to create and populate emails from Google Sheet templates using the API. Merging People in Bulk Using the API: Merge leads in bulk with Python code that will allow you to set custom rules for how you want to prioritize conflicting values for the same fields on different leads.   The content in this blog has been reviewed by the Community Manager to ensure that it is following Marketing Nation Community guidelines. If you have concerns or questions, please reach out to @Jon_Chen or comment down below. ... View more

A trigger event that occurs for the winning lead of the merge   An example of where this is useful is that when 2 leads become merged there could be new webpage visits/anonymous activity on the winning lead activity record after the merge which means that we should recheck attribution campaigns to see if this person's first touch parameters should be updated   I am sure there are more use cases for a trigger like this ... View more

Currently, scheduling a smart campaign is limited to the timezone of the Marketo instance. It would be nice to allow campaigns to be scheduled in the local time of the Marketo person ... View more

Currently, the "Must End On" parameter is limited to the timezone of the Marketo instance e.g. CST in the image above. It would be nice to allow the timezone to be changed to the local time of the Marketo person to ensure that people do not receive emails on the weekend or outside of office hours ... View more

At the moment when you clone using the API there is no option to tell Marketo that the cloned campaign should be executable so even if the original campaign being cloned is executable the cloned campaign will not be executable ... View more

  Zapier looping flow diagram       Calculating Customer Acquisition Cost   In this post, we will use the “Cost Tracking” sheet as an example of where we need to use Zapier to loop through a list of items and carry out an action for each item.   Ad campaign costs mapped to their corresponding program     In a typical marketing team, a sheet like the “Cost Tracking” sheet will be updated at the start of every month to map all the ad campaign costs from their various marketing channels from the previous month to the corresponding program that tracked the leads generated from this campaign.   Therefore, the objective of the Zapier automation workflow is to update each of the programs listed in this sheet with their respective costs so that the cost of acquiring a lead can be calculated.   Importing Ad Campaign Costs from Google Sheets   Now that we have the programs and costs collected nicely in Google Sheets the first task that needs to be done is importing this information into Zapier.   As explained in the Zapier Google Sheets Quick-Start Guide (DM me for the link) the Google Sheets app in Zapier is limited to pulling in a maximum of 20 rows of data in a single action so if you want to import more rows than this then you need to get creative!   In this example, we will follow the steps outlined in the Zapier Google Sheets Lookup Value post (DM me for the link) by   Using a Google Script to package the data up so that it can be imported into Zapier Assigning this script to a button so that it can be triggered to alert Zapier that the data is ready Using a Zap to listen out for this alert and then use the “Lookup Spreadsheet Row” action to pull in the data   "Cost Submissions" tab containing the information which will be retrieved by Zapier     Taking a quick peek at the “Cost Submissions” tab, we can see that there is a column for Period Costs and another for Marketo Programs where both columns contain a string variable. These string variables are created by the “concatenate.js” Google Script which joins every value in the “Program” and “Cost” columns of the “Costs July 2020” tab together using the * character.   This Google Script can be assigned to a button (see the Triggering a Google Script using a Button post (DM me for the link)) so that anytime the button is clicked these strings will be created and then stored in a new row in the “Cost Submissions” tab along with a timestamp and the beginning of a log which will be populated by the zap with the status of each cost update.   Looping using Webhooks & Python   Looping in Zapier using webhooks and Python     Achieving nested looping in Zapier is done by book-ending the zap with the “Catch Hook” trigger event at the start and the “POST” webhook action event at the end to form an outer loop, which contains the nested Python loop. When you come to Step 3 below, you might be wondering why there is a need to have nested looping in this zap at all. Why could we not just iterate through all the programs at once in the Python loop and remove the webhooks forming the outer loop?   Again the reason for this is that Zapier has a 10-sec timeout on all its tasks so if you tried to update all the costs at once then the task might timeout and the zap will fail. Therefore for improved scalability as your number of digital advertising campaigns increases, it is better to break the programs into smaller groups and then update the programs within each group in successive iterations of the outer loop.   From my own experimentation, I found that updating 20 programs at a time in Step 3 led to an execution time well under the 10-sec timeout.   Zap overview       Step 1. “Catch Webhook” Trigger   Zapier trigger to catch the webhook sent from the Google script   The “Custom Webhook URL” under the “Set up trigger” section is the destination URL that is used in the Google Script function in the previous section to send the timestamp and index to start this zap. The index value retrieved by this webhook denotes the point at which the Python code in step 3 will start/continue parsing through the two parallel lists of programs and costs   Step 2. Get Costs   Retrieving costs from Google Sheets using a lookup value     The timestamp from Step 1 is used as a lookup field to get the programs and costs from the row that was submitted to trigger the zap   (See the Zapier Google Sheets Lookup Value post (DM me for the link) for more detail on how this lookup works)   Step 3. Update Costs [Python Loop]   Inputs used in the Python code     This Python script is used in the “Code by Zapier” action to iterate through the programs and update their costs using the API. The “Programs”, “Costs”, and “Log” cells from the Google sheet are pulled in as input data along with the “Index” and “Timestamp” from the webhook in Step 1   N.B. If it is your first time using the API or you need a quick refresher then check out the Quick-Start Guide to the API to see how to make your first requests in Postman before transitioning to making requests in code or in the Zapier automation tool.   Step 4. Update Looping Log Update the log with the responses from the update costs requests     The “Log” column in the Google Sheets row is updated with the responses from the cost update REST API calls made in Step 3 Make sure to only include necessary information in the log because Google Sheets has a 50,000 character limit for single cells. If you try and write to a cell and exceed this threshold then this step will fail with an error message “There was an error writing to your Google sheet”. After the zap has updated all the costs, I recommend pasting the log into a JSON formatting tool so that you can see the data in a more presentable format Step 5. Only continue if more costs to update   Filter to allow progression only if there are more costs to update     A filter is used with the “finished” boolean value set in Step 3 so that the Zap will only progress to Step 6 if there are more programs that still need their costs updated.   Step 6. Send Webhook   Sending a webhook to start the next iteration of the outer loop     If the zap passes the filter in step 5 then a webhook is used to send the index at which the next run of the Python loop will need to start from along with the timestamp needed to lookup the correct row in the Google sheet. The destination URL of this webhook is that of the “Catch Hook” trigger event in Step 1 of the zap so when Step 6 runs it will trigger the whole zap to run again. This zap will run until all costs have been updated, at which point it will finally finish at Step 5 when the “finished” boolean is True.   Need to Backdate Costs?   Now you can use this zap to update your costs at the start of every month so that you can determine your customer acquisition cost for the previous month. But now that your CMO knows you’re an attribution rock star, what if they ask you for the customer acquisition cost for all the months before you had your cost updating in order?   Never fear! The Bulk Updating Costs Via API post will guide you through how to use the API to take your historical ad campaign costs and update the costs of the associated programs in bulk.   P.S. Check out the video below to see how everything is stitched together, how the zap is setup, and what the output log of successful cost updates looks like.   P.P.S.There is no commentary on this video so no there is not an issue with the sound haha Go easy this was my very first YouTube video! I may redo it at some point in the future with commentary so if you want to see that leave a comment below 🙂   The content in this blog has been reviewed by the Community Manager to ensure that it is following Marketing Nation Community guidelines. If you have concerns or questions, please reach out to @Jon_Chen or comment down below.   ... View more

  Screenshot showing costs for a program     If getting costs data and calculating cost per lead is something you are interested in doing but have never done before, you might be worried about the prospect of having to manually update hundreds of programs with multiple costs for each month they were in existence. No need to fear the API is here!   This post will walk you through how to collect all your advertising costs in the correct format, map them to programs, and then import these program names and costs into a Python script to automatically update each program with all historical costs.   Then once the backdating of costs is complete you can follow the Updating Costs using the API & Zapier post to see how to automatically update costs every month using Zapier and Google Sheets.   N.B. If it is your first time using the API or you need a quick refresher then check out the Quick-Start Guide to the API to see how to make your first API requests in Postman before transitioning to making requests in code or in the Zapier automation tool.   Introduction   Every program has a “Period Cost” attribute, which allows you to input marketing costs (advertising, events, offers, etc) for each month the program is live and generating leads. Thus, with the number of leads generated by the program and how much it cost to generate these leads, a cost per lead can be calculated.   To get you started with costs and what insight they can help derive here are 3 short product docs to get you started:   Using Costs in a Program Understanding Costs Understanding the Cost Analysis Area   Google Sheet Setup   Mapping Ad Campaigns to Programs   To begin the program cost update journey you will need a way to map marketing spend to the program that was set up to track leads created from these marketing initiatives. In this example, advertising spend per campaign per month is imported into the Spend by Campaign tab of the sheet along with the utm campaign parameter that was appended to all links from the ad that point to our site.   Costs for each ad UTM campaign value         On the Marketo side, a corresponding program with tracking campaigns was set up to check which leads visit the site with the utm parameters matching that of the ad campaign, thereby allowing the first touch attribution parameters of these leads to be set (see the UTM Tracking & Automation post to see how this is done).   UTM parameters of ad campaign stored in corresponding program description     All our programs were set up so that the utm parameters the program is set up to track are included in the program description. Thus, once the program names and descriptions have been imported into the Campaign-Program Mapping tab, the utm campaign parameter can be split from the “Program Description” field.   Mapping programs to ad UTM campaign values     N.B. A CSV of programs with their ids and descriptions can be obtained in bulk by using one of the program query requests from the API library and then doing some parsing to isolate only the program names, ids, and their descriptions. Since you already have the program id you should replace the program name in the pivot table with the program id so that you will not need to make a request to get the program id in the Python script. When I was tasked with bulk updating these costs I was already given a list of program names and descriptions so I had to get the program ids using the REST API within the Python script (see below).   Then in the Spend by Campaign tab and in the “Matched Marketo Program” column a vlookup formula is used to take the utm campaign parameter, search for a match in the Campaign-Program Mapping tab, and then return the program name from the matching row.   = VLOOKUP ( "UTM Campaign" , 'Campaign-Program Mapping' ! $A$2 : $F , "Program Name" Column Number , false ) Creating a Program-Cost Pivot Table   Costs - Program Pivot Table     Once the campaign costs have been imported for each month and matched with their corresponding program, a pivot table is then used to list out all the programs with their costs per month in the same row. The pivot table can be created easily by using Google sheet’s inbuilt pivot table function (see Pivot Table (GUI) ) or for the nerdy among us, below you can find a brief aside as to how you can build your own pivot table using just Google sheets formulas (see the output in Pivot Table (Formula) ).   All the programs are brought into the left-hand column using a filter applied to the unique function to remove #N/A values (in the scenario where a program was not found for the ad campaign).    = filter ( UNIQUE ( 'Spend by Campaign' ! E2 : E ), NOT ( ISNA ( UNIQUE ( 'Spend by Campaign' ! E2 : E ))) )   The program name is then concatenated with each of the date headers in succession and a vlookup formula for each concatenation is used to search for a match in the “Helper” column of the Spend by Campaign tab and then return the cost from the matching row. If the vlookup formula returns an #N/A value then the cell is left blank.   = if ( ISNA ( VLOOKUP ( "Marketo Program" & " " & "Date" , 'Spend by Campaign' ! $B : $E , "Cost" Column Number , false )),, VLOOKUP ( "Marketo Program" & " " & "Date" , 'Spend by Campaign' ! $B : $E , "Cost" Column Number , false )) Once this formula has been applied to every Marketo Program – Date combination then the data is ready for export as a CSV and processing by the Python script.   Bulk Updating Python Script   Python script flow diagram         Importing Costs Data and Getting Access Token   The first action in the script is to read in the pivot table as a data frame using the Pandas library and then the code below is used to create a list where each index contains a series of (date, cost) pairs for each program.   iterrows = list ( df . iterrows () ) Before looping through the programs in the pivot table, it is necessary to get an access token and ensure that there are more than 60secs left on the token life so that there is enough time to update the costs in a single iteration of the loop. This is achieved using nested while loops with the inner while loop checking that token life is greater than 60secs before every run and if this is not true the outer while loop will wait until the access token has expired and then get a new access token with 3600secs of life.   The getToken function is used to make a get request to the token endpoint, passing the client id and client secret, to return the API access token and the length of time that this token will be valid for.   Appending to the Costs List   Inside the inner while loop, each index of the iterrows list is brought into a for loop where the ( date , cost ) pairs for a program are assessed. IF the date is the “Marketo Program” header (this will always be the case for the first ( date , cost ) pair of an iterrows index) then a call will be made to the getProgramByName function passing the program name to get the program’s information.   IF the program was found successfully then the program id and its created date are parsed out from the response and the day of the created_at date is set to 1 for later comparison with the input date values from the pivot table. ELSE the program name was not found then the script will break from the for loop and the next iteration of the loop will proceed to assess the next program. ELSE for all subsequent ( date , cost ) pairs date will be one of the date headers and if the cost for this header is not null and the program existed before this date or was created in the same month then append the ( date , cost ) pair to the costs list. If there was spend for a paid campaign in months before the corresponding program was set up e.g in June, then you do not want to add the program costs for these prior months because they will incorrectly drive up the cost per lead for the leads who became members of this program from June onwards. Once all the ( date , cost ) pairs have been collected a single API call will be made to upload them to the program.   Updating Costs IF the costs list length is greater than 0 after iterating over all the ( date , cost ) pairs for a particular program i.e. it has been populated with at least one ( date , cost ) pair,  then the program id and costs list are passed to the updateProgram function, which makes a call to the API update program endpoint.    Additionally the costsDestructiveUpdate parameter is passed to the updateProgram function, which when set to TRUE will clear out any costs that are stored in the program and replace them with the costs in the costs list, which is desired since the costs in the ( date , cost ) pairs are the ad spend for the entirety of the months. Setting costsDestructiveUpdate equal to TRUE is also better for debugging and rerunning this code so after a lot of testing you do not have to delete a lot of costs from programs that were part of the test. If you would like to preserve the existing costs in the program then set costsDestructiveUpdate equal to FALSE then the incoming costs in the costs list will be appended to the existing costs, and all the costs that now exist for a month will be summed and used to get the cost per lead for that month.   N.B. There is also the option to clear all costs from a program by setting costDestructiveUpdate equal to TRUE without passing a costs parameter. In order to account for the scenario where a cost parameter may or may not be passed to the updateProgram function the kwargs magic variable is used to pass keyworded arguments to the function. Thus, the cost s and costDestructiveUpdate parameters can then be accessed inside the function and their values stored in the payload by referencing their respective keys via kwargs . ELSE the costs list has not been appended with any ( date , cost ) pairs, meaning that the program was not found (and the break call was made inside the for loop) or there are no costs to update. This can happen either because there simply are no costs for that campaign or all costs for a particular campaign were before the program was created.   Finally, at the end of the inner while loop, a 0.2sec delay is implemented so that the rate limit of 100 calls in 20secs is not exceeded. Then the remaining time on the token is calculated and if this time is greater than 60secs and there are still more indices of iterrows to iterate through then the next iteration of this inner while loop will proceed.   If the remaining time is below 60secs , the script breaks out into the outer while loop and then waits for this remaining time to elapse before requesting a new access token and diving back into the inner while loop. This process will be repeated until all the rows from the pivot table have been iterated over and the associated costs updated.   Checking Output Log of Costs Updates   Before entering the outer while loop and beginning program updates, a timestamped log file is created and subsequently updated inside the inner while loop to record information for each row of the pivot table and whether processes like finding and updating the program were successful. You can see a sample output file of this log script here.   I recommended that you check a few of the rows of this log once your script has finished successfully and make sure that the costs updated correctly by comparing the ( startDate , cost ) pairs in the log to the ( date , cost ) pairs for the program in the pivot table.   What’s Next?   Once the backdating of costs is complete you can follow the Updating Costs using the API & Zapier post to see how to automatically update costs every month using Zapier and Google Sheets.   Now that you have gotten a taste for the API and have seen how it can save you time, take a look at these other posts to get more ideas for things you can automate:   UTM Tracking & Automation: Streamline the process of creating UTM parameters and tracking these parameters in Marketo using Google Forms, Google Sheets, and the API. Email Process Automation Using the API & Zapier: Learn how to create and populate emails from Google Sheet templates using the API. Merging People in Bulk Using the API: Merge leads in bulk with Python code that will allow you to set custom rules for how you want to prioritize conflicting values for the same fields on different leads.   The content in this blog has been reviewed by the Community Manager to ensure that it is following Marketing Nation Community guidelines. If you have concerns or questions, please reach out to @Jon_Chen or comment down below. ... View more

  Zapier actions to create and then update Dynamic Content Sections     In summary, this post will teach you how to optimize the hand-off of email content from your content creation team and create automation that will:   Send email content from a Google Sheet to Zapier Create an email program, email asset, and smart campaigns for this email Upload images from Dropbox to the Design Studio using the API so that they can be used in your email Populate your email by transferring the content from your Google Sheet to email variables using the API Create dynamic content sections and populate these sections with the content from your Google Sheet using the API   All the Python code used in the Zapier actions, the JavaScript code used in the Google Sheet, and the HTML code for the marketing newsletter can all be found in this directory in Github.   N.B. If it is your first time using the API or you need a quick refresher then check out the Quick-Start Guide to the API to see how to make your first API requests in Postman before transitioning to making requests in code or in the Zapier automation tool.   Dynamic Content Overview   Dynamic content refers to the ability to swap different content into your emails based on which customer segment the person viewing your email is in. For example, if you segment your customer database by which product they are interested in e.g. SMS, Calls, Data, then a person in the SMS segment will see SMS content and so on.   Consequently, the first step toward using dynamic content is by creating a Segmentation and defining the smart list criteria for each constituent segment.   Segmentation for Dynamic Content       The next step is to work with your content creation team to get the different content that will be sent to each segment so that you can put this content into your emails!   Collecting Email Content using Google Sheet Templates   Month YYYY Tab   As marketing operations professionals we want to make it super simple to get the content for our emails from the content creation team. This is why creating email templates in Google Sheets like this Marketing Newsletter Template is such a great idea because it lets the content team know what copy they need to fill out and where they need to fill it out, what sizes images need to be, and where they should provide links for images used in the email.   Google Sheet template used for collecting email content       When it comes time to make the newsletter for the upcoming month the content creation team can simply duplicate the “Month YYYY” tab used for the previous newsletter and replace the content in this newly duplicated sheet with the content for the upcoming newsletter. By comparing the rows in this tab to the “Newsletter Image Preview” (scroll all the way to the right) you will notice that there is a row for each section in the email allowing the content creation team to fill out all the titles, copy, destination URLs, and Dropbox image links needed for each section.   In order to upload images from Dropbox to the Design Studio using the API (see Steps 8 and 9 below) it is important that the correct link for the Dropbox image is provided. To get this link in Dropbox, right click on the image’s row from a list view containing the desired image, select “Copy Link Address”, paste this value into the “Design Image Links” field in the Google Sheet. This link should have ? role = work at the end. The Dropbox Path For REST API YouTube video will demonstrate the steps outlined above.   In this newsletter example the “Lead Content”, “Card 1”, “Card 2”, and “Card 3” sections are the same for each customer but the two “Other News” sections are dynamic and will show the customer either SIP Trunking (SIP), SMS, or Call Control (CC) content depending on which segment they are in.   Back End Tab   Once the marketing operations team has the email content in a structured way within the “Month YYYY” tab then we can map each of the content sections, whether text, destination url, or dropbox image link, to their corresponding email variables within the email template using the “Back End” tab.   If the variable is a global email variable then you do not need to specify a module id along with the variable id. However, if the variable is a local email variable then you need to specify both the variable id and the module id within which the variable is housed so that you can update it with the API. For more information on email variables see the documentation here.   If you want to see how to set up your emails to use variables then copy the code from the marketing_newsletter_template.html file into a new email template.   All the content from the “Month YYYY” tab is pulled into the “Back End” tab automatically using vlookup formulas so don’t worry there is no need to do this manually!   You might have noticed the “mkto_link#” placeholders in the “Value” column. These placeholders will be replaced with URLs to the images hosted in the Design Studio (Step 10) after the images linked in the “Dropbox” column have been uploaded to Marketo using the API (Step 8 and 9).   Mapping of content to corresponding email variables     Submissions Tab   Finally, all the values for the email variables, the Dropbox image links, and the dynamic content sections are concatenated together using the * character so that when the big, shiny, green “Submit” button is pressed they are sent to the “Submissions” tab triggering the Zapier automation.   The JavaScript code attached to the “Submit” button can be copied from this file in GitHub. If you want to learn more about how this JavaScript code works, how to attach this code to a button, and how the concatenated values are retrieved in Zapier then see the Zapier Google Sheets Lookup Value post (DM me for the link).   Submission of email content to Zapier   N.B. If emojis are being used in the subject line then in order for these emojis to be rendered correctly they have to be Q-encoded. This should be done before hitting the “Submit” button to trigger the Google script and Zap. Thankfully, Sanford Whiteman has come to the rescue again with a free-to-use emoji Q-encoder on his site.   Importing Data into Zapier & Creating an Email Program   Importing email content from Google Sheets   1. Once the new row has been created in the “Submissions” tab, this will trigger the “New Spreadsheet Row” trigger in Zapier and then cause the 11 subsequent “Code by Zapier” Python actions to run in succession.   Setup of the "Code by Zapier" action with Python code and input variables from prior actions     2. Get the access token needed as authentication to make all subsequent requests. Since there are a lot of subsequent requests to the API and the token life is limited this step also checks to make sure that the remaining token life is greater than 120 seconds. If the remaining token life is less than 120 secs then the Python code will wait until the current token expires and then request a new token, which will always have a lifespan of 3600 seconds (get_marketo_access_token.py).   3. Either get the ID of the existing “Newsletter YYYY” parent folder or create a new “Newsletter YYYY” folder which will house all the monthly newsletters for this year (get_parent_folder.py).   4. Since each marketing newsletter program follows the same naming convention “Email_YYYY_MM_MonthName_Newsletter” we can use this knowledge to find the ID of last month’s program (get_last_program.py).   5. Once we have the ID of last month’s program, we can clone it to use as a basis for this month’s program (clone_program.py).   6. While the API request to clone a program does return the ID of the new program (step 5), I found that while the step succeeded to create the new program it often did not send the successful response to Zapier within 10 seconds. Since Zapier has a 10 second timeout limit on all actions this meant that Step 5 would be marked as failed and all the subsequent steps in the zap that need the program id failed.   Consequently, I introduced a fail-safe action that will search for the newly created program by name (since we know from Step 5 what we called it) and then set up all subsequent actions to pull the program id from this Step 6 instead of Step 5 This means that even if Step 5 is marked as failed the rest of the zap can proceed by using the program ID obtained from Step 6 (get_program_id.py).   Zapier actions to clone a new email program   Creating an Email & Populating Email Variables   7. You might be wondering why we need to create a new email in Step 7 instead of modifying the email that already exists from cloning last month’s newsletter program. The reason we need to create a new email, is that emails used in A/B tests cannot be found using the API.   This means that if last month’s email used an A/B test then the email in this month’s program will also have an A/B test setup (since we cloned last month’s program and therefore email too) and therefore we would not be able to find or modify it using the API.   Therefore, Step 7 creates a new email i.e. one without an A/B test, that can be populated with the API and the email cloned from last month’s program can then later be deleted manually (create_email.py).   8. Use the Dropbox asset paths for each image provided by the content creation team in the Google Sheet to get a link for each image that can then be used to upload this image straight from Dropbox to Marketo (get_temp_dropbox_links.py). If you want more information on uploading assets straight from Dropbox to the Design Studio then check out the Uploading to the Design Studio via API post.   9. Upload the images straight from Dropbox to Marketo using the links for each image obtained from Step 8 (upload_images.py).   10. The “mtko_link#” placeholders in the “Variable Values” concatenated string are replaced with the URLs of the images that were uploaded to the Design Studio in Step 9. Next, the “Variable Values” are matched to their corresponding email variable id and module id combinations so that these variables can have their values updated in the email (update_email_variables.py).   Zapier actions to create an email, upload images from Dropbox to Marketo, and populate email variables   Creating & Populating Dynamic Content Sections   11. The two “Other News” sections at the bottom of the email are turned into dynamic content sections (GitHub file).   12. The two dynamic content sections created in Step 11 are then populated with the content from the Google Sheet for each segment within the segmentation e.g. SMS, Elastic SIP Trunking, Call Control, and Default. The content from the Default segment is set up to alternate between the content from the other 3 segments depending on what month it is (GitHub file).   Zapier actions to create and then populate dynamic content sections     The Result   Et Voilà! Once all the API requests have been made, you will have a new email program created in your yearly newsletters folder with an email asset that has been populated with all the content from the Google Sheet.   And you know what the best part is?   You didn’t even have to lift a finger!   The email program created via API     Before email variables and dynamic content sections are populated     After email variables and dynamic content sections are populated     What’s Next?   Here are some follow-up posts that will hopefully inspire some of your own ideas for automation with the API:   Merging Leads in Bulk using the API Uploading to the Design Studio via API Updating Period Costs in Bulk Via API   Also if you are not familiar with the API then I would recommend starting with the Quick-Start Guide to the API to see how to make your first requests in Postman before transitioning to making requests in code or in the Zapier automation tool.   The content in this blog has been reviewed by the Community Manager to ensure that it is following Marketing Nation Community guidelines. If you have concerns or questions, please reach out to @Jon_Chen or comment down below. ... View more