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Yes, it absolutely will negatively impact performance of other campaigns in your subscription if you have tons of unused active trigger campaigns. You should do routine cleanups and de-activate anything that is not necessary. I also encourage people who use trigger campaigns to see if they can execute the same operations with a recurring batch campaign. Trigger campaigns really should be reserved for operations that must occur in real time. In general, trigger campaigns are slower if you are attempting to execute an operation for 5,000+ leads.
We have two queues that are part of trigger campaign processing. The first evaluates whether an activity has caused an active campaign to be triggered. It then pushes that over to a second queue that is a queue of campaigns that have already been triggered that need to be processed. If you were to import 1M leads in a list import and also had an active campaign with “New lead was created” trigger, it would take some time (it will vary, hard to estimate and also involves whether the trigger campaign has additional filters as part of the smart list qualification) to evaluate and push these over into the second queue to await processing. The next queue contains the campaigns that have been triggered and need to be executed. This queue is a bit faster than the first as we have parallel processing in place (6 processors) to execute these campaigns. There is also prioritization in place for the second queue. There are three levels of priority and the highest level will be processed faster. The type of trigger doesn’t matter (assuming there aren’t additional filters specified in addition to the trigger, which can also slow things down). What matters is the flow step. Trigger campaign processing is prioritized as follows: Campaigns with “Send Email” or “Send Alert” flow step are highest priority, campaigns with “Request Campaign” flow step are second-highest, and campaigns with any other flow steps (including “change data value") are lowest priority. The amount of time a trigger campaign takes to execute depends on what is presently in the trigger campaign processing queue. If there are many active trigger campaigns and several campaigns are triggered at once, there can be some wait time, especially for low priority trigger campaigns. It is always best to avoid trigger campaigns if the campaign will trigger extremely often. Otherwise, if there are a bunch of active trigger campaigns then this second queue could grow to be quite large. Finally, the more active trigger campaigns you have, the longer it will take to determine if the campaign was trigger by an event that took place. Best practice is to clean up (de-activate) any old active trigger campaigns that aren't needed any longer.
Hi Robberto McDowell this is interesting.
I've also been told that having many "Campaign is Requested" triggers can slow down Marketo as well.
Yes, it absolutely will negatively impact performance of other campaigns in your subscription if you have tons of unused active trigger campaigns. You should do routine cleanups and de-activate anything that is not necessary. I also encourage people who use trigger campaigns to see if they can execute the same operations with a recurring batch campaign. Trigger campaigns really should be reserved for operations that must occur in real time. In general, trigger campaigns are slower if you are attempting to execute an operation for 5,000+ leads.
We have two queues that are part of trigger campaign processing. The first evaluates whether an activity has caused an active campaign to be triggered. It then pushes that over to a second queue that is a queue of campaigns that have already been triggered that need to be processed. If you were to import 1M leads in a list import and also had an active campaign with “New lead was created” trigger, it would take some time (it will vary, hard to estimate and also involves whether the trigger campaign has additional filters as part of the smart list qualification) to evaluate and push these over into the second queue to await processing. The next queue contains the campaigns that have been triggered and need to be executed. This queue is a bit faster than the first as we have parallel processing in place (6 processors) to execute these campaigns. There is also prioritization in place for the second queue. There are three levels of priority and the highest level will be processed faster. The type of trigger doesn’t matter (assuming there aren’t additional filters specified in addition to the trigger, which can also slow things down). What matters is the flow step. Trigger campaign processing is prioritized as follows: Campaigns with “Send Email” or “Send Alert” flow step are highest priority, campaigns with “Request Campaign” flow step are second-highest, and campaigns with any other flow steps (including “change data value") are lowest priority. The amount of time a trigger campaign takes to execute depends on what is presently in the trigger campaign processing queue. If there are many active trigger campaigns and several campaigns are triggered at once, there can be some wait time, especially for low priority trigger campaigns. It is always best to avoid trigger campaigns if the campaign will trigger extremely often. Otherwise, if there are a bunch of active trigger campaigns then this second queue could grow to be quite large. Finally, the more active trigger campaigns you have, the longer it will take to determine if the campaign was trigger by an event that took place. Best practice is to clean up (de-activate) any old active trigger campaigns that aren't needed any longer.
Thanks Justin Cooperman!
That's by far the most information I've received on this topic. Very helpful.
Follow up question: are triggers in engagement program streams and segmentation filters processed the same way?
Yes. Say I had a segmentation on "Job Title" and I just changed mine in the Lead DB. It does not mean that instantaneously, that would be reflected in the segmentation. The trigger would go through same evaluation and execution to update my segment. So, there would still be a period where I was in my old segment.
In addition to these, Revenue Cycle Model transitions, and Auto-Assignment rules follow this model.
Hi all-
This exchange is super helpful! We have been seeing an increased slowdown as well and we run a ton of triggered campaigns. Does anyone know if those on the Enterprise level subscription experience the same problems? We are relatively good about cleaning up our triggered campaigns and removing old or obsolete ones. We are growing rapidly and will only see an increase in triggered campaigns going forward, so we are trying to determine if we need to jump to the Enterprise licensing level or would we experience the same thing? Would appreciate any insight you have.
Thanks,
Christina