What are easy merge service gotchas?

Anonymous
Not applicable

What are easy merge service gotchas?

Would love to know what considerations exist with Marketo's easy merge service to ensure records dedup properly. Basically, the "Top X Things to Consider Before Kicking off an Easy Merge." Recently ran into several SF permission issues and trying to find documentation on items an organization needs to have in place to prep for an easy merge.

John Mattos (W)​ does a nice job of outlining the service here (Merging Duplicates Part II : Easy Merge ). However, would love to get one more detail of known gotchas.

Merging Duplicates Part II : Easy MergeConsiderations/Questions

  • Easy Merge obviously can't merge records that live in Salesforce only.
  • When will Easy Merge kick back errors? For example, what happens if a record has fields that live in SF but not Marketo? Will that cause an error when the new data syncs to SF?
  • What permissioning is needed on the Salesforce side to ensure to merged data properly completes into Salesforce? Have seen some instances where Delete capabilities in the SF side are not granted. Assume the merge will not work in those cases?
  • Etc. etc.
Tags (1)
4 REPLIES 4
John_M
Marketo Employee

Re: What are easy merge service gotchas?

1. correct.. only leads that are synched will merge.

2.why would there be fields in SFDC and not marketo? They sync automatically when they are created and are visible. If they aren’t visible the value in the master record wins

3. Create, read, update delete on all entities that marketo can see, and are linked to those objects.

4. etc etc! ☺

-John

Anonymous
Not applicable

Re: What are easy merge service gotchas?

Thanks John.

On #2, there could be be fields in SF like "Customer ID" that doesn't need to be in Marketo so that field is not given permission to sync to Marketo. Could a field like throw off an error upon syncing of the dedups from Marketo to SF? My guess is that has no impact at all.

Brings up a similar scenario. If Marketo dedups two records on Marketo side and one of the fields it adjusts is read only in SF, will that throw off an error for the whole record or just that field (expected behavior). For example, if "Favorite Color" is read only on the SF side and two records merge in Marketo adjusting favorite color to Blue, will A) SF merge the records but reject the new Blue Favorite color value. B) Salesforce completely reject the record as a whole causing the record not to dedup.

I know some of these questions are specific but we recently saw some significant unexplained issues with merging. Want to avoid on future dedups.

Casey_Grimes
Level 10

Re: What are easy merge service gotchas?

So, a few things I've learned through several Easy Merges:

- EasyMerge cannot handle selective merging of records; that is to say, if you have multiple records that meet criteria, they must all be merged together. The most common use case for this is intentional duplicates. You can't, say, merge all Marketo-only qualifying records but exclude Salesforce-Marketo linked records.

- It's been a few years since I last dealt with this, but if you have a database that is using non-Latin characters, the results might be improperly encoded.  I even flagged this during the dry run as a potential issue but it wound up being delivered that way. Would love to know if this has been resolved.

- If a record has been broken from SF (there's a connected record ID but no deletion flag sent to Marketo), there's some odd behavior--I believe I had to manually remove those records the last time that happened. However, this is a very uncommon scenario and one I doubt anyone would run in to.

Anonymous
Not applicable

Re: What are easy merge service gotchas?

Hi Jeff

Last time, I talked to Ringlead, they mentioned to me the following about EasyMerge.

- With EasyMerge there is some data loss as it does not append data just take the data in fields that are selected as the master.

- Similarly, on lead score, it will not aggregate score when merge but use the one selected

If anyone has more information on this and other limitations of EasyMerge, it would be great.

Thanks

Axel