Migrating your Marketo activity history and historic results

When it comes to migrating Marketo activity history, even Marketo’s documentation will start with a big fat no no! But what if we told you it’s possible… 🤫

What is historical data in Marketo Engage?

Within Marketo Engage, we refer to historical behavioural or system data as Activity History. Activity history includes emails sent, data value changes, and program membership changes. Note that activity history may be limited as Adobe have strict retention rules. The Activity History data is connected to the Person record and can be exported via the Marketo APIs and stored.

So why can’t you migrate it?

The first challenge is that when we migrate a Person record from one Marketo Engage instance to another, the Marketo Person ID changes. The second is that the Marketo Activity ID is linked to a Person ID and doesn’t contain any other information to link back the record. The third is that the activity is typically related to a program, smart campaign, or email asset, and again they have all changed IDs or not been migrated to your new Marketo instance.

📖 Download our Marketo Engage migration checklist

Understand the step by step process of migrating your Marketo Engage instance with our handy checklist.

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Cracking the code of activity history migration

But you said it was possible! Well in short – it is. It requires data manipulation in order to match the different activities to the individual, as well as a custom Activity Type in Marketo Engage. We recommend only conducting this migration of historical data if you cannot live without it, or you are in a highly regulated environment.

How does it affect historical reporting?

By default, migrating data from one instance of Marketo to another results in data loss especially on activity history. Some historical reporting using program statuses can be maintained but requires additional steps.

Discover our migration capabilities, and discuss your Marketo data migration needs.