With Marketo you can now prioritise trigger campaigns

prioritising trigger campaigns in Marketo
James T Fletcher
CEO, Principal Consultant

23/10/2018

Have you ever experienced a backlog with your triggered campaigns in Marketo?
Well, you’re not alone! With Marketo’s default priority assignment rules, you might find yourself in a situation where some of your triggered campaigns will just sit in the Campaign Queue, causing delays on your data update and implicitly slow sync with your CRM system.

As you probably already know, when a campaign is activated, Marketo assigns it a priority, based on how the campaign was launched and what’s in the flow. High priority campaigns will run first, once those are finished the next highest priority campaigns are executed and so on until all have been completed.

Obviously, Marketo is great at running multiple campaigns simultaneously so you are probably thinking why do I have to manage the campaigns’ priority in my instance? Well, mainly because the execution resources are shared among all clients on the same server.

Let’s say for example multiple customers will trigger a number of high priority campaigns at the same time. If you’re running low priority campaigns (eg: webhooks, sync to SFDC, etc) they will be put on a queue until the high priority campaigns are completed. Of course, there will also be cases where you’ll be required to manage the campaign’ priority inside your own Marketo Instance. (i.e.: you’ll want to prioritise a campaign with a “Change Status in SFDC Campaign” flow step over a campaign with a “Send alert” flow step).

Historically this proved to be an issue for some of our clients running multiple low priority campaigns, therefore you can understand our excitement when Marketo announced its Q3 Autumn Release. New functionality will be made available which will allow the users to prioritise important data management triggered campaigns which would normally be flagged as low priority by the Marketo system.

We are definitely looking forward to using this new feature which will help us deliver better Marketo functionality for our clients. Being able to override Marketo’s determined priority and push forward critical data management campaigns is definitely a win for us all.

TIP OF THE DAY:

If you have many unused triggered active campaign it will always negatively impact the performance of other campaigns in your instance (especially if they are high priority campaigns). We would strongly recommend doing a regular cleanup and removing the old or obsolete triggered campaigns.

Of course, if you find your triggered campaigns sitting in a backlog, this doesn’t necessarily mean it’s because of Marketo’s priority assignment rules. There can be multiple reasons why your campaigns wouldn’t perform as expected so if you feel like having a chat with a certified consultant, please get in touch! We’d love to hear from you.