Marketo Smart Campaigns: Troubleshooting Tips & Tricks

Working in Marketing Operations, there occasionally comes a time when things don’t always go to plan. Especially when learning a new, complex system like Marketo. But we all had to start somewhere!

Everyone at least knows someone who has sent emails to the wrong people, deleted information they shouldn’t have, or linked to an outdated landing page. While some errors may be bigger than others, it’s all part of the learning process. And if things do go wrong, it’s important to know how you can troubleshoot them quickly and efficiently.

Most of the time, troubleshooting in Marketo will centre around a specific Smart Campaign, and so that’s what we’ll cover in this post. We’ll also imagine a hypothetical scenario where you have created a Webinar Program in Marketo and someone has filled out a form to register but didn’t receive the confirmation email they expected.

In this situation, a good starting place would be the Results tab of the Smart Campaign that should have sent out your email. Here you can see all the actions taken within the Flow and also some related actions as well. For example, you don’t just see if the email was sent, but also if it was opened and clicked too.

By navigating here first, you can answer a key question: did the person actually run through any part of the Smart Campaign? Troubleshooting is all about identifying where a problem is, so finding out what the problem isn’t can also be valuable information. If the person is there, then you can often (though not always!) determine that at least your Form and Smart Campaign’s Smart List seem to be working as intended.

If the person is there and did qualify for your Smart Campaign’s Flow:

• Check that the Email Send Activity is there for the person

If every other activity is there but the Send Email activity isn’t, check if the person is unsubscribed, has an invalid email address, or is blocklisted. These can all result in an email not being sent. For unsubscribes, making the email operational should fix the issue. An invalid email address should be confirmed as correct, and then the fields reset. For blocklisted people, you’ll need to check why the person has this marked as not even operational emails will be sent to them.

• Did the email bounce?

Nobody likes bounces. But they’re a part of your everyday life in marketing operations! There might not be too much you can do to fix it, but double-clicking on the bounce in the person’s Activity Log will give you more information about why it happened. A crucial field here is the Bounce Category. 1 and 2 are known as Hard Bounces and mean that either the email address doesn’t exist or the email has been identified as spam. Categories 3, 4, and 9, are known as Soft Bounces, these cannot really be influenced, are often temporary, and don’t often impact sender reputation.

• Are there any testing processes that weren’t removed?

It’s not uncommon to include slightly different processes in a Smart Campaign for testing, a Choice in a Flow Step, removing a person from the Flow, or even some Smart List Filter criteria. But no matter how minor you think these adjustments are, it is important to remove them when going live as they could end up impacting your processes in unforeseen ways.

And what if the person is not there? Well, there’s a few places you can check:

• Check the Schedule tab

By default, newly created Smart Campaigns will only allow people to run through the Flow once. For the hypothetical webinar situation, this makes sense. However, there are numerous times when it makes sense for someone to run through the Flow more than once. As a side note, when dealing with Batch Smart Campaigns, you can also check here if there are any limits that mean it’s aborted if there is a certain audience size.

• Has the person fallen victim to Partitions?

Partitioning data in Marketo can be a good thing, but if there’s any amount of overlap between the respective Partitions it can cause some serious headaches! If the person is in another Partition that your Workspace cannot access, your Smart Campaign will not be able to process the person even though they qualify for it. However, the Filled Out Form activity will still be logged. While there are solutions to this, you may adversely affect other campaigns the person may already be in when changing their Partition.

• Make sure your Smart List is working

If someone is not qualifying for your Flow, the issue normally lies in the Smart List. Check your Triggers and Filters to ensure they’re configured correctly - particularly if you’re using Advanced Filter Logic and/or Constraints to organise them! When using Filters, also keep in mind Marketo’s Data Retention Policy which periodically deletes activity data to free up memory space. For example, if you want to include a Filter for everyone that was sent a specific email, this Filter will only be valid for 90 days.

This isn’t an extensive list of everything that could cause issues in Marketo Smart Campaigns. If we were to do that, you’d be here reading for days! But hopefully you’ve at least gathered some helpful tips to troubleshoot some common issues.

Sometimes though the issue goes much deeper and you just don’t have time to look into everything that is on your to-do list. Thankfully, we love a good troubleshooting session! So if you need some help, guidance, or Marketo assistance in any shape or form, Onemedia is here for you and your team.

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