Skip to main content
Blog

Servicing your Luxury Attribution Tool: How to Maintain your Marketo Measure Instance for Long-Term Success

By March 8, 2024No Comments

You might hear some people refer to Marketo Measure (formerly Bizible) as a ‘Ferrari’ of Martech tools. By this, I think people mean it’s an extremely powerful tool, but that it also requires consistent upkeep to stay in peak form.

In this article, I’ll talk through what I think are the most important elements of maintenance for Marketo Measure, highlighting which aspects of the tool to check and how often.

Weekly –

Get into the data!

This one seems simple, but just by using Marketo Measure consistently (pulling new reports, looking for trends, data spikes/drop-offs, etc.), you will be able to detect potential issues before they become difficult to manage. Additionally, the more you use the tool, the more familiar you’ll become with its capabilities, limitations and inner workings, much like that of the owner of a Ferrari would!

Listen for changes that might impact Bizible: CRM & Website

CRM Changes

If you’ve used Marketo Measure for a while, you know how closely tied it is to your CRM data. The two systems are constantly reading/writing from each other, so changes made within the CRM often impact the data produced by Marketo Measure. We’ll do our best to identify changes which you should keep an eye on, as they’re likely to impact data.

  • New Lead/MQL/Opportunity flow | Impacts the Custom Stages and Custom ModelChange to revenue fields | Impacts the Custom Opportunity Amount
    • In this scenario, review Stage Mapping to ensure the new flow is replicated there and that Marketo Measure has an understanding of which custom stages.
  • Changes to Contact Roles/Account Hierarchy | Impacts the Attribution Mapping Method (Account-based vs Opportunity Contact Role-based)
  • New/modifications to campaign types, campaign member statuses | Impacts Offline touchpoints
    • If there are changes made to campaign architecture, review your custom campaign sync rules to make sure touchpoints will still be accurately created once the dust settles.
  • Change to or onboarding of Sales Automation tool | Impacts Activity Touchpoints
    • Review the Activities section of Marketo Measure – it’s likely there will be new field mappings/values, so we want to make sure those are reflected in our rules.
  • Broad data imports/deletions | Impacts merging instances
    • For large data imports, maybe via acquisition, it’s useful to have a flag/tag on the new objects to determine the source of what’s brand new. This can then be built into a segment for reporting purposes. For deletions, Marketo Measure can’t push data to leads/contacts/opptys/accounts that don’t exist, so know that deleted data is likely to impact total number of touchpoints and opportunity attribution coverage.

Website & Ad Account Changes

Like the CRM, your website and the Bizible javascript are critical for accurate reporting with Marketo Measure. Having the script on every page and within every iframe gives you the best data possible to work with. That being said, we recommend keeping your ear to the ground whenever folks are discussing changes to the site. We’ll include some common changes and how best to prepare for them

  • New form type(s)
    • Run tests once forms are live to make sure touchpoints are being created!
  • New event software (registration forms)
    • See above ^ test Marketo Measure’s ability to track the registration form. If it can’t add a ‘Registered’ status as eligible to receive touchpoints via Custom Campaign Sync.
  • Site migration/overhaul
    • Same as above, make sure script is added successfully post-migration and test for touchpoint creation
  • New chat provider
    • MM is integrated with the following chat providers: (Drift, LivePerson, Olark, LiveChat & SnapEngage)
      • If you’re moving TO one of these platforms from a different vendor, remove the offline touchpoints for web chats after doing so
      • If moving AWAY from these integrated providers, you’ll want to START creating touchpoints for web chats via SFDC Campaigns on that date
      • If either moving from integrated-to-integrated (LivePerson to Drift) or vice versa (Qualified to Intercom), ensure that touchpoints are still coming in via the javascript/check to make sure you have a consistent method of creating an offline touchpoint for the web chat interaction
  • Adding a new domain or country url (.uk/.cn/.fr/etc)
    • All domains should be enabled from within the Adobe Admin Console. Instructions on domain management can be found here.
  • Adding/removing other javascripts
    • Consult with your web team to ensure the change won’t interfere with/remove the MM Javascript. Also, it never hurts to run another test once the change goes live to make sure touchpoints are still being generated
  • Acquisition of another company/their web properties/ad platforms
  • New paid social or search channel effort
    • If you’re launching a new effort or new account to any of these platforms: Facebook, Linkedin, AdWords, BingAds, then go ahead and connect that new account with Auto-tagging after reviewing this documentation.
  • Changes to UTMs (either new or changes to existing)
  • Onboarding a new resource center/hub software
    • Test form submissions and web tracking on this new resource center – confirm that touchpoints are generating successfully

For any changes above, consult further with your account manager, Adobe Support, and/or the attribution community to help understand exactly what impact the changes might have. In general, we want the following:

  1. Marketo Measure JS present on every page and generating a touchpoint for every form fill
  2. All ads accounts (Facebook, Linkedin, AdWords, BingAds) connected to Marketo Measure with auto-tagging

Bi-Weekly: Check and work off of audit reports

Having audit reports built to monitor Marketo Measure data is super important for long-term success and data hygiene. We cover all of these audit reports in another article, but on a bi-weekly basis we recommend checking the following:

  1. Digital touchpoint creation (form fills)
  2. Digital touchpoint mapping (Online Channel Rules)
  3. Offline touchpoint audit (touchpoint creation & mapping)
  4. “Other” report diagnosis (comprehensive mapping report)
  5. Custom revenue amount flow (if using something other than non-standard ‘Amount’ field)

If any of the audit reports are showing you something other than expected results, use our Audit article to help remedy! Once built, these reports shouldn’t take more than an hour to review.

One report not covered in our Audit article looks to measure trends in touchpoints created from form fills. This report, which you’ll title ‘Bizible Form Fill TPs WoW’, is built using the following steps:

  1. Create New Report
  2. Report Type: Bizible Persons with Bizible Touchpoints
  3. Filters:
    1. Show me ALL Bizible Persons
    2. Touchpoint Date: Current & Previous Month
    3. Form URL not equal to NULL (or blank space) – this removes any offline touches
  4. Outline
    1. Group Rows by Touchpoint Date
    2. Group field by Calendar Week
  5. Add Chart
    1. Configure Chart: Display as Column
  6. Save & Run

What you can now do, is see trends in touchpoint generation from form fills on a weekly basis. Again, this is something to monitor every few weeks to look for big spikes/valleys, especially if those changes don’t line up with visit and conversion data from Google Analytics.

If you do see a concerning trend, please reach out to the Adobe Support Team to help diagnose!

Monthly: Upload costs, monitor for trends, knowledge-sharing

There’s a huge amount of value to uploading costs consistently with Marketo Measure. We’ve written an article on what those benefits are and how to best approach cost uploads, so we will spare you that bit here. Uploading costs on a monthly cadence is consistent enough so that you constantly have accurate data, but not too frequent that you have to ask for cost data from stakeholders every two weeks. Monthly is the sweet spot!

It’s also worth monitoring overall and per-channel touchpoint count month over month. If there’s an issue that might have slipped through the cracks (site/script change, change to CRM processes), checking for touchpoint count monthly will give you early detection into what might be going on, and gives you enough time to remedy the issue quickly.

Quarterly/Ad-hoc: Custom Model/Stages Review, Suppression &  Segments

Custom Stages/Model

It’s worth reviewing your custom model stages and percentage credits every few months to make sure it still aligns with your business’ goals and lead/contact/opportunity stages. This will be updated in the ‘Everytouch Attribution’ section (for custom model set) and ‘Stage Mapping’ section of Marketo Measure Settings

Touchpoint Suppression

Like with the custom model/stages, it’s worth reviewing your suppression settings every once and a while. Common suppression use cases include:

  • Attribution Decay Window
  • Domain-based deletion (internal email addresses)
  • Removing touchpoints based off of certain forms/landing pages

If you’re seeing certain data in reporting you think needs suppressing, now would be a good time to add a suppression rule and review what’s already built in your org! A lot of suppression rules are too aggressive when first enabled, so double check to make sure every suppression rule makes sense.

Custom Segmentation

Segments are useful tools within Marketo Measure to be able to filter data in the Discover UI. While it’s unlikely for something to be ‘wrong’ with them, they’re worth taking a look at to make sure those filters and their values are still relevant and useful!

Knowledge-sharing: Office Hours/Marketo Measure Q&A (optional)

For Marketo Measure to be successful at an organization, we recommend getting as much of the marketing org familiar with the data. To do this, it can be helpful to take a teaching approach and holding office hours after rolling out your reports. These can be for a small group, and could cover topics like:

  • Intro to reporting – basic SFDC objects and 101 reports
  • Configuration basics: UTM parameters, SFDC campaign membership, custom campaign sync
  • Custom reporting live session

Even as a Marketo Measure Admin/Expert, it always helps to be able to learn new ideas about what other customers are doing and to ask questions from folks who might have been there before! There are a couple of resources you might want to check!

It’s fine if some of these monthly items stretch to bi-monthly, but think of these like deep cleaning – the longer you put things off, the more of a task it is to get everything squeaky clean!

In this article, we’ve outlined ways of keeping your luxury attribution vehicle (Marketo Measure) up & running – if you have any questions about the content or want to learn more about our services, reach out to us at info@attributa.io or find us on Linkedin!