As you probably know, Marketo is a pretty robust system. In smaller databases, marketers can get away with creating sloppy campaigns and inefficient programs with little impact on system performance.
However, bad habits are quickly exposed at enterprise scale. Million plus record databases with thousands of active programs and trigger campaigns will put a huge load on a poorly designed Marketo instance. In large enterprise companies, it’s vital that programs and systems are built for scale.
A truly scalable Marketo instance has been optimized for peak campaign performance and the Campaign Queue is being actively managed. Focusing on these areas will provide the highest impact from a raw speed perspective.
I have found that understanding campaign priority and how to “tune” campaigns to run at a low/medium/high priority is one key to keeping leads flowing smoothly.
According to an article explaining campaign priority on the Marketo Community, “Marketo executes campaigns based on priorities. High priority campaigns run first in the order they were added to the queue. Once those are finished, the next highest priority campaigns are executed in time order and so on down until all have completed.” (Login Required http://community.marketo.com/apex/MarketoResource?id=kA650000000GsQqCAK)
Paying attention to campaign priority ensures that high priority activities, like routing leads to sales are executed first and lower priority data value changes are executed second. This way, you make sure that leads and data flow smoothly and do not get backed up behind less important updates. More detail can be found in the attached document on campaign priority. See our Marketo Campaign Priority data sheet.
Another key performance optimization is shifting high volume processes (and less time sensitive processes) from trigger campaigns to batch campaigns so that you can time heavy loads to hit the system at non-peak times. You should always schedule maintenance campaigns to run at night or in the weekend and avoid running them on-demand during business hours.
Over the next few weeks, I will highlight other key areas impacting Marketo instance performance, including:
- Salesforce.com Sync Optimization, and
- Marketo Instance Organization and Ongoing Maintenance
I would love to learn how others optimize Marketo system performance. What are the tips and tricks that you have learned to keep everything flowing smoothly?
Interested in knowing more about Marketo campaign priority and performance optimization? We’d love to talk with you; to schedule a call, just drop a note to our Business Development team.
Thomas Terry is an Account Director at DemandGen. He is responsible for enabling and supporting our client’s marketing and sales teams to adopt marketing automation and CRM systems and ultimately drive revenue. As of June 2013, Thomas is one of fewer than 200 Marketo Certified Experts worldwide.
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