Having problems with Acquisition Program in Marketo?

I am sure you all are going great with your Marketing stuff and getting most out of Marketo’s program. I am just wondering if I can help you in some way with my experience so far. So in this article I am going to cover a very important thing of Marketo’s program that will let you prove your Marketo program success.

What’s a Program in Marketo?

Any program in Marketo is a Marketing initiative like Email Campaigning, Webinar, Content program etc. In Marketo it’s like a package where you can put all stuff related to that particular Marketing initiative like all emails, target lists, forms, landing page and related reports etc.

What is Acquisition Program?

Acquisition Program tells that this is the program the first time this lead ever came into this system so that program gets the “credit” for creating a net new lead.

This is very important if you are using RCE or if you rely on the Program Analyzer or Program Performance reports to measure your program success.

How is the Acquisition Program value set in Marketo?

You are curious on how the Acquistion Program value is set in Marketo or you want to manually set the Acquistion Program value for a lead.

There are 4 ways that the Acquisition Program value is set in Marketo:

1. Automatic option – The Acquistion Program is automatically set by Marketo once a brand new lead is acquired by your Program/Event in Marketo. Like you have a form crated under a program then if a bran new lead filled out this form then that lead will automatically mark to be acquired by this program.
2. Manual option: Change Data Value- Using the Change Data Value flow action using the Acquisition Program attribute.
3. Manual option: During List Import – Using setting the Acquistion Program during your List Import in the Lead Database:
4. Manual Option: During Member Import in a Program – Using the “Member Status” option of the “Import Members” option under the Members tab of your Program/Event.

What is the importance of Acquisition Program?

As I have mentioned above acquisition program tells you how many new leads you have generated from this program. This is really a cool thing to show to your senior management. This tells the success of your program.

What if you haven’t set the acquisition program correctly? How you can back fill this data?

If you are not setting up acquisition program correctly then you are loosing up the reporting and you would not be able to show the great success of your program in front of your senior management team. You might have a number of orphan lads in your system which you can’t easily tells from where these leads we were generated.

You might have forgot to setting up acquisition program during importing leads into your program that you have setup for your roadshow or content syndication program and another offline or third party online program and now you are loosing to show the correct numbers to show in front of your board member meeting.

Don’t worry I have figured out a work around to back fill this information so that you can get correct report from Marketo itself. Below are some steps that I have used to back fill this information for one of my client recently. Hope this might help you. Steps are:

1. Identify Leads without Acquisition program, there is a system smart list in Lead Database Management
2. Export all these Leads in a excel spreadsheet with Original Source Info and Original Source Type. These are the fields that Marketo uses for it own tracking that tells how exactly a lead was created in Marketo. Original Source Type tells what was the actual source from this lead was originally created. This can be “List Import”, “Web-from Fill out”, “Salesforce.com” or “web Service API” etc. The field Original Source info further defines the Original Source Type. Like if Original Source Type is “Web-form fill out” the original Source info tells which was that form and if it is “List Import” then Original Source info tells which was that list.
3. Check the distinct values Original Source info; in your excel sheet find the total distinct Original Source info values. There might be a number of distinct Original Source Info values available.
4. Try to figure out Acquisition program value from Original Source Info; as the Original Source Info tells you from which list or which program this lead was originally generated in the system then it’s possible for you to infer the acquisition program. Result might not be 100% correct but it’s better then nothing. As per my understanding you will be getting 70-80% correct tagging. Below are some example that might help you to figure out the correct acquisition program:
   • If the Original Source info has format like List: <Program Name>.<List Name> then it means that the leads were imported into a program but at the time of list import acquisition program were not assign. So you can assign leads to this already existing program.
   • If the Original Source info has format like List: < List Name> it means that these lists were imported into lead database directly, not under Marketing activities Program. So I recommend to try to identify the appropriate program already created in Marketo and if there is no appropriate program exists then create programs based on the List name. This way you will be able to report each and every lead that was imported in Marketo.
   • If Original Source Info has format like “< Form: form_name>” exp. “Form: Resource Form”, then see if you have setup some program in Marketo which you can assign that as a acquisition program. If not then create a new program say “Website – Forms” and put all leads in this program.This is possible if your form was created in design studio and you haven’t setup correct flow in your smart campaign for this.
   • If the Original Source info is “slaesfoce.com” or “Lead” or “Contact” then create a new program called “SFDC auto sync” and acquire these leads in this program
   • If the Original Source info is “Web service API” then create a new program called “Web service API” and acquire these leads in this program
   • If the Original Source Info contains URL then create a new program “Web Site” and acquire these leads in this program
5. Create Smart campaigns in Marketo and update the Acquisition program according to what you have figured out in above step. You also need to update Acquisition Date as this date tells you on which date that lead was acquired by the program. I would recommend to update this date based on Lead Create Date in Marketo. You can do it by using token “{{Lead. Lead Created date}}” token in the flow step.

Wow!! This sounds complicated and time consuming process but believe me if you have done this then you will see the benefits of it when you are creating reports for your next QBR 🙂

Hope this help you guys a lot. Please do not hesitate to let me know if you have any question about this and if you have any other brilliant idea to handle this.

Note: Before implement this, I would like you to first understand it correctly and consult within your team and list what you are going to do. I would love to help you out on this. If you need any help from me, please feel free to let me know.