And vs. or filters in smart lists for "not in" fields | Community
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Anonymous
November 26, 2016
Question

And vs. or filters in smart lists for "not in" fields

  • November 26, 2016
  • 2 replies
  • 3611 views

I'm setting up a smart list that is trying to pull anyone who is in list A but "not in" smart list list B or C, and I'm applying "or" filters between B & C. In my logic I would say 1 and (2 or 3). However, when I run it, it's not excluding the leads properly -- I'm getting tied up in the "not in"/negative logic. Has anyone else encountered this scenario? Is "and" the right way to go instead of or -- why? I would think it needs to be "or" because I'm trying to pull anyone who matches any of these "not in" criteria, not matching all of the criteria.

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2 replies

Josh_Hill13
Josh_Hill13
Level 10
November 27, 2016

How sure are you that this isn't working? Did you check people you know across these lists?

To me, this looks correct, however, there could be some logical issues if Marketo, for some reason, runs it differently than expected.

But did you try the other combinations?

But think about it a bit:

  • Show me everyone in List 1 AND who are also
    • Not members of List 2 OR Not members of List 3

Now if we run these separately

  • Not in List 2 OR List 3 will show me nearly the entire database.
  • Show me all in List 1


And if we use AND:

  • Show me
    • Everyone in List 1 AND everyone Not In List 2 AND everyone Not in List 3


Which may actually be what you want.

    Sara_Greaves
    Sara_Greaves
    Level 4
    November 30, 2016

    We've had trouble with our smart lists when we have multiple not-ins enclosed in parenthesis, so we create a separate exclusion smart list of ins (per Marketo support's suggestion).

    To make this more clear, we need to exclude specific states in our emails on occasion. Here is a basic example:

    We may want to create a list where SFDC type is contact and (billing state is not CA or state is not CA). Marketo will look for the first thing that applies in the parenthesis. Someone may be a contact and not have a billing state of CA, but the state might be CA. These people were ending up in our lists.

    To prevent this, we created an exclusion list. We said billing state is CA or state is CA. What we then do for our final smart list is SFDC type is contact and member of smart list not in exclusion list. Hopefully this makes sense.

      SanfordWhiteman
      SanfordWhiteman
      Level 10
      November 30, 2016

      We may want to create a list where SFDC type is contact and (billing state is not CA or state is not CA). Marketo will look for the first thing that applies in the parenthesis. Someone may be a contact and not have a billing state of CA, but the state might be CA. These people were ending up in our lists.

      To be fair, this is the way a boolean comparison expressed this way always works, in any language.

      true && (!false || !true)  --> true

      true && !(false || true) --> false

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