Channel Tags and Reporting

Hi Tom,

1.) A program can as many tags as needed, but is there a point in which this becomes unmanageable?

In my openion, what and how many tags you should use depends on your business practices and how do you report on your marketing programs.

Apart from manageability, we need to evaluate how a tag will be used and would it help to analyze, slice/dice, and improve program performance.

Typically 5 tags or less might work better but there might be instances where you need more.

2.) What happens if we had an excessive amount of overly specified channels?  How would that effect reporting?

Again, what and how many channels you should use depends on your business practices and how do you report on your marketing programs. How many and what 'delivery mechanisms' do you have for your Marketing programs.

Overly specific channels might help in the instances where you have business practice where you need specific 'progression statuses'. Otherwise, try to 'fit' specific needs in a common channel with generalized progression statuses.

If you have a distributed, or big team using Marketo, too many similar sounding channels might create incorrect channel use for your programs.

3.) It seems like Marketo 1st wants to pull reports by channel and then use other tags and not the other way around?

Channel reporting helps you to understand how leads moved within a program from progression status to the next progress status.

While tags are just attributes that simply describe these leads and can be used to further slice and dice to understand what might be common in leads that moved in progression in certain way.

One 'almost' analogy is Channels have 'behavioral' insights while tags give you 'descriptive' (almost like demographic) insights.

Hope this helps

Rajesh

This is not quite right:

• Program Channels are a special Tag that convey attributes and Status values to a Program.
• Tags are ways to slice the Program Data if assigned. This can only be done in Program Report or RCE. Think of this like "Webinars which are for Audience=Customer and in Region=EMEA"
• I recommend keeping Tags to no more than 10 and closer to 5.
• Only put in Tags you plan to make Required. No one will fill out unrequired Tags.
• Don't do a Tag like "Country" because it's a pain to sift through the values or setup.
• Avoid Tags that need to be updated frequently. I see a lot of people using Asset=Program Name, when Program Name is enough. Asset Type would be better.

The next challenge is do you want to align the Channel or Lead Source to the Program Channel or use a Tag to handle that as well as the Asset Type? There's no perfect answer here, but I'd suggest creating Program Channels that align to Lead Source and include a Channel Type and Asset Type Tag.