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August 24, 2016
Question

Hundreds of Duplicates Created by Marketo Sync - Advice?

  • August 24, 2016
  • 2 replies
  • 3467 views

Hi all,

I spent some quality time yesterday doing two cleanups in Marketo:

1. Making sure I included (and ran) an "Influenced" smart campaign for all of my programs (I had a training session on Analytics and realized I had not properly set up tracking for programs to report out Program Influence, Attribution, etc.)

2. Creating nested Campaigns in Salesforce, pulling Smart lists for Marketo program members and then adding them to those campaigns

During this time, we had an outage with our Salesforce API as our development team exceeded the daily API limits as they were setting up the integration.

A few hours later, my sales lead used Cloudingo to run a report on duplicates and noticed there were hundreds of new leads created during that time by Marketo Sync. We have a huge campaign going out Friday, so I have to get this resolved before then.


Two questions:

1. Why did this happen?

2. Am I safe if I just run a report of all Leads with Create date yesterday, created by Marketo Sync, and then delete them all? I'm scared to do that given that we also uploaded a bunch of new Contacts yesterday (new users associated with a customer account).

Your help is so appreciated!

Christine

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2 replies

August 24, 2016

Here is an example. The person existed in our system as a Contact (he is a current platform user), and yesterday 2 new leads were created b Marketo for the same person. Help

gkrajeski
Level 10
August 24, 2016

A lot of times system admins will set up a field to key off of for sync to CRM of vice versa.

In the absence of this, you can go to the System Smart List for Possible Duplicates.

Marketo keys solely off of the email field.

You can merge these in SFDC or in MKTO.  Either way, you need to check that you have a Smart Campaign to remove (if desired) leads that are deleted in CRM from Marketo, or merge the data. 

It's a bit tricky, but can be done.

You can also merge these in Marketo manually, but if you have a large number of leads, this is not efficient.

Other options include:

- Easy Merge: Marketo tool (has cost associated) where you create a set of rules, and merge criteria.  They can run a test prior to the 'real' run so that you can review results and validate.

- Demand Tools in SFDC (add-on software) to help with deduplication from the CRM side of things.

Best case IMO would be to get the "sync boolean field(s)" set up and go from there.  Merge these leads manually (for now) and then work on the rules and flows for sync.

August 24, 2016

Geoff - I'm not following you. I know how to dedup and have a tool in place to do that, but this was such an oddity at a large scale, that I need to know what happened before merging or deleting anything.

What went wrong here?

gkrajeski
Level 10
August 24, 2016

I would need to see more detail from the MKTO or SFDC records. 

My suspicion is that there may have been multiple leads in MKTO (one possibility) that then synced to SFDC, hence the two new leads.

Does each SFDC record have a corresponding Marketo record?