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Grégoire_Miche2
Grégoire_Miche2
Level 10
December 16, 2015
Solved

Removal of "Is Anonymous" filters.

  • December 16, 2015
  • 23 replies
  • 16794 views

Hi all,

We have been receiving today an information from Cheryl Chavez​ about the removal of the is Anonymous filter, as part of the release of Munchkin v2. See here for more details : Next Generation Munchkin Tracking FAQ - Marketo Docs - Product Docs

Although this new version of the munchkin and the way the V2 will work is promising, there is one thing we will be missing, though: the ability to look at the anonymous leads, display inferred and origin informations and create an understanding of where they come from and how they arrived here.

Also, some database providers use anonymous leads to read their IP addresses and provide in return some leads from the same IP address for retargeting. They will be in hard difficulty.

Your thoughts ?

-Greg

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    Best answer by Mike_Reynolds2

    Folks, I've gotten some Support KB articles published to go over the full scope of details about these upgrades coming out. Here are the links to all of them:

    Anonymous Lead Upgrades Overview

    Anonymous Lead Upgrades – Changes Inside Marketo UI

    Anonymous Lead Upgrades – Customer Action Needed

    Anonymous Lead Upgrades – Analytics Reports

    Anonymous Lead Upgrades – Release Schedule

    Anonymous Lead Upgrades – Under The Hood

    Anonymous Lead Promotion to Known Lead – Munchkin V2 Behavior

    Hopefully these will help give more details!

    Enjoy!

    23 replies

    Kailey_Belsher
    Kailey_Belsher
    Level 2
    December 16, 2015

    Hi Greg,

    I'm with you there. The removal of the "Is Anonymous" smart list filter is concerning.

    We distribute a daily report of Anonymous Web visitors from the day before, and it is widely used by our Sales and Marketing teams. It's especially great for Sales people that are looking for new accounts as we can see who the inferred company is. With this being removed, does that mean we lose the value of this report?

    Any recommendations on how we can get information about Anonymous Leads in a easy-to-use way after this change?

      Grégoire_Miche2
      Grégoire_Miche2Author
      Level 10
      December 16, 2015

      Hi Kailey,

      I understand the logic of not executing smart campaigns on anonymous, since the volumes can be overwhelming, especially if the volume is multiplied by 50...

      But I have the feeling that this high volume would only regard a few customers (How many companies has more than 2 Millions web page visits a day ?).

      I would pledge for keeping the filter only in smart lists that are not used in Smart campaigns :-)

      -Greg

      Mike_Reynolds2
      Mike_Reynolds2
      Level 10
      December 17, 2015

      Greg,

      We actually do have quite a few customers that have large volume of web page visits like this. I don't have specific numbers to quote unfortunately, but the bigger issue is scalability. As Marketo grows, and as the customer base grows as well, the needs of the servers will need to grow as well. Ideally every customer would be pulling 100 million web visits a day. In the meantime though, increasing the capabilities makes that kind of growth possible. Plus, even if your own instance isn't getting millions of web visits each day, other larger customers on the same servers could be and increasing the capabilities across the board opens up system resources across the board as well.

        Grégoire_Miche2
        Grégoire_Miche2Author
        Level 10
        December 16, 2015

        And also, I have a question : does this impact API's as well ?

        -Greg

        Kenny_Elkington
        Adobe Employee
        Kenny_ElkingtonAdobe Employee
        Adobe Employee
        December 16, 2015

        To an extent, yes.  You will no longer be able to retrieve lead details of an anonymous lead via lead ID, since there will not be any anonymous records which have lead IDs.  Promoting a lead via the inclusion of a <marketoCookie> parameter in a syncLead call will work the same.  There will not be any changes to the way REST works since access to anonymous leads has never been permitted via REST.

        Grégoire_Miche2
        Grégoire_Miche2Author
        Level 10
        December 17, 2015

        Hi Kenny,

        Suppliers that retrieve anonymous leads to get the IP address and provide some more info on this will hate you

        I suppose this will reinforce the interest for RTP, but also for this idea :   so that at least we can make decent use of the Web Activity Report and the Company Web Activity report.

        -Greg

        Casey_Grimes2
        Casey_Grimes2
        Level 10
        December 17, 2015

        I'm actually rather annoyed at the announcement surrounding anonymous leads. The under-utilization of anonymous leads isn't due to their lack of usefulness; it's due to a lack of awareness and the possibilities they hold.

        Tracking anonymous records on their path to becoming known to the system is a key piece of seeing how various inbound marketing programs work—because measuring who was touched by a campaign before they later convert is vital to measuring long-term campaign influence. I've been using anonymous records in conjunction with Smart Campaigns and static lists as a way to monitor this for a while; if anything, I've been bummed that I can't do more with anonymous records in terms of comparing them to known records. When you're honing in on specific actions, it's more than just scoring or flagging an Interesting Moment.

        This change will effectively ruin the ability to do that.

          Josh_Hill13
          Josh_Hill13
          Level 10
          December 17, 2015

          I agree here. I play up this during many conversations with clients and it rarely gets done because few teams have the resources to look at RTP and other Anon to Known conversion techniques.

          I'm concerned about a few things here because this wasn't fully explained. And I appreciate @Kenny Elkington​'s explanation and @Arjun, but need more:

          • What happens to smart lists and flows where Is Anonymous currently exists?
          • Many teams were using Is Anonymous to prevent Visits Web Page from scoring Anon leads. I thought this defeated the point of scoring, but it does reduce the trigger. How is this situation handled then?
          • Will ALL behaviors now never operate on Anonymous? That is, smart lists act only on Known records?
          • How will RTP work? Will this Anon stuff just be hidden?
            Grégoire_Miche2
            Grégoire_Miche2Author
            Level 10
            December 17, 2015

            Hi Josh,

            The answer to your first 2 questions is in the FAQ at least partially (Next Generation Munchkin Tracking FAQ - Marketo Docs - Product Docs)

            • Smart campaigns with "is anonymous" in the filter will fail and you will receive a notification. I gather this if for batch campaigns as well as trigger campaigns
            • The second point will be handled differently : the scoring (and any other flow step BTW) will happen later, at the moment the lead becomes known, but with retroactive dates. I suppose this will enable these flows to run for leads that become known, thus significantly reducing server workload. BtW, a question: what if I do not want a smart campaign to work retroactively when a lead becomes known ?

            On your 3rd point, my understanding is that yes, smart lists will only act on knows records

            on the 4th, I do not have a clue

            -Greg

            Grégoire_Miche2
            Grégoire_Miche2Author
            Level 10
            December 17, 2015

            I also have customers who were using the "is anonymous" filter to get a measurement of the number of visits and compare with the new known leads generated in the same period from online forms, in order to measure their ability to attract and convert anonymous visitors.

            Although this can surely be done with Google Analytics, it requires a separate application. It also convenient to have everything in the same place

            -Greg

            Grégoire_Miche2
            Grégoire_Miche2Author
            Level 10
            December 17, 2015

            Another example of the anonymous leads will be the way the lead life cycle is set, starting with an "anonymous" status that exists only in Marketo and gets changed when the lead becomes known... Of course, this part of the cycle is not the most important one, yet, again, it's all about measuring conversion rates that disappears.

            -Greg

            A
            Anonymous
            December 17, 2015

            We rely on Is Anonymous in combination with Visits Web Page + Querystring to track clicks and subsequent behavior originating from Adwords, retargeting, and other online channels. Any suggestions for a workaround?

            Tole

            Mike_Reynolds2
            Mike_Reynolds2
            Level 10
            December 17, 2015

            Campaigns will still trigger off of the web activity like from the Visits Web Page, including with the Querystring constraint. The difference is that they will not be triggered until the lead becomes known. In this case, you'll just need to remove the Is Anonymous filter since all leads will be known at the time the campaigns are activated.

            D
            DavidDe7
            Level 4
            December 17, 2015

            There is already a lot of limitations with Anonymous leads and I was hoping that Marketo would move forward to closing the gap with analytics and ad technologies that rely a lot on these leads to get closer to the "full picture". I find this disappointing.

            Also I see a lot of cases where passing a lead retroactively in a smart campaign is a bad idea. A lot of what we do is time sensitive Ex: Interesting Moments, Scoring, Data Updates and should not be triggered if it's not immediately dealt with. My other concern is that the date stamps associated with campaign membership and potentially program status (if it's part of that campaign flow) will also be decayed vs their "real" time and will also skew reporting that relies on the membership or status update timing...

              Grégoire_Miche2
              Grégoire_Miche2Author
              Level 10
              December 17, 2015

              Hi David,

              Fully agreed about time sensitiveness. Vote here :

              -Greg

              Grégoire_Miche2
              Grégoire_Miche2Author
              Level 10
              December 17, 2015

              Another idea to vote for, in order to "compensate" for the loss of info is this one :

              -Greg

              A
              Anonymous
              December 17, 2015

              Hi Greg,

              I have a very dim outlook on this change, I created a discussion (more of a rant) here before realizing you already made one: Removing the 'is Anonymous' filter - That's A TERRIBLE IDEA​

              Does anyone have a suggestion, per the below rant, now that the 'is anonymous' filter is being removed.

              I hope I'm not the only one saying this, but removing the 'is anonymous' filter is one of the most shortsighted and perhaps most 'bone-headed' moves you can make.  I feel a sales pitch about RTP about to happen, but more importantly you have essentially removed the reason we've bought into Marketo in the first place...  The ability to convey information to other tools in the LaunchPoint ecosystem to INTELLIGENTLY TARGET anonymous people  - is now gone.

              I don't want to lose QUALITY -  TOP OF FUNNEL targeting.  The ability to HYPERTARGET unknowns who have made desirable actions on my site using ADBRIDGE will be lost, and my 'closed loop reporting' is fractured because I will need to action things from an outside system... Is this not Lead Gen (remarketing) 101???  How do I target these people now?

              You have to realize, that you have essentially removed our ability to action anything on anonymous people, and that makes me very upset and angry because as a Non-Profit we have been stripped of a valuable capability ingrained available in the database and a large portion of our data is being held hostage.... SO, if 80% of my database is not being used, I would expect an 80% reduction in the cost of the tool.

              Apologies for going into a rant about this, but this is a most TERRIBLE IDEA and I'm actually quite frustrated about this:

              This alone is enough for me to recommend cancelling our Marketo accounts and move-on to another provider that gives us access to this group.  There is HUGE value in the unknown leads and Marketo may lose us over this.

                Grégoire_Miche2
                Grégoire_Miche2Author
                Level 10
                December 17, 2015

                Hi Nicholas,

                Could you illustrate the use cases you are having with anonymous leads, how you use them ?

                -Greg

                A
                Anonymous
                December 17, 2015

                Anonymous users who visit certain portions of our site or perform certain actions but do not convert into a lead or ecommerce conversion.  ex. target unknowns by specifying 'if anonymous', 'visited web page', (more conditions, if needed) - send through adbridge = hypertargeted

                Grégoire_Miche2
                Grégoire_Miche2Author
                Level 10
                December 18, 2015

                Hi All,

                @Arjun Nair​ is requesting some input on this idea :  

                -Greg

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