What Operator to use for Country Normalization Campaigns

Forum|Forum|7 years ago
November 27, 2018
2 replies
3944 views

Hi Everyone

I am going through all of the (inherited) country normalization campaigns in my instance, and some of them use CONTAINS or IS. Here's an example:

One campaign has USA Normalization - "Country IS USA" Change to United States

Another example is "Country CONTAINS United States of America" change to United States. (Yes I know its bizarre to have two differnent campaigns doing normalization for United States - but I stress the statement "inherited instance").

Is it better to use CONTAINS or IS?

Thanks,Dave

Marketo

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Devraj_Grewal

Level 10

David,

"IS" is the best scenario since it is the most precise. However, the issue with "IS" is that it will not include all possible scenarios and thus, will not subsequently normalize all people. The issue with "CONTAINS" is that it may qualify people who should not have been qualified.

For example, neither of your campaigns will normalize "U.S.A". What I would do is look for all possible values that should be normalized and then use the "IS" filter and list every single one of them:

Smart list:

Country IS

USA

U.S.A

United States

Flow:

change data value: United States of America

When you discover a spelling or abbreviation that did not qualify, add it to the smart list so it qualifies in the future.

Parfitt_DavidAuthor

Level 3

Thank you for the quick reply! I think I will go with "IS" and just continue to add to the scenarios.

-Dave

SanfordWhiteman

Level 10

Frankly the lack of wildcard matching, let alone true regular expression matching, makes doing this within Marketo Smart Lists pretty useless IMO. For example, you need a regex like U[ .]*S[ .]*A[ .]* to just match the real-world permutations of the abbrevation USA.

If you watch my blog posts, you'll soon see a way to do this kind of thing by via real-time lookups in a Google Sheet.