Marketo’s core expertise is Marketing Automation, a software category it pioneered along with Eloqua, Pardot, Hubspot, Adobe and now 208 additional vendors and counting. Marketo still holds a solid market share, especially on the West Coast, especially in Tech companies. For analysts and executives who love data, Marketing Automation platforms offer an attractive perspective besides operations: they capture large amounts of information on the individuals who comprise customer and prospect organizations, from the details of the websites and other assets they consume, to the forms they populate, the emails they receive, open, forward and many more indicators. Marketing Analytics are a fast growing field part of the sprawling Martech industry, necessary to allocate Marketing resource and improve performance. Alas, Analytics with Marketo have been mostly a tantalizing promise until June 2017. If all this data is indeed stored on the Marketo instance, users who stay within the Marketo interface can query the Lead database only, and NOT their Activities DB, that is the details of the transactions in time stamped sequences of identified individuals. The analyst willing to go beyond those restrictions was left with two options: either invest in the Marketo costly analytics upsell solution (no blending of external data allowed!), or leverage the APIs to get the data his organization owns, out to a serious analytics platform of choice.
Marketo has been offering access to the data generated in those databases through a SOAP API, then a REST API, better suited to extract volumes of transactions. The current version of the Marketo connectors supplied out of the box by Alteryx, as of V11, and I believe by Tableau as well, are still using those transactional REST APIs, which are really meant by Marketo to be used to sync with a CRM, and not for analytics. As a result, as I mentioned in the comments for my previous post on Marketo APIs, the traditional REST APIs have been gradually stripped over 2016 of the capabilities to extract any decent volume of data at once. So far, most users of those APIs and connectors willing to extract more than a handful of records per session have been facing a dreaded series of errors:
1. Marketo REST API Error code 606 (Rate limit): Marketo limited throughput of records extracted within 20 seconds to 100, and kills the connection if higher
2. Marketo REST API Error code 615 (Concurrency limit): Marketo limits the number of concurrent requests to their API to 10, limiting parallel processing
3. Marketo REST API Error code 6XX (Daily Quota): 10,000 API calls maximum per day.
Furthermore, to definitely discourage the use of Analytics outside of the Marketo moat, authentication tokens are only valid for 60 minutes, killing any extraction job running >60 minutes. As an indication of scale, in my own experience in my org, one hour is what it takes to extract 6 days of website visits, that is just one Activity type, out of the 18, I had planned to work on. And last but not least, Marketo does not offer a DATE TO filter for transactions in that API, effectively preventing from running updates on data sets. For instance, for a daily refresh of 2016 transactions, a full update for all of 2016 data was required… I wrote WAS because, since June 2017, Marketo has finally released Bulk Extract APIs for People and Activities, with surprisingly little fanfare for a Marketing company…
This is great news, but Marketo has not suddenly turned into a land of milk and honey. The new bulk approach is not as easy as one could expect and is still riddled with hoops to jump through. However, if you have read that far, you must already get why it’s a much bigger deal than Marketo makes it sound, (Campaigns Golden Path analysis anyone?) and you will be able by the end of this post to take immediate advantage of the new API. You will finally get your hands on stacks of your data , instead of just trickles.
