Administration is the key(bunch)

So, I'd actually like to advocate for two items that were previously on the Marketo roadmap but seem to have gone missing: Field Metadata API and User Provisioning API. The two most common things I do when in the Admin section are either creating fields or handling users—and the idea behind both of these APIs were to solve common pain points around both.

By having a Field Metadata API, third-party integrations could add/update fields as needed rather than forcing the end user to enter fields by hand. Likewise, the ability to mass hide outdated fields would be a big boon--I once spent nearly 20 hours hiding ~700 fields from a client instance, and I could have just as easily done that in 20 minutes with an API call that would let me review fields and then post an update to hide them from UI. 

Likewise, with most enterprises onboarding/offboarding marketing employees, there's automation for adding and removing Exchange inboxes, Salesforce users, HR software logins... but no way to hook Marketo into this setup. As such, you're stuck adding and removing users manually, which is a pain. There's no reason a user API couldn't just hook into Workday or other HR systems to make this part of the onboard/offboard process.

These things don't sound cool or appealing, so they tend to die on the vine--but the convenience they afford when given context makes them worth it.

Some of these might already be pointed out but here is my take:

• SFDC Field sync: As of now, Marketo sync all the fields visible to marketo user in SFDC automatically and if we already have a similar field existed in Marketo, it creates a duplicate. We have to go to Marketo support to merge those fields. It would be ideal to let admin which SFDC field needs to be sync with Marketo and merge with existing field, if needed.
• Field Management:
  • Right now, it shows the field dependency in a list and if it's being used in lot of assets, we have a "load more" option. It doesn't show the number of assets it's being used. It would be really nice to have a feature to export all the field dependencies and also a summary table that will show the number of assets per asset type like forms, smart lists etc.
  • Delete the fields instead of hiding
  • Let Admin merge the fields if needed
• Custom Objects: Custom objects are really useful at times but it comes with an overhead of developing something outside marketo to feed the data. It will be really really cool to allow custom objects to be updated right from smart campaigns. It will seriously save a lot of time developing some solution using custom object.
• SFDC-Marketo sync: Today, it just shows the last sync time or if the sync is in progress. Would be nice to have some more details on the previous sync logs and also what is current being synced between the systems and how many records, expected sync cycle completion time. Also, it would be nice to have a button to start sync cycle immediately.

- Developers require Admin access to access the Custom Objects/Custom Activities consoles. Ideally, this wouldn't be necessary. 

I didn't read previous comments so I could give an unbiased point of view. Sorry if I'm repeating everyone else!

What according to you is the single most disliked feature of admin?

Users and roles. There isn't enough rigor here - why can't I control what folders people have access to or get more granular? Some of it isn't clear (ex: Access Design Studio -> edit email. I've had jr. admins ask me if that means someone can edit in Marketing Activities but not Design Studio, which is a fair question).

What is the most used functionality of admin for you?

Field management!

Are there any commonly used workarounds which you'd like admin to cater for?

Better search via Audit Trail. Right now I export someone's audit trail to use "find" functionality so I can search across asset name, parent name, etc. It would be nice to have an integrated search option so I don't have to export to do this.

If we were to provide an export feature of configurations, what details would you like in that "data take-out"

FIELD MANAGEMENT EXPORT - I want to see if the field is connected to my CRM, if it's in use in any smart list or smart campaign (and possibly a list of which ones?). I'm going through hundreds of fields right now to clean up SFDC and it's the most painful experience. At least make this possible via an API.

Field Management is the area I use the most, and the one that causes the most frustration over the 10 years I've been a Marketo admin. Agree with comments made above about Field Management. It is terribly klunky.  I would like to be able to:

• rename fields in use without having to remove references
• delete instead of hide fields
• sort by asset type in the Used By list
•  have clickable links in the Used By list.  It is so frustrating when tracking use of a field to have to search asset by asset! And when you try to copy and paste, you often click by mistake if you place your cursor in the wrong place by a pixel.
• be able to export the Used by list with links in the export, so that you can do some audit reporting.

Audit Trail appears worse than useless.  I have never been able to get sufficient info about who did what when we've had an issue. 

Permissions could be more granular. Folder permission would be immensely useful, as not everyone wants to use Workspaces (or has it in their subscription).

Regards,

Erica

A big shout out to all of you who have replied to my post with your suggestions and asks.

Apologies that I haven't been active much on the community for past couple of days. 

Going forward, I would like to interact with you, based on your availability, to learn more.

Please do keep those suggestions coming in. :+1: 

Regards,

Vikram R

• There are third-party tools that can do this, but I would love to have the ability to communicate with our users within Marketo - an announcement/notification feature of sorts.
• This likely falls outside of the Admin section, but it would be great to have a smart list filter for "Marketo users" that would allow me to easily distribute emails to the active users in our account. 
• It would be helpful to have a "view as" feature to test user roles and troubleshoot permissions issues. 

Hi Vikram, 

I recently had a customer research call with Marketo and brought up a request for a feature that could be added to the admin area. I think we need an instance analyzer which can provide a summary with key stats all in one place. It would be something targeted towards admins, or superusers, who inherit an instance when joining a company, but also useful for those managing it over time. Some ideas for what this could include....

1) A quick overview of the total # of contacts in the database which provides splits by marketable/unmarketable, country/region, SFDC lead/contact, customized segments, and customizable for other existing fields/tags in the database. It would also be helpful to see dormant vs engaged contacts for each region (i.e. how many have activity in the last 3/6/12 months vs those who are not active). 

2) An overview of the most active internal users.

3) A way to see key average email performance stats for the whole account (open rate, click rate, click to open rate, hard bounce, soft bounce, unsubscribe rate), and the ability to segment these averages by country or region. 

4) Similar to above, but for landing pages...what are the most viewed LPs, what is the average conversion rate for forms (with option to create an average by selecting specific LPs to crunch data on). 

5) Communication limits / API limit. 

6) Other useful macro level stats to get users up to speed. 

Need more metadata for individual fields, created date, created by etc...

Webhooks configurations should use, like all code- and code-like text, a monospace font that preserves whitespace.

It's impossible to read webhook definitions that use JavaScript (or JSON objects beyond a couple of properties)... I have to use a browser plugin (UserStyles) to alter the CSS for that page