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Robert_Kelen3
Robert_Kelen3
New Participant
October 23, 2017
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Phrase match using 'contains' filter?

  • October 23, 2017
  • 2 replies
  • 7157 views

Is there a way around Marketo effectively doing a broad match when using the 'contains' filter? If we have something like Company Name contains "Acme Pharmaceuticals", now it will pull values for either of the two terms, such as "Acme Manufacturing" and "Smith Pharmaceuticals".

Given non-normalized data which could include many variations (such as "Acme Pharmaceuticals, Inc." or "Acme Pharmaceuticals" or "Acme Pharmaceuticals Company", etc.), it's not currently an option to use the "is" filter.

Thanks.

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Best answer by Trevor_Parsell

I'm not able to send a screenshot because the filter has more than 1000 selected values in it, and is specific to the client's marketing interests. I can say that results of the smart list definitely include things that don't match the filter. That said, it does appear that Josh's 'starts with' idea effectively suppresses the false positives I was seeing in the 'contains' case.


Hey Robert,

My guess is that some of the 1,000+ values are pulling in things that are unexpected and should not be included in a contains filter. For example, I have tried filtering for job titles that contain CRO (for Chief Revenue Officer) and received job titles like "Microsoft Architect" and "Cross-Channel Marketing Manager"

I've found that it is best to use a combination of "Is", "Contains", and "Starts with" filters to get the correct list. For the CRO example, we would use something like:

starts with "Chief Rev"

OR

is "CRO"

OR

contains "Revenue Off"

Thanks!

2 replies

Robert_Kelen3
Robert_Kelen3Author
New Participant
October 26, 2017

Okay, support was able to confirm that their original answer was incorrect, and that you guys (thanks @Josh Hill​, @Dan Stevens​, @Trevor Parsell​ and @Sanford Whiteman​!) were right in your faith in the correct operation of the 'contains' filter. What they discovered on further analysis was that with a list of 1000+ values to check against, the filter wasn't failing but was rather falling victim to unintended (and hard to spot) consequences of certain values in a list that long. Just as two examples, 'contains "HP"' also finds the company "Highpointe", and 'contains "CA"' also finds any company with "PharmaceutiCAls" in its name.

    SanfordWhiteman
    SanfordWhiteman
    New Participant
    October 26, 2017

    Thanks for the update -- good to know we haven't all lost it.

    Josh_Hill13
    Josh_Hill13
    New Participant
    October 23, 2017

    Did you test that? Thought CONTAINS with "acme x" would only look for that phrase.

    You can also try STARTS WITH as an alternative.

    Robert_Kelen3
    Robert_Kelen3Author
    New Participant
    October 23, 2017

    Thanks Josh. I've not tested 'starts with', but the 'contains' issue is definitely taken from experience.

    Dan_Stevens_
    Dan_Stevens_
    New Participant
    October 23, 2017

    Unless something has changed in terms of how Marketo searches string values, this would only look for the entire string when setup like this:

    However, if you entered it like this, it would return any record with "Acme" or "Pharmaceuticals":

    By chance, are you manually entering these as comma/semi-colon values?:

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