1. Home
  2. Marketing Automation Software
  3. Adobe Marketo Engage Reviews
  4. User Review of Adobe Marketo Engage
Good product, but don't be blinded by vendor marketing.
February 21, 2013

Good product, but don't be blinded by vendor marketing.

Anonymous | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 6 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User

Software Version

Other

Modules Used

  • Marketo Lead Management
  • Marketo Sales Insight

Overall Satisfaction

  • Good landing page creation
  • Tracking leads created through social sharing. They have a nice feature where you can embed a widget on a landing page that allows the page to be shared though social channels. If someone clicks on the shared link and comes to the landing page, they are automatically associated with the person who originally shared the page.
  • Integration with Salesforce.com
  • scoring and ranking leads
  • Landing page performance reports
  • Email performance reports
  • Business process mapping with revenue cycle modeler. The ability to easily model the business process with an intuitive visual tool was very useful.
  • It is very slow. The issue here is that it's very easy to implement and use the tool in such a way that performance becomes a real issue. Admittedly our use case was somewhat extreme: We track as many as 7 million unique domain names and this is undoubtedly part of the reason for slowness. However, that is not the whole story. Many Marketo customers have complained about this issue. Speed and performance are major issues even for very standard implementations of the product.
  • Reporting is light years behind salesforce.com. This issue might be related to the fact that we do not use the Marketo Revenue Cycle Analytics module. There are some basic analytics tools built into the product, but they are very basic compared to Salesforce reporting. For example, there is nothing like the Salesforce capability of building summary row and column data with minimums / maximums/ averages, etc. There is a feature called Smart Lists that provides a quick window on the number of leads in the database, but its very slow, and reports cannot be scheduled in advance.
  • No dashboards. These are part of the Revenue Cycle Analytics module which comes at an additional cost. Marketo tries to up-sell this module to customers.
  • Hard to set up governance (ie no more than 2 emails per week)
  • Hard to set up multiple subscription lists
  • Hard to set up adwords integration
  • Search marketing tracking is unreliable
  • It enabled automation of an upsell campaign that was responsible for nearly 40% on a past quarter's revenue.
  • It enables a lead nurturing program that consistently brings in about 15% of our revenue.
We are actively looking at potential replacement products. The main issues are:

- Poor customer support. This is perhaps the biggest issue. The support team seems somewhat unconverned with resolving problems, and more concerned with closing support tickets as quickly as possible
- Very slow performance.
- Marketo committed to a release that would deal with the performance issue specifically. However, they never actually did so.
- Since that performance release did not materialize, we contracted with their professional services team to do some custom work to resolve our performance issues. They never i concluded that work
- The API documentation is inaccurate, which wasted a full man-week of our engineering team's time. While the inaccuracies were identified, the vendor did not compensate us in any way.
This vendor is phenomenal at marketing. Try to keep that from coloring your perception of the product's actual strengths and weaknesses.

Product Usage

10 - Marketing and web development
  • Ranks and prioritizes leads
  • Campaign landing pages
  • De-dupes web-to-lead leads
  • Campaign management
  • Lead tracking
  • Email performance reporting
  • Lead nurturing
  • Data management

Evaluation and Selection

Vertical Response.
Eloqua, Hubspot, and Silverpop.

At the time, Eloqua had just moved from Eloqua 9 to 10, which was a major re-write, and they were not yet up to feature parity with the previous version. We did not feel that it was wise to take a risk with a brand new version of the product. Additionally, integration to Salesforce, although certainly possible, was not out-of-the-box as it was with Marketo.

Hubspot, at the time, was somewhat light on marketing automation functionality and was more focused on social media marketing and CMS. Their CRM integration capabilities were not strong, and their lead management capabilities were simply not robust enough.

Silverpop were also in the midst of a transition. They were known as more of a B2C marketing automation solution and had recently acquired a small B2B vendor called Vtrenz. We were concerned about product integration issues and decided there was too much risk. However, they did have some great features. For example Silverpop had a great feature that automatically figured out the best time to send an email to a specific individual to ensure click-through.

Marketo aggressively discounted, and I trusted the brand due to excellent content marketing from the Marketo marketing department. I was burned a little by focusing too much on the marketing and not enough on the actual product experience.

Implementation

We had an implementation manager who helped, but we were disappointed that the implementation manager made recommendations without understanding why.

For example,
Marketo: "All lead scoring campaigns should reside in programs"
Me: "Why? If lead scoring does not add records to the database why not just have individual smart campaigns in a lead scoring folder?"
Marketo: "I don't know, that is what I was told to say"
  • Implemented in-house

Training

  • Online training
  • In-person training
  • Self-taught
We attended a 4-day offsite training which was a pretty good way of getting the team up to speed. However, it was not as comprhensive as it might have been for such an investment of time.
Online training is quite good. This is something of a strength.
Yes, the product is easy to learn, but due to its flexibility, it is also easy to use incorrectly.

Configuration

Extensively configured, but wrote no custom code during implementation. The integration with salesforce was solid.

Support

Their support is very inconsistent. It seems as if the team is measured on / cares about metrics like time to resolve ticket. They seem much less focused on actually being helpful and resolving real technical issues. Tickets are often closed before issues have been resolved.
No - Their support team is not very good. Our experience with support has not been good - even when issues are escalated to higher levels of support.

Usability

It is fairly intuitive, with a drag and drop UI for form and campaign creation, WYSIWYG landing page editor and email editor, and auto-complete searches.

Reliability

They have a page where they cover up-time. It has been generally quite good.
As already indicated, performance has been a major issue for us . Despite the fact that our implementation is somewhat unique and may be responsible for some of the performance issues, this is a problem that many other Marketo users with standard implementations also suffer from.

Integration

  • eCommerce store
  • DiscoverOrg
  • AdWords
  • Salesforce.com

Vendor Relationship

Easy, pre and post sales. Vendor became more difficult to work with as time went by. It almost feels as if the Marketo team is highly focused on making the first few months go well. After that, things started to deteriorate and customer support was a huge disappointment.
54% off list price, unlimited database size provided no more than 250k people were being actively marketed to.

Marketo discounts quite aggressively, but we pushed hard to get the best deal possible.