1. Home
  2. Marketing Automation Software
  3. Adobe Marketo Engage Reviews
  4. User Review of Adobe Marketo Engage
My Web Development Marketo
Updated April 11, 2017

My Web Development Marketo

Anonymous | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 1 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User

Software Version

Spark

Overall Satisfaction with Marketo

Marketo is used at the high level as a platform for managing campaigns and relationships. From a web development perspective, it's completely lackluster and does not easily scale up due to the high adoption cost.
  • It's very simple for handling very simple one-off, unique pages.
  • It has a very primitive administration model (good, but also bad).
  • It has a nice, very friendly (but technically lame) UI for editing web pages.
  • Does not actually support Internet Explorer 8, 9 and 10 properly, as of 2013. It is currently Fall 2015.
  • It is extremely challenging to update web page layouts (templates). Too many steps are required because I have to maintain version control outside of Marketo. It is very hard to automate uploading templates.
  • There is no control over headers associated with certain files being hosted on Marketo. Lacks real Internet inter-operation support.
  • Product Launches
  • Upsell
  • Cross-Sell
  • Lead Management
  • Prospecting / New Business
  • Other
We used Marketo to grow our market and introduce new products through various campaigns.
For simple mailing lists, MailChimp seems to do the job smoother and with better instrumentation.
Not available
Both
It's kind of terrible right now, overall, for anyone who is a full stack web developer. There are too many artificial roadblocks to Marketo happiness.

Adobe Marketo Engage Feature Ratings

1.0
WYSIWYG email editor
Not Rated
Dynamic content
1
Ability to test dynamic content
1
Landing pages
1
A/B testing
Not Rated
Mobile optimization
1
Email deliverability reporting
Not Rated
List management
Not Rated
Triggered drip sequences
Not Rated
Not Rated
Lead nurturing automation
Not Rated
Lead scoring and grading
Not Rated
Data quality management
Not Rated
Automated sales alerts and tasks
Not Rated
Not Rated
Calendaring
Not Rated
Event/webinar marketing
Not Rated
Not Rated
Social sharing and campaigns
Not Rated
Social profile integration
Not Rated
Not Rated
Dashboards
Not Rated
Standard reports
Not Rated
Custom reports
Not Rated
2.7
API
3
Role-based workflow & approvals
3
Customizability
2
Integration with Salesforce.com
Not Rated
Integration with Microsoft Dynamics CRM
Not Rated
Integration with SugarCRM
Not Rated

Using Marketo

8 - Developers, marketing, sales and content people
6 - Developers, Marketers, Data Analysts
  • List Management
  • New Leads
  • Landing Pages
  • Business-logic powered e-mail handling
  • CRM integration
It's an interesting platform, but the limitations hinder "interesting" HTML development capabilities.
  • Much slower full-stack integration.
  • Much faster micro-page production.
  • Many unresolved technical challenges (bugs, Marketo's fault) prevent maximizing on the investment.

Evaluating Marketo and Competitors

Not Sure
  • Price
  • Product Features
  • Product Usability
  • Product Reputation
  • Vendor Reputation
  • Existing Relationship with the Vendor
  • Positive Sales Experience with the Vendor
  • Analyst Reports
  • Third-party Reviews
Trial run using a full compliment of employees to see how the feel about the platform's capabilities and limitations.

Marketo Implementation

As long as things are "super simple" in terms of technical tooling, then, you'll have a nice time with Marketo. Add any "fancy" web communications, effects, etc... and you might be stumped.
  • Implemented in-house
  • Marketo mangles HTML, sometimes, without any warnings / sanity checking. You'd launch pages that end up broken without expecting it.

Marketo Support

While they're very slow at resolving issues that seriously hamper producing good web (landing) pages, they eventually get around to creating solutions. It could take 6 months, 12 months, or more.
ProsCons
Knowledgeable team
Kept well informed
Support cares about my success
Slow Resolution
Problems left unsolved
Escalation required
Need to explain problems multiple times
Slow Initial Response
Yes - It took a long time, but eventually, Marketo added an "optional" toggle that fixes problems that it has with HTML output.
Some of their "community" people respond quickly; but that doesn't mean the issues are fixed quickly.

Using Marketo

Too much full-page reloading required to get things done.
ProsCons
None
Unnecessarily complex
Difficult to use
Requires technical support
Inconsistent
Slow to learn
Cumbersome
Lots to learn
  • Landing page creation from "well formed" templates is fairly painless
  • Creating "well formed" templates is a painful process needed at the start