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(Article Updated - August 2024) Overview A blocklist is a database of IP addresses or domains that have been associated with the sending of unsolicited commercial email or spam. Internet Service Providers (ISPs) and business email networks use information from blocklists to filter out unwanted email. As a result there can be a drop to inbox delivery rates if the IPs or domains involved with sending email are listed on a blocklist. Marketo’s Email Delivery and Compliance team monitors blocklist activity on our IPs and domains daily. When an impactful listing occurs, we reach out to the blocklist, attempt to identify the sender that triggered it, and work with the blocklist organization to get the listing resolved. There are thousands of blocklists, most will not have a significant impact on your delivery rates. Below, we have compiled a list of the blocklists that commonly appear across our sender ecosystem. Each blocklist has been grouped into a top tier (Tier I) by most impactful, to the bottom least impactful tier (Tier III). These may have little to no impact across our sender network. Tier I Blocklist Spamhaus (SBL) Impact: Spamhaus is the only blocklist that we categorize as a Tier I for a reason: it has by far the greatest impact on delivery. It is the most well-respected and widely used blocklist in the world. A listing at Spamhaus will have a negative effect on your ability to deliver emails to your customer’s inbox and can cause bounce rates of over 50%. Evidence suggests that most of the top North American ISPs use Spamhaus to inform blocking decisions. How it works: Unlike many blocklists, Spamhaus lists senders manually. This means they are proactively watching sender activity, collecting data, and base listings on a number of variables. Most commonly senders are listed for mailing to spam trap addresses that Spamhaus owns. Sometimes Spamhaus will list senders based on recipient feedback as well. Next Steps: Please note that every Spamhaus email can be quite different depending on the information provided and the nature of the listing . Because Spamhaus has multiple types of listings, the remediation steps are based on which type of blocklisting has occurred. We have listed the most common types to affect Marketo customers, from most to least impactful. Impact can range from a full block of top severity, to a partial block that is less severe (CSS Data, DBL). If remediation isn’t performed and the problem not addressed, these listings can increase in severity and turn into a full blocklisting. Spamhaus Blocklistings Types SBL (full blocklisting) Considered the most impactful. Remediation steps: Our team monitors closely for Spamhaus listings. Once alerted to the listing, we send an email notifying the customer, and reach out to the Spamhaus contact to start the remediation process. Only a Marketo delivery team member should be in direct correspondence with the Spamhaus contact, to speak on behalf of the customer, and to relay their questions and instructions, ensuring quick resolution and reduced impact. Senders that trigger this listing on a shared IP range will be moved to a more isolated, penalty range (IPB), so as not to impact the other shared senders. Those affected on a Dedicated IP, only impact their own sending and will not be moved. However, depending on the severity of the issue, our team may need to revoke a customer’s ability to send any emails until full resolution. The listing will last until Spamhaus is satisfied that the offending sender has taken the appropriate steps to mitigate the problem. SBL CSS Customers are alerted of the listing with an email containing all the information needed to immediately begin the remediation process. This is part of an automated trigger listing, that allows for a customer to delist directly on the Spamhaus website, after they’ve completed remediation. Remediation steps: Customers will go to the Spamhaus IP lookup website, at https://check.spamhaus.org, where they can check on the status of their IP and continue to monitor it in real time, until it is no longer listed there. Follow the remediation and delisting instructions provided, and check for specific details in the blocklist notification email. DBL (Domain blocklisting) Customers will receive an email notification alerting of the company domain being listed. The email will contain specific information to help narrow down and identify which email source likely triggered it within Marketo. It’s important to note that any email sent from outside of Marketo, that contained the company domain, is suspect. This means, if the sender uses multiple IPs and/multiple email platforms, then any of those could be the source. Remediation steps: Follow the detailed instructions in the email, which will also provide a link to the Spamhaus Domain reputation checker webpage, to check the real time listing status of the affected domain. Once the email source is identified and cause addressed, this customer will follow the online instructions to request to be delisted. Tier II Blocklist SpamCop Impact: SpamCop is not used by any of the major North American ISPs to inform blocking decisions, but it makes it to the Tier II list because it can have a significant impact on B2B email campaigns. SpamCop is considered a Tier I one blocklist for B2B marketers but a Tier II for B2C marketers. SpamCop is a dynamic IP blocklist, that can affect a single IP or a subset of IPs Typically, the block will automatically lift within one business day, but can take longer for relisted IPs. To have triggered a SpamCop listing likely means the sender has a list management problem that should be addressed. How it works: SpamCop lists IPs for one of two reasons: Either the email hit SpamCop spam trap addresses OR A SpamCop user has reported the email unwanted. Most of SpamCop’s spam traps are previously valid addresses that have not been active for 12 months or longer. Remediation steps: If you are seeing a significant number of bouncing emails caused by a SpamCop blocked IP but aren’t sure if your email activity triggered the listing, first identify whether you are sending on a shared sender network or not. If sending from a shared IP range when this occurs, you or any other customer sending from the same network may have contributed to the IP block. This IP block will automatically get dropped within a business day. For those on a Dedicated IP that trigger a listing, refer to the above remediation steps and resources, to address the list management issue. Tier III Blocklist (Low/ No impact ) These are considered the lowest tier and therefore cause the least impact across the Marketo sender ecosystem. Some of these blocklists were more impactful at one time, while others are only impactful based on the sender region (Manitu). Others still can suddenly flare up (Lashback). There are also many blocklists that are ignored (0spam), and are not taken seriously because they do not provide any means to delist once on the list (NoSolicitado) or that they charge money to have the listing removed ( UCEPROTECT ). The pay-to-delist model is not well respected in the email industry. When using blocklist tool checkers, such as MXToolBox, many blocklists will appear, but very few are relevant. Here is our selection of Blocklists you may come across that are least impactful: Project Honey Pot SpamAssassin URIBL/SURBL DrMX PSBL 0spam HostKarma Ascams ZapBL Barracuda Trendmicro Inc. Cloudmark Proofpoint Invaluement ISP Blocklists Some ISPs use internal blocklists to make blocking decisions. Examples include AOL, Yahoo, Gmail, Outlook and Hotmail. If your IP is being blocked by one of these networks, and those networks have a large presence in your lists, a block of this kind could have a noticeable negative impact on delivery. Marketo monitors for significant ISP blocks. Those experiencing deliverability issues with emails not making it to the Inbox and bulking in the spam folder may benefit from additional services with our Email Delivery Consultants. Remediation Steps: Email Delivery Compliance Team works to resolve any ISP blocks. ISP blocks are are usually resolved or lifted within less than 24 hours of a delisting request. Customers experiencing significant blocks for Microsoft domains (outlook.com, live.com, microsoft.com), can submit a request to the delivery team to seek mitigation on their behalf. Additional Resources: Blocklist Deep Dive Abuse Report Deep Dive What is a spamtrap, or spam trap, and why does it matter? Blocklist remediation Blocklist resolution flowchart Successful lead reconfirmation What is a blocklist?

Issue After adding an IFrame to an email in the Marketo email editor, the IFrame seems to disappear when you view the email in an email client (such as Outlook, Apple Mail, or Gmail). Solution The reason why you can see the IFrame in Marketo but not in your email client is because not all email clients support IFrames. If yours does not support them, the IFrame will be blocked and will not appear in the email. You can try viewing the email in another email client to see the IFrame.

Issue You may notice that the files under "Images and Files" folder are being crawled and indexed by search engines. Is there a way to ensure that they cannot be indexed? Solution To disable indexing for all assets in Design Studio > Images and Files, please contact Marketo Support. Support can disable indexing for all files in this folder. Please note, this is a global block. Support is not able to selectively block indexing for specific files.

Issue You would like to pull a report of all the non-marketable records that you have in Marketo. Solution You can do this via a Smart List: Use the Any filter in the Smart List. Filters: Block Listed = true Unsubscribed = true Marketing Suspended = true Email Invalid = true Email Address is empty This Smart List will pull all the people that fall into the blocked leads list. You can also add a view in which you can add above mentioned columns to the smart list which will give a view if a record is block listed /unsubscribed etc. Reference Doc :- Create and Change Views for Lists and Smart List

Issue A record in Marketo failed to sync to Salesforce due to a Field Validation error. Errors may include the following: Failed: FIELD_INTEGRITY_EXCEPTION: INVALID_OR_NULL_FOR_RESTRICTED_PICKLIST: bad value for restricted pick list field. Solution The lead was unable to sync to Salesforce because the value for a specific required field was missing or did not match the rules Salesforce had for the data in the field. For example, the field in Salesforce could be a picklist and the value Marketo is trying to pass in the field is not in the picklist. Salesforce always requires a Last Name and a Company Name value for all records, so if your lead is missing data in these fields, the sync will fail. To resolve this, check Salesforce to see what the acceptable values are for the field specified in the error, and make sure the Marketo record has the necessary information. If you need further assistance with this, we recommend working with your SFDC Admin to determine why Salesforce is rejecting the record. This commonly happens when Country/State picklist is enabled on your SFDC instance. As a consequence, SFDC will reject any record with country/state value does not belong to the list and so you will have to make sure that countries are set correctly everywhere in Marketo, and especially: in forms in data management campaigns in imports For example, if you try to pass the value "New York" to Salesforce, it will not be accepted. Salesforce will only accept "NY". The error messages you're seeing are coming from Salesforce because the State fields have been standardized to only accept certain pick-list values. In order to get these records to sync with Salesforce you'll need to update them to have valid values. Contact your SFDC Admin to get the list of accepted values for that field and update the record in Marketo with the appropriate value that is accepted by SFDC. If you feel like pick list is not necessary on SFDC, you could just disable the state or country pick lists in SFDC by following the below document https://help.salesforce.com/articleView?id=admin_state_country_picklist_enable.htm&type=5 Who This Solution Applies To Customers integrated with Salesforce

Issue You want to add multiple values to a Smart List filter as described here: https://docs.marketo.com/display/public/DOCS/Add+Multiple+Values+to+a+Smart+List+Filter . However, when you go to do so for a field that has a type of "Text" you are not able to add multiple values. Solution This is expected behavior for Marketo Text fields. As a workaround, you can add the same filter to the Smart List multiple times, one for each value you want included.

Overview For added security, we have added functionality to validate that email tracking URL hash codes originate from the same domain in the subscription. A unique email tracking URL hash code is what is used to identify which Marketo instance the link is coming from, enabling the tracking functionality in your emails. Example Here’s an example of how an email tracking URL is constructed: Enhancement being made: This enhancement will add extra validation to the tracking URLs used in your emails. When our tracking server receives the link, it will use the URL hash code to identify the Marketo instance. It then looks up the branding domains associated with the subscription. If the domain presented in the URL matches a branding domain we have listed for you, the link will connect just as it should. If the domain in the URL does not match a domain in our database, it will be considered suspicious and will be stopped and a "404 error" will be displayed.

Issue Using a browser with JavaScript disabled causes display and validation problems with Marketo forms. Solution When JavaScript is disabled in a browser, it can cause a couple of different behaviors. For embedded forms, the form will not load on the page because it is loaded by JavaScript. For non-embedded forms on a Marketo landing page, the form will load but it will be a bare bones version of the form that does not validate field input, because validation is handled by JavaScript. If you want to display a message to users with JavaScript disabled, you can use the “noscript” tag to display a message that prompts users to enable it in order to render the page correctly: w3schools.com/tags/tag_noscript.asp Here’s an example using that with an embedded form: <script src="//app-sjst.marketo.com/js/forms2/js/forms2.min.js"></script> <form id="mktoForm_1001"></form> <script>MktoForms2.loadForm("//app-sjst.marketo.com", "507-ILX-247", 1001);</script> <noscript>You have JavaScript disabled! Please enable JavaScript for the best experience on this site.</noscript> For a Marketo landing page, I added an HTML Element with just the last line from the example above: <noscript>You have JavaScript disabled! Please enable JavaScript for the best experience on this site.</noscript> Alternatively, you can use a redirect solution like this, which will send users with JavaScript disabled to another page: <html> <head> <noscript> <meta http-equiv="refresh" content="0; URL=http://www.marketo.com"> </noscript> </head> <body> <p>Fancy redirect page if JavaScript is not detected.</p> </body> </html>

Issue You have an Email Program or Smart Campaign with an expected audience size, but when it is run, only a small number of leads are sent the email. For example, in an Email Program with 250 people in the audience, only 15 people were sent the email. Solution There are several things we need to check to determine why this happened. The easiest way to start is to create a separate Smart List with the exact filters as the program or campaign. Check the number of leads in this recreated Smart List. Does it have the same number of leads as the original Email Program or Smart Campaign audience? Email Program audiences do not automatically refresh and update when the Smart List is changed, so if you did not refresh the Audience before sending the email, it may be displaying an out-of-date number. This is a particular risk if your program or campaign Smart List references another Smart List. If that secondary Smart List is changed, it will affect your program or campaign audience without you being aware of it. This is one reason why we recommend avoiding nested Smart Lists. Use your testing Smart List to determine how many leads you have that may have been excluded from the send: Leads that are unsubscribed, marketing suspended, blacklisted, or flagged as invalid Leads that with no email address (sometimes due to a mistake in a list upload) Leads that have a duplicate email address in the program or campaign audience. If there are duplicate leads in the Smart List for an email send, Marketo will send to the first one and skip the rest Look in the View Results/Campaign Results for your program/campaign to see if any leads were skipped due to Communication Limits. Add up the number of leads that may have been skipped for these various reasons and see if that accounts for the missing audience members. If it doesn't, Check the Audit Trail to see if the Smart List has been changed between now and the time the emails were sent. If you still can't figure out why your email went out to fewer people than expected, open a support case and include the results of the above troubleshooting, and Marketo Support will investigate further.

Overview Add Leads to Static Lists Use Custom Fields Overview Lead records have two primary components – lead attributes and activity logs. Lead attributes are the fields and field values within the lead record. For example, Job Title is a lead attribute. Lead Name is a lead attribute. Activity logs record the actions Marketo or the lead themselves have taken. For example, sending an email to a lead is an activity that would show in the activity log. If the lead opens the email or visits a tracked page, those activities would show in the activity log as well. Activities in the activity log are only retained for 25 months, or 37 if you have purchased the premium data retention option. The main way to store activity data beyond the Data Retention Policy timeframe is to use the Bulk Extract API. There are two other ways you can keep a reference of these activities after the end of the Data Retention period, and they can be referenced within the Marketo UI. This article will show you how that can be done. Add Leads to Static Lists Static lists will retain lead membership even if the activity of adding the lead to the list has been removed. This will let you have lists dedicated to specific criteria that would otherwise be removed after the data retention time period has been passed. For example, Smart Campaign membership history is not retained after 25 months. If you are searching for members of a Smart Campaign, but a lead first became a member of the Smart Campaign more than 25 months ago, the search results would not include that lead. An easy way to work around that is to add your leads to a static list as part of the flow of the campaign. When creating your Smart Campaign, create a new static list with the same corresponding name (makes it easier to identify later). When building the flow of your campaign, add the "Add to List" flow step so that all leads going through the campaign will be logged on the list. Use Custom Fields Lead attributes and their field values are not affected by the Data Retention Policy. Use Smart Campaigns to populate custom fields with values based on activities your leads take. This will allow you to filter leads by these lead attributes that are not affected by the Data Retention Policy. A side benefit to this is that it is faster to search by lead attributes than by searching through lead activity logs. Example: This approach can work for many different activities, but let’s use form fill outs as an example. Let’s say you want to be able to identify leads who have been very active and have filled out more than 5 forms over their lifecycle. You could use the filter “Filled Out Form” with the “Min. Number of Times” constraint set to 5. However, if one of those forms filled out occurred more than 25 months ago, the filter would only be able to access 4 form fill activities in the activity log. Therefore, the lead would not pass the filter. Instead of using the “Filled Out Form” filter, set up a Smart Campaign to write to custom fields that show you how many forms they’ve filled out, and when the first one was. Here’s how to do it: 1. Create two new custom fields in Marketo, one Score Field, and the second a Date Field. 2. Create a new Smart Campaign 3. Add the trigger “Fills Out Form” set to “is any” to the Campaign Smart List 4. Add these two Flow Steps to the Campaign Flow: Flow Step 1: “Change Score” Score Field Name: your score field name Change: +1 Flow Step 2: “Change Data Value” Add Choice to Flow Step Choice 1: If “your score field name” “is empty” Attribute “your score field name” New Value: {{system.date}} Default Choice: Do Nothing This campaign will listen for any time a lead fills out a form, add +1 to your score field, and if it’s the very first form they’ve ever filled out, it will log the date of when it was done. If the lead has ever filled out a form in the past, there will already be a date value in the date field, so the flow choice would just skip over it and do nothing. Results You’ll See: With the original goal of identifying leads who have filled out more than 5 forms you’ll be able to filter for leads that have filled out at least 5 forms. In addition, this campaign will let you search for leads based on when they had filled out their very first form, regardless of how long ago it was. Since it’s stored in a lead field, it’s a lead attribute that is not affected by the Data Retention Policy at all.

Issue Description You are trying to unapprove or delete an asset and get the following error: [Asset Name] is in use and cannot be deleted/unapproved Issue Resolution Marketo assets (such as emails, templates, forms, lists, smart lists, and programs) cannot be deleted while they are used or referenced by another asset. If the error does not specify where the asset is being used or referenced, you can find this information in the Used By tab in the asset's summary page. For programs, you can find the Used By section in the program's View drop-down. The Used By section will show where the asset is in use, and you can click on the links to jump directly to that location. Once the asset is no longer referenced anywhere else in Marketo, it can be deleted. If you are certain the asset is no longer in use but are still unable to delete it, please contact Marketo Support

Issue Description Clicking on a link in a Marketo e-mail that re-directs to a non-Marketo webpage destination does not open the page. Issue Resolution Complete the troubleshooting step below. If they do not resolve the issue, include the results in a Marketo Support Ticket. Check the CNAME is correctly setup for the email tracking link [Related DOC] Check that the Default Branding Name matches the CNAME in Step 1 (check for typos). [Related DOC] If you are unsure you can visit CNAME lookup on mxtoolbox and enter the default branding name to check. Under the Domain field enter your default branding name. Do you have SSL for tracking links enabled? If Yes, tracking links in emails should start with If No, tracking links in emails should start with If you do not have SSL enabled, but when you click the link it resolves to ,try a different network and see if it still occurs. Your network may be configured to automatically use HTTPS automatically even if the link is specified as HTTP. (Check with your network admin) If you are re-directed to the non-Marketo landing page but the page does not load: Check with the website admin if there are any redirect rules setup on the website. Try cutting out parts of the additional URL Parameter to see if that fixes the issue to identify which part of the URL parameter is causing it. Sometimes lead tokens or the mkt_tok may affect a redirect rule, since mkt_tok generates random characters and sometimes the token contains percentage '%' characters. It very common for websites to interpret a % followed by a character as an encoding. Seen in this website here If you are unable to resolve the issue in the steps above, provide the test results and information in a Marketo Support Case.

Issue You are utilizing Forms on Marketo Landing Pages, and want to run reporting on these forms. Solution Currently Marketo has reporting for Email assets and Landing Pages. We do not have the ability to report on Forms specifically. One option would be to use Web Page reporting - this reported information would be limited to Marketo Pages with numbers of records who filled out the form, listed under "conversions." You could then create a Smart List to identify leads who have filled out these forms.

Issue Authorized support admin unable to find a contact to add as authorized support contact. Solution The contact will need to have logged in to the community (nation.marketo.com) at least once for their profile to be created and recognized in the system. "In order to appear on the list of available contacts, the user must have clicked Community (while logged into Marketo) at least once." docs.marketo.com/display/public/DOCS/Manage+Authorized+Contacts+in+the+Community Once the contact has logged in to the community, the authorized support admin should be able to see the contact to be added as an authorized support contact.

Issue Search engines index all pages, but you want to exclude some pages from the index and allow others. Solution To prevent most search engine web crawlers from indexing a page on your site, place the following meta tag into the <head> section of your page (copy the bolded print): <meta name="robots" content="noindex"> To prevent only Google web crawlers from indexing a page: <meta name="googlebot" content="noindex"> You can also add the following after the content="noindex to stop links from being crawled on a page: , nofollow" Example use: <META NAME="ROBOTS" CONTENT="NOINDEX, NOFOLLOW"> Using "nofollow" means the crawler will not crawl the links on the page while the "noindex" will only block the page from being indexed. Within Marketo this can be applied on a template basis and then on any pages using said template will not be indexed. You can also ask support to set your Images and Files Directory in Design Studio to not be indexed so documents such as whitepapers will not show up in search engine results.

Issue Attempting to push a custom audience to Facebook results in a Facebook Authorization Error visible in Notifications. Some custom audiences can be pushed and it appears to be only affecting a certain Ad account. Solution Issue Resolution 1.) Check if the Custom Audience Terms (facebook.com/legal/terms/customaudienc) have been accepted 2.) Log in as the user used in the Facebook Custom Audience service in Marketo and check in Audience Manager to see if there are any custom audiences that have the "Accept Terms" button pop-up similar to this screenshot. 3.) As per our recent release notes at docs.marketo.com/display/public/DOCS/Release+Notes%3A+Winter+%2719: "Facebook now requires a Business Manager account in order to leverage your Custom Audience integration. Your Facebook LaunchPoint service must be associated with a Business Manager account or your integration will no longer work after January 14, 2019. To set up a Business Manager account, please refer to Facebook Help." 4.) Check if the user used in the Facebook Custom Audience service in Marketo is a Business Manager account 5.) After completing the checks above, try to push a custom audience again to the affected ad account. If unsuccessful, recreate the Facebook service and test to push a custom audience from there.

Issue If a lead in an import file has a blank value for a column (e.g. first name), will Marketo overwrite the existing data in Marketo when the file is imported? Solution Marketo does not overwrite the existing data if a field for a lead in an import file is blank. Per this article: https://docs.marketo.com/display/public/DOCS/Clear+Field+Values "Leaving the new value blank or simply entering a SPACE will not truly empty the field. You have to type in NULL. Also, remember, flow steps can't be undone after running." While the example shown in the article is with a smart campaign flow step, the NULL value is also applicable to list import.

Issue You created a picklist field in SFDC and want to know if that field will sync down to Marketo with the field type of picklist. Solution Marketo has a picklist option in form fields, but not in Lead Database fields. When you sync a field from SFDC that has the type of picklist, this field will show in Marketo with a type of String. However, when you create a form, the field type for your field will show as "select," which is a picklist.

Knowledgebase

Maintaining a Directory of Leads Bouncing Emails

Top Blocklists - What You Need to Know

IFrame Not Showing in an Email

SSO Login for CRM Integration User

Preventing Search Engines From Indexing Images and Files

How to Pull a Report of All Non-Marketable Records

Record Failed to Sync to Salesforce with a Field Validation Error

Adding Multiple Values to a Smart List Filter Using a Text Type Field

Email Tracking URL Security Enhancement

Wait Step Duration Options

What Happens to Marketo Forms When JavaScript is Disabled

Email Program or Smart Campaign Sent Email to a Fraction of Leads in Smart List

Storing Activity Data Beyond Retention Policy

Unable to Delete or Unapprove Asset - "Asset is in Use"

Marketo Email Link is not redirecting to a Non-Marketo Landing Page

Forms Reporting

Unable to Add Authorized Support Contact

Preventing Search Crawlers on a Page-Level Basis

How to Create a Custom Interesting Moment Type

Facebook Authorization Error - Custom Audience

List Import - Blank Values in CSV or TXT File

Picklist Field Type in SFDC and Marketo