Marketo’s January 2024 updates include on-demand webinars, email bot filters and more

Let’s kick off 2024 with a look at Adobe Marketo’s January updates, which cover all areas of the Marketo platform, from bulk lead imports to a jQuery update for Marketo Engage forms. 

Interactive webinars add on-demand functionality

Our schedules can get in the way of attending live events, but this is no longer a blocker for interactive webinars. Thanks to the January updates, on-demand webinar functionality is now available.

This feature adds to the current functionality of interactive webinars, which are powered by Adobe Connect. Now you can publish webinar recordings for those who didn’t attend the live event, creating on-demand webinars. 

With on-demand webinars, you can now:

• Reach out to all registrants, whether they attended live or on-demand giving you a larger pool of leads to continue engagement.
• View daily updates on the On-Demand Webinar dashboard, which include the number of leads watching on demand as well the watch duration for all visitors.

See an example of the dashboard in Adobe Docs. 

Why we care: On-demand webinars allow more leads to engage with your content, potentially resulting in a higher number of qualified leads.

Filtering email bot activity 

We all want accurate data on email performance, right? A new feature added in January helps identify and confirm bot activity within Marketo, which will, in turn, help provide more accurate reporting. 

The set up provides you with two options in relation to how you want to identify said activity, and can be set up in Admin > Email. More information can be found on the Adobe website.

Filtering allows you to:

• Match with the Interactive Advertising Bureau (IAB) bot list.
  • Filter any activity that matches with anything on the list.
• Or match with proximity pattersn.
  • If two activities happen at the same time, this is considered a bot. For example: Lead ID, Email asset, Link click or email open. 

Why we care. It’s now easier than ever to weed out bot activity, resulting in more accurate reporting across the board.

Bulk lead import API update 

Using bulk lead import through an API reduces a marketer’s time enormously, so while this update may be minor, it is useful to note.

When a job creation is made and ID is used as the lookupfield, if no records are located you will now be able to see the numofrowsfailed within the response. 

Why we care. The more insight the better! However, this is more of a “good to know” uodate. 

Manual live chat termination 

With Adobe’s continued investment in dynamic chat, a new feature released in January enables visitors and agents to manually terminate live sessions. This is applicable for those on the dynamic chat Select package. 

Why we care. This update delivers an enhanced user experience for agents.

 jQuery update for Marketo Engage forms

On Jan. 9, 2024, Marketo initiated the transition to a newer version of jQuery, from 1.x to version 3.7.1, which is fundamental for the optimal operation of Marketo forms. 

Why we care. This transition was unlikely to affect many Marketo users or any landing pages, however it was advised to update one’s website in early January if your website loads on its own version of the jQuery library and there are embedded forms present.

More information can be found in this Marketo Nation Article.

Coming from a best practice angle, it would be advised to update Marketo landing page templates to utilize the latest version of JQuery to avoid any issues that may affect any form submissions and functionality. 

The best thing your team can do is conduct a quick audit of the landing page templates to see if there’s specific jQuery code doing custom actions on the page, and do a quick check with 3.7.1 compatibility.

Full Marketo release notes for January 2024 can be found on the Adobe website.