Marketing & Automation Blog

Recently, I encountered an automation that repeatedly failed during a Query activity, with the dreaded error message: “Automation failed due to system error.” Despite my best efforts to modify the query and explore other avenues, I couldn’t resolve the issue. Naturally, I turned to Google for answers. The majority of responses pointed to common culprits:  Primary Key Violation : If your query generates duplicate rows that violate the primary key constraints, it can lead to failure.  Inserting Null Values : Attempting to insert null values into non-nullable fields can trigger errors. Data Truncation : Inserting values longer than the field allows (resulting in truncation) can cause issues. Timeouts : If your query exceeds the 30-minute timeout window, it will fail.  Despite checking my query against these possibilities, none seemed to fit my case.  Desperate for a solution, I contacted Salesforce support. Their investigation uncovered a critical detail: an ‘Invalid le...

Recently I worked on a project where the requirement was to extract UTM parameters used in triggered emails for some audit purposes. These are the tracking parameters that are appended to the URLs when the links are clicked in the emails and they are used to understand and attribute the web traffic generated from the CRM emails. For example, some common parameters will be the source, content block name, campaign name, email name etc. Source will always be email, campaign name will be the name of the campaign (Black Friday, Summer Sale, Boxing Day etc.), email name to understand which email generated the higher traffic and revenue and content block names to understand how different sections within the email performed.  The approach that I took was to: First, identify all the triggered sends in the account using WSproxy. This provided a list of all active triggered emails in the account along with important details like name, customer key, JobId, BatchId, Subscriberkey etc. Second, d...

Recently Salesforce announced changes to its data retention policy for Marketing Cloud Engagement. Starting January 15, 2025, subscriber and journey engagement data will be retained and accessible for 180 days. This policy applies to data you retrieve using the Email Studio Reports in Analytics Builder, the tracking reports in Email Studio, Tracking Extracts in Automation Studio, or requests to SOAP API.  When this policy takes effect, subscriber and journey engagement data over 180 days old will no longer be accessible using these reports.  Here is the announcement Most of the Marketing Cloud instances I have worked on in the past, typically have automation that extracts previous days' tracking data, imports it in a data extension and also transfers it to external reporting or data storage service. The most common and important tracking extract data are - Sent, Not Sent, Open, Clicks, Unsubscribes, Subscribers, Send Jobs and Bounces. In case you do not have this historic...