The InHouse Marketers publishes 7 write-ups from migrations its consultants delivered: Eloqua to Marketo, Pardot to Marketo across several instances, HubSpot to Pardot, HubSpot to Odoo, and a Marketo to Marketo merge after an acquisition, plus guides on what breaks in a migration and on keeping website forms capturing through one. Each says what was sequenced, what was rebuilt, and the parts that cost more than anyone quoted for.
See the track record · What transfers, and what gets rebuilt · Run the audit checklist on your own instance
One write-up per move, each from an engagement on the track record.
An Eloqua to Marketo migration is two projects sharing one name: moving assets and programs across, and moving the website's data collection across without losing a submission. The second is the one that gets under-scoped. Eloqua's Campaign Canvas and Marketo's Smart Campaign model do not map one to one, so budget for rebuilding logic rather than translating it.
A Pardot to Marketo migration gets harder the moment there is more than one Pardot instance to move. Consolidating several Account Engagement (Pardot) instances into one Marketo instance is a design problem before it is a migration: a workspace and a person partition per acquired organisation, a subdomain each, a decision about which instance goes first, and a Salesforce connector that can only serve one arrangement at a time.
Account Engagement (Pardot) has no equivalent of a HubSpot workflow, so in a HubSpot to Pardot migration each workflow becomes some mix of automation rule, completion action, page action, dynamic list and Engagement Studio program. That makes the project mostly an automation rebuild. Emails and landing pages are an HTML and CSS job and tend to get the attention first, but the operational programs are where the work is, and lifecycle and scoring get redesigned in Pardot's own model.
If you are planning a HubSpot to Odoo migration, decide early who will rebuild your workflows, because Odoo has no like-for-like equivalent of HubSpot's workflow editor or its active lists: program logic gets rebuilt rather than ported, and on our migration much of it ended up as regular expressions in server actions. Whoever does that rebuild has to learn Odoo well enough to teach it, and that learning takes more time than the migration itself.
What the project costs beyond the licence, and which parts of an instance do not come with you.
In a marketing automation migration the records usually arrive intact; what breaks is the scoring, lifecycle, routing and CRM sync logic, which has to be rebuilt in the destination platform's own execution model. A lead that arrives in the new instance with a score of 87 means nothing until something there can say how 87 happened and what should happen next. Plan for activity history to stay in the old platform, and scope the logic before the export.
The workstreams that get scoped last and cost most: the website, and a database arriving from an acquisition.
On a marketing automation migration involving Adobe Marketo Engage, HubSpot, Account Engagement (Pardot) or Oracle Eloqua, The InHouse Marketers runs the site as a separate workstream so its forms keep capturing: hidden fields inventoried, forms repointed in batches, both platforms taking posts until a set date, and a daily zero-submission alert. The failure this guards against is a form that loads, validates and shows its thank-you message while the UTM, GCLID and referrer values never reach the new database. A value lost that way can't be recovered, because the landing URL that carried it has gone.
Marketing automation consolidation after acquisition works best when the acquired brands stay separated inside one instance rather than blended on day one. Workspaces hold each org's assets and programs. Person partitions hold each org's database, and every org keeps its own sending and landing page subdomains. Consolidate the platform and the licence first. Leave the brands alone until someone senior decides to retire one. Consultants at The InHouse Marketers have done this twice for one web-based solution provider: several Pardot business units into one Marketo instance in 2020, and later an acquired competitor's Marketo instance into the parent's.
The six lenses every migration here was run against: discovery, sequencing, release engineering, data and consent, revenue continuity, and QA and cutover, with the phase each discipline owns.
Tell us which platforms are involved and where the project stands, from a first draft of the plan to a cutover that has stalled. We will tell you which of the problems above you are likely to hit next.
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