Multi-Touch Attribution using Pardot and Salesforce Campaigns
Your prospects don’t just come to your website and click buy. The modern customer journey involves a lot of research before the first contact, multiple marketing touches and several interactions with sales. This is even more true for complex products which have longer buying cycles and usually involve multiple decision makers.
Which campaign will receive credit when multiple marketing campaigns touch the same prospect resulting in an opportunity creation? You want to measure how your marketing initiatives are tied to business results. However this is not a straightforward process. There are more ways to credit marketing activities which impact sales and there are a couple methodologies which you can use.
Marketing is not just money down the drain. Marketers have a real impact on the organization’s bottom line. You just need to use these attribution models to prove it. You also need a marketing automation platform like Pardot automation solution to track everything. This blog post will walk you through those examples and how you can use Salesforce to measure that.
Data-driven marketers should continue to ask the following questions:
- In which marketing campaigns should I continue to invest?
- Which marketing campaigns should I abandon or what should I change?
- Which campaign helped you acquire new prospects?
- What is the cost per new name for each type of campaign?
- Which campaigns influenced the most Opportunities, pipeline and revenue?
- How much pipeline credit is last quarter’s webinar getting?
Definitions
Understand the following concepts is crucial when measuring marketing’s impact on sales.
- Pipeline Credit - When sales opens an Opportunity in Salesforce
- Revenue Credit - When sales successfully closes an Opportunity in Salesforce
- Attribution - Method of crediting Opportunity value to one or many marketing activities
Salesforce Campaigns
These are essential in tracking all your marketing activities and touch points. They can have both Leads and Contacts as members. You can categorize your marketing activities, measure the success of each activity and tie them into Opportunities.
Pardot
In Salesforce Pardot, you can use Pardot Completion Actions for emails and forms to change the Salesforce Campaign member status of your Leads and Contact prospects. This will indicate they successfully performed your call to action in your marketing campaign.
Example 1
Date: May 2016
Department: Marketing Prospects
Activity: Registers for Webinar Campaign
Campaign: WBN 2016 Learn About Us
Cost: $3000
Example 2
Date: February 2016
Department: Marketing Prospects
Activity: Performs the Call to Action in Email Blast
Campaign: EB 2016 Infographic
Cost: $1000
Example 3
Date: April 2016
Department: Sales
Activity: Downloads Whitepaper from the Website
Campaign: WC 2016 Advance Tech Specs
Cost: $3000
In Salesforce, it will look something like this:
Campaign View
Opportunity Stage History
Opportunity Campaign Influence
First-touch (FT) Attribution
Simply means giving credit to the campaign that acquires a prospect.
Pipeline Credit
Which campaign should receive Pipeline Credit for that opportunity? The initial campaign will receive 100% Pipeline Credit for that Opportunity, simply because the opportunity was created.
Campaign: WBN 2016 Learn About Us
Cost: $3,000
Pipeline Credit: $100,000
Revenue Credit
Which campaign should receive Revenue Credit for that opportunity? The campaign that acquired the prospect gets 100% of the Revenue Credit if that opportunity closes.
Campaign: WBN 2016 Learn About Us
Cost: $3,000
Revenue Credit: $80,000
Your Pardot Campaign Report is a good place to monitor FT attributions:
Multi-Touch (MT) Attribution
Simply means giving credit across all campaigns evenly when a prospects achieves success in multiple campaigns. The prospect must achieve a successful responded campaign status for all the marketing activities they participated in.
Pipeline Credit
Which campaign should receive Pipeline Credit when multiple campaigns touch the same prospects resulting in an opportunity? Only the January Webinar and February Email Blast will split the credit because they occurred before the opportunity was created. The Web Content campaign does not receive any credit because it happened after the opportunity was opened.
Example 1
Campaign: WBN 2016 Learn About Us
Cost: $3,000
Pipeline Credit: $50,000
Example 2
Campaign: EB 2016 Infographic
Cost: $1,000
Pipeline Credit: $50,000
Revenue Credit
Which campaigns should receive Revenue Credit when multiple campaigns touch the same prospects resulting in an opportunity? The revenue credit is split among the January Webinar, February Email Blast and April Whitepaper Download.
Example 1
Campaign: WBN 2016 Learn About Us
Cost: $3,000
Revenue Credit: $33,333
Example 2
Campaign: EB 2016 Infographic
Cost: $1000
Revenue Credit: $33,333
Example 3
Campaign: WC 2016 Advance Tech Specs
Cost: $5000
Revenue Credit: $33,333
Summary Comparison
You shouldn’t have to decide on which method to use. You can’t always use one or the other. Both methodologies are very beneficial and you must be comfortable with the differences between them so you can make sound decisions when allocating your marketing dollars.
What are some of the ways you measure your marketing return on investment (ROI) using Salesforce? I love bringing together both marketing and sales executive to discuss measuring marketing’s impact on the sales pipeline. Let me know what you think in the comments below or email me at CRMexpert@Macromator.com if you are looking for advance marketing tracking in Salesforce.