Multi-Touch Marketing Campaign Attribution With Pardot and Salesforce — The 2021 Update!

It’s been five years since I wrote my blog on “Why You Need to Focus On Defining Campaign Attribution in Salesforce”, and I felt it was about time to update you.

The good news: I have a few new ideas on the subject.

The bad news: Very little has changed with Salesforce Campaigns since my last post (despite Salesforce launching Multi-Touch Attribution B2B Marketing Analytics in 2018).

So, as usual, let’s set the scene.

You spent time and money producing an ebook.

You’ve followed my advice and added a funnel to your gated content.

The demos produced from this have turned into opportunities and revenue.

Salesforce is fine with that.

The eBook Demo form has a Pardot completion action that associates the prospect with the correct Salesforce Campaign.

The Opportunities get associated with the Salesforce Campaign.

You can see the pipeline and revenue generated by the ebook.

Voila.

But hang on.

What about the money we spent promoting the ebook?

We did Sponsored Posts on LinkedIn.

We took our custom audiences and remarketed the ebook on LinkedIn, Facebook and Google.

Hell, we even marketed the eBook to our CRM prospects who had already converted on another marketing asset!

How do we track that in Salesforce Campaigns?

In my previous post, I suggested that you lump the promotional costs into the cost of the Salesforce Campaign to calculate ROI for the entire campaign. In essence, you should be thinking about the campaign in its entirety, not just as an asset or indeed a paid channel.

For many (or maybe even most) marketers using Salesforce, my views haven’t changed. That’s because it’s a lot easier to have every person who downloads the eBook added to a Salesforce Campaign by a Pardot Form Action and then analyse the performance of your Channels in Google Sheets or Excel (maybe I should do a blog on that too).

That’s because Pardot’s B2B Marketing Analytics multi-touch attribution product is still based on Salesforce Campaigns.

So yes, you can Look at ROI from a First Touch, Last Touch, Even Distribution or Custom Attribution perspective with Pardot’s B2B Marketing Analytics.

But that still doesn’t solve the issue of how you organise campaigns in Salesforce and how you add Prospects to Multiple Campaigns in Salesforce.

So before we continue, let’s think about what we’re trying to achieve and how we want it to appear in Salesforce.

Option 1 — Create Multiple Dual Campaigns

Ebook NAME / Direct (eg SEO)
Ebook NAME / LinkedIn PPC
Ebook NAME / Remarketing
Ebook NAME / CRM Marketing
Ebook NAME / Twitter
Ebook NAME / LinkedIn
Ebook NAME / Other

Pros

• It’s possible to track campaign and channel ROI
• You can add a cost for each channel

Cons

• A lot of automation rules will be required to add members to each campaign.
• It won’t take long for you to hit your automation rule limit in Pardot.
• Your reports are going to be messy — you’ll most likely spend hours bucketing Campaign Names in Salesforce Reports to build useful Dashboards.
• It could get very confusing for any of your Salesforce Users who wish to attach a Campaign to a Person or Account.

Option 2 — Separate Campaigns for Channels

Ebook NAME
LinkedIn PPC
Remarketing
CRM Marketing
Twitter
LinkedIn
Other

Pros

• It’s possible to report on what Channels contributed to the eBook downloads
• Reports and Campaigns in Salesforce will be clean/simple
• You’d be able to use the Salesforce Campaign Influence Report to understand how Channel Spend contributed to revenue

Cons

• Opportunites can only be related to one Primary Campaign — you’d need to decide a process for that — do you want to do it by Channel or Campaign?
• You still won’t have ‘Out of The Box’ reports for ROI tracking.
• You still need to create a fair few automation rules in Pardot to add members to multiple campaigns.
• The data is limited for Channel reporting (there is no depth to the data like you have in the native advertising platforms)

So if you’re still game, this is how you do it.

Step 1

You have to be using UTM tracking correctly for all inbound traffic.

I’ve written a guide on how to do that here, and you also may want to use my Mass UTM URL Builder for consistent results.

Step 2

You need to make sure you are capturing the UTM properties correctly in Pardot. Jenna Molby has written a great post about that here

Step 3

You may want to sync the UTM parameter fields in Pardot with Salesforce on both the Contact and Lead Object. Naturally, you need to decide if you want those fields to be overwritten or not (do you want first or last touch?) Here is the Salesforce guide on how you map fields.

Step 4

For any tracking to work, Contact Roles have to be added to the Opportunities in Salesforce. I wrote this post about how you Force Contact Roles to be added to the Opportunity Here (with Apex code).

It’s worth saying that Salesforce has done a hell of a lot of development on Flows since then, and I imagine it entirely possible to automate that process now. KickSaw has written a great post about how you create flows here.

Step 5

Choose Option 1 or Option 2. If you choose Option 1, perhaps get on with hiring someone to manage your campaigns moving forward!

Step 6

Either way, you are going to need to do a lot of work on the forms across your website and build out the automation rules to add Members to the correct Campaigns. From a personal perspective, I have found Option 2 to be more than sufficient for my own reporting requirements.

Conclusion

Pardot B2B Analytics has made ROI reporting better. After all, if you’re focussing efforts on the top of the funnel, you can use first-touch attribution to show where most of your prospects generated. You could look at the last touch if you want to understand which campaign had the highest close rate. And then you have options to do even split and custom attribution.

The real issue here is with Salesforce Campaigns. Until Salesforce develops a separate related entity to the Campaign object that can hold data on Channels, you can either do what I have suggested above or buy your way out of the problem with a different reporting platform.

Always interested in hearing other peoples views on the subject!

Photo by Eva Elijas from Pexels