First off, MarCloud uses Pardot Advanced but you can achieve all of the below if you have Pardot Plus too. When I see clients using Growth, I will always tell them to consider the upgrade to Plus and it’s because of the reporting benefits I’m going to show you below. There's also an incentive to upgrade because of Ad Studio but I'm getting sidetracked…
It was actually Brian Coles who inspired me to write phone line in cambodia this blog (I recommend you read Brian’s marketing automation book) because the description of his Trailblazer event said there is no known documentation that ties all Pardot’s elements together to make this (campaign influence) work’.
Campaign Influence is interesting because every single marketer has a strong desire to have it implemented. I personally love it because it proves a point of how powerful marketing actually is, so when sales are moaning at us for doing webinars and drawing pretty pictures’ we can actually say how much £/$/€ we actually generated off the back of it. Watch the organisation invest in pencil sharpeners once they see the ROI…
Sometimes blogs are a little bit theoretical so I want to show you how we do it. Take from it what you like.
For a practical guide on how to approach campaign reporting and multi-touch attribution, read this one instead.
Pardot Prerequisites
First things first, you need the below:
A strong Campaign Hierarchy that actually aligns with questions you want to answer. For example, do you compare performance in Germany vs the UK? Do you want to measure campaign success on your product/service lines - maybe it’s by marketing channel? Do you want to measure the effectiveness?
In any case, the Salesforce campaign hierarchy should answer your questions. I strongly suggest writing down what you want from your reports before building a structure. Starting with the end in mind goes a long way. P.S. I do not like using dates in the campaign name unless it’s relevant! Think about how many things you’ll need to update next year if you stick a year in the name… Use B2B Marketing Analytics filters to be smarter with reporting on dates.
In the above prerequisite I am assuming you already have Connected Campaigns turned on. If you don’t, do it now! It’s such a core feature that enables you to get the reporting you need and want. Put it this way, if you don’t enable it you cannot confidently attribute revenue across your campaigns.
You need marketing content. If you don’t actively market (which is rare but I’ve seen it) then you don’t have anything to measure. Content is key here and it gives you something to talk about. Otherwise you’re that loud shouting person in the middle of town who just repeats nonsense.
All of your marketing can be boiled down to touchpoints’ and when you define what these are, you can create a Salesforce campaign against it to measure the effectiveness of the touch’. This will become clearer later on…
Ensure you’re using Pardot first-party cookies and Pardot forms. We want this to be seamless and your technical setup can impact tracking.
Review your lead management and conversion process. Speak to sales about when and how they convert Leads - I want to feel confident that Contact Roles are being used properly and values are being added to Opportunities. You will need Pardot Advanced if you want to get away with not using Contact Roles (the Einstein AI is REALLY cool).
Enable campaign influence and configure it to align with your business.
The Basics
Before we get into what we do at MarCloud, let’s lay some foundations.
You want to be tracking all of your touchpoints. Think about paid ads, third-party blogs, events, webinars, content downloads, video plays, demo signups, newsletters, email campaigns and so on…
If you put money or time into it, we want to know if it generates revenue directly or indirectly.
That’s the basic logic. If money or time goes in, we should be tracking it.
There may be some instances where this doesn’t apply, like a partnership with a third party who just sends Leads (lucky you!) and in these cases, I still recommend a campaign for this because I want to know who is the best partner!