Challenge: Fixing Salesforce Campaigns Reporting!
I’m currently trying to crack down Reporting on my campaigns using Salesforce and Marketo.
The goal is (seems to be!) quite simple: I need to know, on a monthly basis:
A) How many Sales-Ready Leads each of my campaigns are generating.
B) How much revenue each of my campaigns are generating.
(See below for the description of a typical scenario.)
Challenge 1: Multiple “level” of leads
We have different “level” of leads, so no I cannot simply use the number of lead member a campaign have. We have “Prospect” & “Sales-Ready Leads”. Sales-Ready Leads are the one that have been qualified by our Triage team and assigned to sales rep. We differentiate the 2 level using the Lead Status in Salesforce. So my need is to report only the Sales-Ready Leads
Challenge 2: Campaign attribution
Most of our leads are touched by multiple campaigns and I don’t believe that I should only attribute the last or the first campaign.
With the current way Members to Campaigns relationship works in Salesforce, when I report on multiple campaigns, I get a higher total number of leads & revenue than the reality. For example,
- Lead is member of Campaign A & Campaign B.
- Lead is converted with an opportunity
- The opportunity close at 100$
The Campaign reports will show me:
- Campaign A generate 1 lead and 100$
- Campaign B generated 1 lead and 100$
So if I report to the board that each campaign generated 100$ and the total revenue of the company is actually 100$, my CEO will fire me on the spot! 
Maybe the solution is outside Salesforce?
We also have a deep integration with Marketo, our Marketing automation platform. So if I can find a way to get that kind of reporting in Marketo instead of Salesforce, I would be as satisfied!
I don’t mind having to do some manual work to get the numbers, but I certainly do not want to start building complex Spreadsheets and CSV files manipulation to report on my campaigns.
Description of a typical scenario:
We sponsor a Webinar: 1,000 people registered, 50 request a demo and qualify right after the event. In the following 2 weeks another 50 leads become qualified Sales-Ready Leads by visiting our website and completing a demo request form. 2 Leads purchase a widget for $10,000. The following month, thanks to nurturing program, an additional 50 prospects become Sales-Ready Leads and 5 more leads purchased a widget for $10,000.
What I would like to know at the end of the month is:
After Month 1: Campaign Webinar generated 100 leads & $20,000.
After Month 2: Campaign Webinar generated 150 leads & $70,000.
Update: I posted it on Salesforce Community Website as well.
12 Comments to Challenge: Fixing Salesforce Campaigns Reporting!
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Hey Alex,
This is one of the biggest challenges facing marketing users of Salesforce.com … I’ll put some things together and get back to you this weekend.
Andrew
I knew it was a hard one!
Thanks for your feedback, looking forward for your ideas!
If you want to know for a lead, which campaigns included it, you can build a Custom Report Type.
The report type would be Leads with Campaign History.
From the lead, you can add the lookup through to the converted opportunity, and from campaign history, you can add the lookup to any campaign details. You’d also be able to filter on the lead fields.
You don’t explain in your answer how to deal with double-counting. If there is another campaign that touches the lead, how do you want to show that?
Wouldn’t you be able to report on Campaigns associated with Opportunities? Or the Campaign influenced opportunity report?
Thanks for your feedback.
Thomas, I’m more interested to know which of my campaigns generate the most in terms of Number fo leads and Revenue $.
And you are right I didn’t explained how to deal with Double Counting as I don’t know how to handle it. That a big part of my challenge…
Caroline, The standard report for Campaigns and opportunity does not considere the double counting. Sames fore campaign influence. So in the end, when I create my reports I get higher numbers compare to reality. Hence my post on finding how to do it.
Hi Alex,
What I’ve been working on for the past couple of months is really diving into Parent & Child Campaigns and the channel for which they are executed.
With this, I am still relying on one (1) primary campaign source for each opportunity (to prevent the duplicate association you speak about).
So for example in your situation my Marketo and Salesforce instant might look like this:
Parent Campaign: Webinars or Specific webinars if you have multiple, i.e. Lead Gen Webinars
Child Campaign: February Webinar
Member Statuses: Sent, Did Not Open, Open – No Click, Click – No Register, Registered, Attended, Registered – Did Not Attend
Channel: Webinar
I then have marketo send out all of the invites with the email and registration form. For each campaign I’ll have a trigger action that updates their status in the Salesforce campaign. So when they fill out the form, it automatically changes them to Registered. (The only manual part comes after the event when you need to upload the attendees).
This is great however, because its easy for me to imagine my funnel of the 1000 people we invited and have direct visibility in a dashboard in Salesforce on how I’m doing on moving people down the path.
Now, I might run lead nurturing out of Marketo following the webinar. I might also argue that the Lead Nurturing should be a campaign of its own…meaning, I wouldn’t necessarily attribute the revenue from this nurturing to the webinar itself (unless its the on-demand follow up)…you should attribute revenue directly to a “Lead Nurturing” campaign.
At the end of the day you’ll have a few reports you can give to your board:
1. Webinars Parent Campaign: A roll up of all the webinars you have run so far and the revenue associated (Roll up fields are standard, but I have some other fields I’m happy to share with you offline)
2. Webinar – February: The individual details of the child campaign, who attended, who didn’t, what revenue was associated.
3. Lead Nurturing or On-Demand Email?(optional): A campaign that shows directly why a system like Marketo is invaluable. Lead nurturing following the campaign which would not have been done in most other situations.
let me know if that makes sense. I’m happy to discuss whenever
.
Hi Micheal,
Thanks for your great feedback. I currently have the parent – child setup you refer to. I’m still not completely set up for reporting, and roll-up summary. I may reach out to you off-line to understand more of what your are doing.
I agree with you about the nurturing. The revenue should be attributed to the nurturing campaign. I currently have a Nurturing campaign in SFDC that all my leads entering the nurturing become member. But I haven’t set up reports yet.
In your post you refer to channel. How do you use it? Is it a custom filed at the campaign level? And how do you report on it?
I think I might have to give up (for now…) on the double counting issue and stick with the primary campaign to report.
Alex,
There is no easy way to associate a variable amount to a campaign. If you use the campaign influence tool it will still associate 100% of the opportunity amount to the campaign before the opportunity is created.
what you’re going to need to do is create custom fields in the “campaign member status record” … this will allow you to add some kind of entry beyond simply stating the member status value.
Basically you can then assign a weighted value to this field. This campaign gets a 1, and that a 2.
Then you can do one of three things.
1. Create a roll up summary field to look at these values and give you some kind of computational score. But this will be limited in it’s effectiveness.
2. Export a list with all of these campaign member status in with a report that pulls on the campaign influence object. You will then be able to pull these values allowing you to do some kind of manual manipulation in Excel. For example, the Opportunity has 3 campaigns associated to it … one is a 2, one is a 3, and one is a 5. You can then used these numbers to say 20% goes to campaign 1, 30% goes to campaign 2, and 50% goes to campaign 3.
3. lastly using triggers and a series of custom visual force pages you could basically custom create an application to do this reporting.
I would suggest option 2.
Let me know if this makes sense.
Andrew
Hey Alex,
For your first question about lead status, why can’t you add to a list in Marketo when someone turns into a sales-ready lead? (Then adding them to their own campaign) If you did this then you would be able to report on overall campaign results or just Sales-Ready lead results. This may help you solve the problem of reporting on leads by status.
Campaign attribution:
Everyone wants to know which of my campaigns cause the sale. The answer is that there is no specific path, though you can find key indicators of campaign success a few ways:
Number of touches needed for success:
For this you will look at the average number of touches needed to achieve success. You should look at this both by lead (primary contact) and by account (all contacts).
Then go one step further and look by type of activity- trade show, email, webinar, sales call, etc. You can capture the types of activities prospects are participating in using Marketo – adding them to lists based on their actions. Then you can see that results like 70% of opps viewed a webinar once they were Sales Ready. (I know this means creating lots of lists.) I like this approach because you aren’t saying that email 1 is more important than email 2 – but instead, email needs to make up 30% of our touches. You can review this by status to make this even more powerful. This would let you see info like 30% of email touches had to be in the decision making stage.
Essentially, you will be creating this type of chart http://myeducatedguess.blogs.techtarget.com/files/2009/06/media-consumption-buying-process.png, but for your own assets/or types of campaigns, which would be super powerful.
Now, look at this report: http://pages2.marketo.com/rs/marketob2/images/CampaignSuccess.png (Sorry- I blocked out the results because I don’t want my competitors seeing which activities are most successful for us- plus this report not only shows number of opportunities, but the average dollar amount.) You can see that once populated I can see what is most successful. If you create the lists like suggested above, you will also be able to filter this by Sales Ready leads- one of the requirements you mentioned. Does it double count? Yes, but what I look at isn’t the overall members or opps, but the % of opps- a much better indicator.
Next you will look by campaign influence. I know you don’t love that this is imperfect in Salesforce. The key to this is to not report on revenue dollars, since one large enterprise deal could skew all your data. This only works well if you have a very standard ASP. Instead look by the number of opps in each campaign. Yes, I know this double counts everything, though that’s not the biggest problem. The bigger problem is if you have 5 emails that go to very specific segments, and one email that goes to everyone you will end up with the one that goes to everyone looking like it provides the most influence just because of its larger reach (even thought the segmented ones probably resulted in much better success). To account for this you need to divide by the number of emails or offers that were sent – giving you a percentage. This percentage will still double count, but it won’t matter, because you can now compare to see which are the most successful.
Also, I suggest you reach out to another Marketo customer, Jason Stewart of Demandbase. He is super slick with his reporting- using Salesforce and Marketo together better than Jimi Hendrix plays guitar. He did a great presentation at Dreamforce last year on campaign influence which is always worth a rewatching: http://www.salesforce.com/video/dreamforce-sessions09-marketing.jsp?v=2cRPPzIK6fQ
Does any of that help? If not, let’s talk more.
PS- You may end up head over heels for our new marketing analytics product launching in the summer. It will help get too many of these answers- deciphering how and why leads are moving through your funnel. We will reach out soon with more specific details.
If you want to know for a lead, which campaigns included it, you can build a Custom Report Type.The report type would be Leads with Campaign History.From the lead, you can add the lookup through to the converted opportunity, and from campaign history, you can add the lookup to any campaign details. You’d also be able to filter on the lead fields.You don’t explain in your answer how to deal with double-counting. If there is another campaign that touches the lead, how do you want to show that?
+1
We use a campaign weighting mechanism that allows the generate dollars to be distributed over all of the leads… We added a custom field on the campgin table called WEIGHT__C, default value is 10. Our marketing managers have the ability to change this value. Any time we are rolling up dollars (or leads for that matter), it first calculates the weight associated with that campaign member as such: WEIGHT__C/(sum of WEIGHT__C for all campaigns that this lead is a member of). With the default for all campaigns being 10, everything is split evenly amongst all of the campaigns a lead is in. However the marketing managers have the flexibility to go inot sfdc and say that a particular campaign was more resource intensive than another and raise its relative weight. Perhaps a webinar is weighted twice (20) as much as a website visit (10). This produces a mutliplier that is applied to dollars and lead/opp counts.
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