As many of us in the Pardot marketing automation world know, getting hold of valuable campaign effectiveness data can be challenging. On one hand you have Pardot Campaigns, which paint a picture of the campaign that generated a leads. For any of us with sales cycles beyond a day or any sort of multi-touch campaigns, this number can be virtually meaningless.
On the other hand is the Salesforce.com Campaign object. This allows for deeper reporting across campaigns that touched a particular opportunity. For many of our clients the campaign object is kind of like a multi-purpose swiss army knife, being used for many purposes, so campaigns that have no relevance need to be removed from any campaign attribution. We typically accomplish this through a standard naming campaign naming convention which allow us to use report names to ensure we get reports with the applicable campaigns included.
Pardot recently announced that they’re adding Pardot Campaign Attribution Models which will allow users to automatically identify which campaign are building pipeline. While the feature announcement is high level and the details are sparse, there are a couple of key words which jump out at me. The campaign attribution models are basically 3 out-of-box reports which identify opportunities associated with campaigns in 3 different scenarios: first campaign touch, last campaign touch, and even distribution models where every campaign that touched an opportunity receives part of the attribution.
This is a big step forward to Pardot in that it represents an option by the current “first touch” option that is offered natively by Pardot. But you still need a word of caution when working with them. Equal campaign attribution is a great option but it means that you really need to be cognizant of how you’re using campaigns and ensuring a certain level of campaign cleanliness.
A recent client we worked with was using campaigns to track when their call center touched a opportunity. With the new marketing campaign attribution it appears that a certain percent of the opportunity will be associated to this call center activity. This may be good – or maybe not. You’ll need to keep it top of mind so you don’t find yourself in a sticky situation.
Perhaps there’s more to this story. We’ll find out when the new Pardot Campaign Attribution Models are released on Nov 14, 2017. We’ll keep you posted.
