A Complete Guide to Pardot Campaign Reporting & Multi-Touch Attribution
A Complete Guide to Pardot Campaign Reporting & Multi-Touch Attribution
Pardot Campaigns • Training
This blog was written before Pardot was renamed to Marketing Cloud Account Engagement. You can read more about the name change and what it means here.
Achieving accurate Pardot campaign reporting is a challenge many marketers face. So I started this blog post intending to clear up some questions about campaign attribution that I get asked frequently.
Before I knew it, I had written this mammoth guide on Pardot campaign reporting, with all of the ins and outs of B2B marketing analytics, campaign reporting, and multi-touch attribution included. You’re welcome!
Correctly attributing sales to multiple touch points and campaigns isn’t a nice-to-have but a must-have!
So, if you’re reading this and find anything unfamiliar with the tools and approaches I’m talking about then please do drop me a message and I can clear up any areas of confusion.
Let’s start with the ideal Pardot campaign attribution scenario…
The Pardot Campaign Reporting Dream
Example:
- Daisy sees your great post on LinkedIn and clicks to visit your website, which triggers the tracking code. Lead Source = LinkedIn.
- Daisy downloads a product-specific technical guide via a Pardot form because your content is awesome and she’s interested in the details, nice work. She opts-in too, but let’s not talk about GDPR here, time and place…
- Daisy is then associated with the Pardot Campaign associated with her first touchpoint. Let’s call this Campaign ‘Website Tracking’.
- Daisy becomes part of a nurturing program and is associated with the Salesforce Campaign ‘Nurture2020- Status Joined’.
- Daisy signs up for a webinar and attends, is associated with the Salesforce Campaign ‘Webinar – Status Attended’.
- Daisy achieves the correct score & grade so is automatically assigned to a sales user (MQL).
- A £20,000 Opportunity is then associated with Daisy (SQL) and she is added as a contact role to this opportunity (important for Pardot to see who is attached to what).
- The Opportunity closes. In Pardot, we see £20,000 ROI associated with the first touchpoint; Website Tracking.
- We head to B2B Marketing Analytics and look at our multi-touch campaign attribution report because we have a custom model set up and see that we’re associating £10,000 to the Website Tracking campaign, £3,000 to the Nurture2020 Campaign and £7,000 to the Webinar Campaign!
- We all celebrate as a single team and marketing gets all the credit they deserve and sales thank them for said efforts!
Step 10 was completely made up.
Daisy is also fictional, although she seems more realistic than step 10…
So how do we even begin to set our Pardot account up in a way that will accurately attribute sales to our individual Campaigns?
Well, there are a handful of Pardot features that need to be considered. These are:
When Do I Need To Set Up A Campaign?
It depends on what you’re tracking.
A Campaign is essentially a mechanism for us to group assets & objects together so we can fully understand where ROI is coming from.
An easy one I go by is if you’re spending money on something, you may need a campaign for it. For example, LinkedIn ads, a new website as part of a rebrand, Organic posts (bonus ROI – or you can use staff costs!), events, webinars, the list goes on.
Your time is paid for, so make sure you’re tracking these ‘organic’ activities because there’s always a cost somewhere.
Connected Campaigns
Great multi-touch attribution starts with Connected Campaigns.
Note how in the above example, Pardot used the first action as the source campaign but B2B Marketing Analytics used this as a point of reference (the first touchpoint).
Connected Campaigns really help with custom campaign attribution models.
These campaigns have a 1-1 relationship with a prospect in Pardot and show where the ROI should be directed in terms of a ‘Source Campaign’.
The Pardot campaign will house all of the assets associated with a marketing campaign (Landing pages, emails, forms, links…). It all becomes clearer when we look at Engagement History a little later in this post.
Now, I won’t go into detail on how to turn Connected Campaigns on because Salesforce have already done this here. But, I will say that if you haven’t got Connected Campaigns turned on yet then please do!
Pardot always tries to work backwards and work out where prospects came from. To see the full list of sources it can actually work out, see here: How a Prospect’s Source Field Is Populated.
However, the above will be superceded if you are using Google UTM parameters in your URL.
I must stress something here because it catches everyone, the UTM information will only populate when it’s the prospect’s first touchpoint only. This is absolutely key. If the prospect triggers the Pardot tracking code in any capacity beforehand, the UTM info won’t populate.
Campaign Hierarchy
Chances are, you may not have a clear strategy in place yet for Pardot Campaigns.
Don’t feel bad about it though, I’ve noticed that the main reason businesses don’t have this clear vision yet is mostly because there’s no real understanding or visualisation of why we need this robust structure in place.
Subsequently, teams just tend to hone in on the granular metrics and this is essentially how and why vanity metrics were such a big thing for such a long time.
An example of how you can manage Campaign hierarchy is available on Trailhead.
Source: Organize Campaigns with Hierarchies and Record Types
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