Why Salesforce Campaign Influence is a Must for Proving ROI

When marketing teams can effectively measure campaign impact on tangible business results like sales and revenue, they can more easily assess and repeat the most effective tactics, continuing to drive growth. 

This dreamy scenario not only benefits the business but those spending their days in Account Engagement (formerly Pardot), tasked with managing and reporting on campaigns without defaulting to ‘fluffy’ metrics.

For more about demonstrating true ROI using your Salesforce software, download the How to Measure ROI in Account Engagement eBook. 

In short, the ability to prove marketing campaign influence saves confusion, prevents limited marketing budgets, and alleviates doubt in the success of the campaigns you and your team have spent weeks - or even months! - devising.

Plus, it’s another step in your journey to true sales and marketing alignment, which is an absolute must for achieving the highest state of Salesforce marketing; ‘B2BMA Nirvana’.

As you know, Account Engagement campaigns allow us to track our prospects’ first touchpoint, whilst Sales Cloud CRM allows us to track all touchpoints of a Lead/Contact. 

Salesforce Campaign Influence, available in the B2B Marketing Analytics app, joins these two sources of information, enabling you to associate a marked Opportunity to a specific campaign (or multiple) through your chosen attribution model.

There are two versions available; ‘Campaign Influence 1.0’ which is for Salesforce Classic users and ‘Customizable Campaign Influence’ for Classic and Lightning Experience. 

For this blog, I’ll focus on Customizable Campaign Influence as it has better capabilities than the standard version. As Salesforce puts it:

“Customizable Campaign Influence identifies revenue share with standard and custom attribution models that you can update manually or via automated processes. Add Customizable Campaign Influence data in related lists and reports so your reps can better understand which campaigns impact their opportunity pipeline.” - Salesforce

With Customizable Campaign Influence, you can access a campaign and see all the Opportunities that the campaign has influenced within seconds. It’s the ideal reporting feature for seeing how campaigns have influenced closed-won Opportunities. 

When it comes to tapping into Salesforce Campaign Influence, customers face challenges with using the pre-built dashboards created by Einstein Analytics. Repeatedly, we’re asked the question:

“Why can I only see ‘Primary Campain Source’ from the ‘Influence Model Filter’ in the multi-touch attribution dashboard?”

The name ‘Multi-touch’ certainly gives the impression that this dashboard should show all of the campaigns that an Opportunity has, at some point, touched. So, why aren’t 'First Touch', 'Last Touch', 'Even Distribution' models showing?

The answer is, the dashboard is created in “Default mode” and you may not have enabled ‘Additional Campaign Influence Models’.

To get you started (or fixed!) on the best foot, let’s run through the steps for setting up and using Campaign Influence in the B2B Marketing Analytics app.

Before continuing, ensure that your org is already using Salesforce Leads and Opportunities, that you’ve enabled Connected Campaigns, and have a campaign hierarchy in place. This way you can get the most out of Salesforce Campaign Influence.

1. In Salesforce navigate to ‘Setup’ and in the search bar type ‘Campaign Influence’, then select ‘Campaign Influence Settings'.

2. You will be taken to the settings page, where you can enable ‘Campaign Influence’ and ‘Additional Campaign Influence’ models. Click ‘Enable’ for both to measure and report on multiple campaigns that have influenced a single Opportunity, then click ‘Save’. A popup message should appear informing you that Salesforce is recalculating Campaign Influence. Once this is done, you can update the new settings on this page.

3. Next, access ‘Model Settings’ - this is where we edit the default ‘Primary Source Campaign Model’ and, once we create ‘First Touch’, ‘Last Touch’, and ‘Even Distribution’ campaign models, they too will show here. 

From this screen, we can see that there are a number of headings above the ‘Primary Source Campaign Model’ and a tick for all three; Default, Locked, and Active. 

4. Click ‘Edit’ next to the model to change any of these settings. However, for the ‘Primary Campaign Source Model’, it is recommended that these remain ticked.

Definitions

Additional note: Record Preference - this specifies whether to create all records or only when the attribution is greater than 0%. This field is always checked for ‘All Records’ for custom models.

5. Next, navigate to the user section and click the User detail page. Click the Related list called ‘Permission Set License Assignments’ and click ‘Edit Assignments’. Select the CRM user by clicking their name to enable the permission set and click ‘Save’.

6. Navigate to Setup > Manage Users > Permission Sets and create a new permission set with the ‘Campaign Influence’ permission. To do so click ‘New‘, in the name enter ‘Campaign Influence’, the API name should auto-populate and also remember to enter a description.

7. Next, you need to select the Permission Set Licence. Here you can select ‘Sales User’ or ‘CRM User’, then click Save. Then, open the new permission set you’ve just created and tick the checkbox to enable permission ‘Campaign Influence’ on the permission set on the App Permissions.

8. We now want to select the names of the users we want associated with that permission set. Click on ‘Manage Assignments’ > ‘Add Assignments’ and select the users to assign.

9. Next, we need to add the Campaign Influence Object to the Opportunity Page Layout. To do this navigate to ‘Object Manager’ > ‘Opportunity’ > and select ‘Page Layouts’. Here we can add the Campaign Influence Related Lists to the Opportunity Page Layout. 

It is important to remember that this related list shows the campaigns that have touched the opportunity and only campaign influence records from your primary influence model appear on the list. Select ‘Related Lists’ > ‘Campaign Influences’ then drag and drop to where you want it on the Opportunity Page Layout. Click ‘Save’. This related list will show the Opportunities that have touched your campaigns.

10. Finally, add the Influenced Opportunities to the Campaign Page Layout. These steps are similar to step eight, navigate to ‘Object Manager’ > ‘Campaign’ > ‘Page Layout’ and select ‘Related Lists’ > click ‘Influenced Opportunities’. Once you’ve decided where you want this list to live on the campaign page layout, drag and drop it into the correct section and click Save. The Influence Opportunity list shows the Opportunities that have touched the campaign. 

Campaign Influence now lets you see your attribution results in the form of related lists or reports, which means you can see which campaigns influenced deals straight from Salesforce. 

Once Campaign Influence has been set up in Salesforce, the additional three models should be visible on the Multi-Touch Attribution dashboard within 24 hours.

By incorporating Campaign Influence with your Multi-Touch Attribution dashboard, you can pull your data into a visual view, clearly identifying which of your marketing initiatives are most successful by reviewing the different influence models for correlations between Contact, Opportunity, and Campaigns.

First Touch Model 

This model assigns 100% of influence and revenue earned to the first campaign a prospect touches. Even if the prospect interacts with other marketing assets or activities, 100% will still go straight to the first touch. The key consideration for this model is that it heavily relies on the Campaign Member’s Created Date. 

Last Touch Model

This model is almost the opposite of the First Touch model. 100% of influence and revenue is assigned to the last campaign a prospect touches before an Opportunity is closed. 

Even Distribution Model

The clue’s in the name, this model will evenly assign a percentage of influence and revenue to every campaign a prospect has interacted with. 

If you still feel that these models aren’t going to meet your business reporting needs, please reach out to find out how we can create custom influence models for Salesforce.