Speaker 0: Hello, everybody. Um, we’re gonna give everybody about one more minute to join, Uh, but welcome. Today, we’re going to be, um, hearing lead attribution versus marketing contribution. Um, so give everybody about thirty more seconds. Uh, if you have any questions during the presentation, you can put it in the chat, and, um, we’ll do our best to get your questions answered. Okay. So for those of you who are here today for financial services day, um, this presentation is part of the financial services track. So welcome, and I hope that these insights will help you. Uh, so with that, I’d like to introduce you to Zhao, and he’s going to be presenting our session today. Take it away.

Speaker 1: Alright. Um, so welcome, everyone, uh, to the session today. Uh, we have twenty-five minutes, and we’re gonna go through a couple of topics. We’re gonna start first with some definitions on the attribution versus campaign contribution, what is it about. And then it’s gonna be a bit of a hands-on session with how you can implement attribution and how you can implement the campaign contribution. We’ll have some questions at the end. So if you have anything that you like to know more, please write there in the chat. You will also have my contact details at the end. If you wanna connect on LinkedIn, please feel free to connect, and, uh, I’ll answer those questions if you have there too. So let’s start. Definitions. So what is lead attribution and, uh, why should this matter to you? Well, as you know, uh, we all do a lot of different activities. Us in marketing, us in sales, we do a lot of different things to try to generate or capture new leads. And it is really important to know which initiatives are giving us the best leads, the best revenue. And, uh, this can be particularly important when you have indirect sales channels or when you have really big-budget initiatives. So this is, uh, why we wanna be sure that we can look into a lead and understand where did this lead come from. Did it come from my search engine advertising? Did it come from a partner? Did it come from some other initiative? So it’s important to know where this lead actually came from. Now a note here that lead attribution can sometimes be confused with the conversion points with the forms. Uh, my take here that it shouldn’t. For those that need to measure conversion points, it’s also possible to do with the current setting in Pardot and in the Sales Cloud. So if you are familiar with with Salesforce Sales Cloud, you will know that you have the Pardot conversion point there. So that can also be used if you want to measure that type of conversions. Now campaign contribution, that’s a that’s a different part. Now we also know that to to get a client, there will most likely be a lot of different touch points. There’s studies that talk about seven. There’s others that talk about more than twenty, thirty. Uh, but we know that there’s gonna be a lot of different marketing and sales activities that will contribute to this deal being closed. So that’s why we know that we’ll have a lot of things, high-tech activities such as search engine marketing or certain campaigns on digital platforms to other that are more personal. I usually call them high-touch activities. Uh, this will be some premium events. So this, uh, you want to know how much these campaigns are contributing to your in terms of revenue because, obviously, every year or every quarter, you need to look back into what you have done and try to adjust for the next quarter. Campaign contribution for me also has, um, another dimension. And for us, this has been a game changer. I’ve used in several companies by now. Is that every time that you have a campaign and you start adding people to the campaign, and if you have it running in the right way, uh, you will actually be able to see how much open pipeline is already connected with this campaign, which means that if you see that there is this could be a really important event or really important initiative, you have the data to go back to your sales director or CEO and ask for more budget or just talk with the team and be sure that we improve the activity itself. So there is a lot of possibilities here in terms of what we can do. Now how do we actually implement, um, this lead attribution? I usually said it’s a five-step process, and the the first one actually, it starts about defining the lead sources. There’s no magical formula here. In the the most important part for you to know is how and what do you need to report. Because based on that, you will define the different levels that you would set your lead sources. And now here, I’m actually practically talking about the lead source field that you both have in the CRM and Pardot. You could go on a very high-level approach, just having marketing or sales lead sources. You could give it a second level. Uh, you can go in a further bit in detail and have a little bit more detail on channel and some of the activities, and you can go even down to the activity level. I typically say that, uh, as as long as you know how to use a CRM, uh, probably the third level is more than enough for most organizations, and the rest, the fourth level, fifth level can be used via campaigns. First and second level might be too little to have later on if you wanna do some, uh, further analysis, but you will still be able to show in the CRM with the first level if you are familiar then with filters in report dashboards. Now, uh, in terms of lead sources, obviously, this is just an example of some of the lead sources that we use. Uh, I also recommend that this is a little bit of a tip. Uh, always have a lead source here for marketing and sales. Uh, I like to have this inbound as a mix of both teams that reduces the friction between the teams and who has generated lead. But some examples of lead sources, I mean, you would see here for social media with paid and organic, uh, with for search engine, with again paid and organic, different type of events, different type of lists if you are purchasing lists, uh, different type of collaborations or referral. This is extremely important that you have a list that suits your needs in terms of reporting. Once you have set up that list, then it’s time to work with your CRM admins if you are not a CRM admin yourself because you will need to update the CRM field, uh, map it to Pardot, ensure that everything is aligned. You should also select a default value for all the sales-generated leads. I mean, this will, uh, decrease the number of errors that, uh, people will have when they create leads, and it will also make it a bit more user-friendly for sales when they are generating their own leads. And then also be sure that all your reports and your dashboards filters, uh, if you have those, uh, that they are using all the options that you have from lead source fields. So it’s, um, uh, I can easily tell that certainly several times where we have been looking into reports and figuring out some leads were missing, and then it was a new, uh, field value that someone had added. Now third step, you need to create some automations. By default, Pardot identifies some lead source. So things such as Google, Yahoo, Bing, Twitter and others, I mean, you can find the full list online. Uh, it finds these leads, and it would mark the lead source for these leads in the prospect field. Now if these fields are not mapped to your CRM and you have said in a way that you limited the values in the CRM and you only accept the values that you have created, you need to have these automation rules to move from the Pardot default sources to the default sources that you are using. And in the process of doing so, you can actually also take the opportunity to add them to campaigns as I have here in this example. So in one go, you’re doing your, uh, lead attribution, but you’re already thinking about your campaign contribution. When you’re also doing this, uh, the same way that you set the default source for sales, we should also default set the default source for marketing. I mean, unfortunately or fortunately depending on where you stand, uh, it’s getting trickier and trickier to track and sometimes you will have leads for which you don’t know where they came from. So, basically, we could not simply identify the source. And when this happens, uh, you should ensure that you have an automation rule in Pardot running that setups a marketing default source, for these leads. Be careful when you set up this rule, uh, so that you don’t override, uh, leads that might have another source. So that is always something to take in consideration. Another step that you need to do is to prepare for external websites. Now here is when things get a little bit trickier. Uh, you’ll need to ensure so if you’re doing campaigns on LinkedIn or in a partner website that you are using some Pardot features such as the custom redirects, uh, so that you can actually understand where these leads came from and then assign them to the right lead source and the right campaigns. Custom redirects have some specificities. Uh, so for example, the completion actions, they don’t run on the prospect unless it’s cookied. So sometimes adding a form afterwards, uh, is also a good step to ensure that you can actually cookie the prospect and assign it to the right source. And then, obviously, the last step is, uh, all about measuring. So it’s, um, this is an example from our sandboxes. Uh, another tip for many of you, if you don’t have yet a Pardot sandbox, I recommend that you get one. It’s really good to have and great to do a lot of testing. But this is an example of a dashboard that we would use to generate, uh, to see the lists that we’re generating, see where they’re coming from, seeing the different sources, and then be able to work with, uh, with this and be sure that we’re mapping them always to the to the right sources. And this is always gonna be, um, I mean, in a way, again, uh, they always will have leads that, uh, you can’t really measure, and then you will have to work and try to figure out a little bit more on how those leads could have been generated so that you find the right sources. And with this part, it’s actually something that we are testing more and more. I mean, we know that it’s getting more difficult to identify the sources. I mentioned the cookies. There’s others limiting issues. Minneapolis is very keen on privacy. So we’re we’re also moving into parallel to the first part tracking, and we have done that. But even that, we have seen that might not be enough. So one thing that we’re started to use is landing pages for specific campaigns. And, uh, this is also a great opportunity to consider how your campaigns work with customer journeys. So someone clicking on the Google Ads and coming into your website, if it comes into a non-index landing page, then you would know that it came from that campaign. And you don’t want to have too much extra work and to duplicate your website with non-index pages. But in certain cases, in certain specific campaigns, especially when you have high budgets or you really wanna control, this might make sense. Because, overall, this would even give your, uh, customers a better journey. So someone clicking on a link in a post will probably not be on the same stage as someone clicking on an ad that is actually a very active action there. And this is, uh, in a nutshell, how you could implement attribution. Now looking in campaign contribution, in here, you always have different KPIs to report, but I mean, revenue in most organizations will end up by being a key metric. Depending on how you have your CRM set, uh, you might have four different levels of revenue. So you would have the full revenue of the organization, then you would have revenue from marketing. So since that should double your campaigns, you run campaigns on accounts and contacts that were generated by marketing and by sales. You would still be able to see revenue on marketing generated accounts, and you would even be able to see revenue on leads generated by marketing or by sales. So you have different levels where you want to look into. But this, uh, marketing contributes to revenue. The results from the campaigns is where we’re focusing in this part. So implementing campaign contribution, it starts with setting up the CRM. Uh, this is, uh, not the easiest part to set, so I recommend that you do it with your CRM admin. There are some auto association settings that you need to look into. One is the number of days that you’re using. You should adjust it based on your sales cycle. Uh, we currently use three hundred and sixty-five days. And then you would be able to decide extra rules on how you associate people. Here, I mean, there is always a big discussion if you should just use campaign members with responded status. So those that have actually done something on the campaign and you decide that. Or if you should use all, uh, we tend to use the responded status so that we can show that there was actually some sort of activity done by marketing. So you need to do this part in the system. Uh, then you need to select the model. There are three that come by default, and you can always create your own custom models. But basically, in this example, if we would look into first touch, everything would be all the revenue would be given to this first click on the LinkedIn post. If we will look into a last touch from marketing perspective, it would have been on the case study. We use the even distribution. So, basically, we look and try to record as many touch points as possible so that we then split the revenue equally through all these different, um, activities. And, uh, I really tend to argue for the even distribution model. Meaning, it is always difficult to know which, you know, was it the first touch really the first touch, or was the first touch something that you could not measure? So it could have been could have happened. Should the last touch always get it? I mean, you could see what’s trying to give you more deals, but, uh, then again, you know, you’re never a 100% sure on which one was really the last touch. Again, could have been something that you did not track. So even distribution tends to be the model that will give you probably the easiest results to interpret and the easiest results to explain. Another really important point here is, uh, adding the right contacts into the opportunities. Now this is a big headache in a way. You might be doing everything right from your side, but if in your CRM, there are no opportunity members added to opportunities, you would not have any campaign contribution. So you need to ensure that, uh, you have campaign contribution. You have campaign members being added to the opportunities or that you have the contacts and the accounts being added to the opportunities. There’s three ways you can do it. Uh, one is, uh, that you find your definition on who you think it should be added. And via automation in the CRM, you would be able to add everyone that is part of that account into the opportunity. This is the one that we’re using right now, and it’s actually the one that I tend to recommend. If you think we are using, um, account-contact relationship, so we can see how our colleagues in sales, uh, have set the different users. So if it’s a decision maker, if it’s an influencer, if it follows a certain criteria, uh, then we’re adding them into the opportunity. And we have some have had some discussions about it. For us, adding an influencer is extremely important because those tend to be the ones that will actually be taking in your content, that might be attending your webinars, that you might meet on a regular basis. If you’re just taking the decision maker, you might end up in a situation where you have a lot of campaigns, a lot of activity, a lot of people from that company is actually engaging, but the decision maker himself or herself is so busy that never attends, never joins, and, uh, then you would not have this campaign contribution visible. So we do recommend this first approach here. If this is not something that you can implement in your organization, I mean, this, uh, number two is another option. You can ensure with your CRM admins that opportunities need to have at least one contact, uh, as a as opportunity member before it reaches a certain stage at this opportunity made or it’s when the opportunity is about to be closed. Or you can even set in a way that opportunities can only be created from the contact object, which means that then there would always be one contact added to the opportunity. But, again, you might miss in both number two and number three a lot of measuring from what you have done. Now after I’ve done all of these, uh, comes one of the parts which might sound simple, but is often one of the most difficult ones to do. You actually have to ensure that, uh, everyone in the company understands how this is working and that you use the systems in the right way. If you’re missing some of these steps, it might be that you simply will not get the results that you’re trying to get. So first of all, you should always, uh, try to have your campaign plan or some sprint activities. Uh, should be sure that this is visible in the CRM. So, I mean, I’m sure most of you by now have the connected campaigns function activated. So if you create a campaign in the CRM, it’s visible in Pardot, and, uh, you should always have a plan even if you have to review it every quarter. Create a campaign. Uh, be sure that you have all the right information there in terms of reporting, you know, the the coverage, the type, what you need to have there. You can even use the return on investment part from the campaigns by adding some of your expected investments there. Whenever you’re creating the campaigns and you’re creating then the emails and the different content, I mean, special emails, uh, be sure to really put them in the right campaigns because as you have also seen, you can see a lot of Pardot data in the CRM itself. So where you would be able to see all this type of contribution from the campaigns, but also the open rates, the click rates on on emails, on forms, on anything that you are doing there. So it’s a big tip. Don’t forget to associate your assets to the right campaign. For most of the campaigns that you’ll do, you’ll need to have lists. So don’t forget to also create those segmentation lists, either dynamic or static. Um, so this is something you need to think of. With dynamic lists and especially when you’re also using Engagement Studio, don’t forget to have your dynamic list based on all campaign member statuses because Engagement Studio is perfect to update the campaign member statuses every time that there is some real activity in the campaign. Then, uh, when you are doing simple campaigns, it might be that you just have a a little list email or just one form. But, uh, I mean, in most real campaigns, you will be using the automation from Engagement Studio. So, I mean, be sure that you have all the steps there that you actually think of the campaign member status as as a representation of the journey that the person will do on the campaign. So be sure that you have everything there really properly set. Campaign attribution, you will need to have the automation rules or its completion actions in Pardot to be sure that you’re adding people to the right campaigns. So if you have a form, you might want to have a completion action in the form. Uh, if you are have Engagement Studio, like I said, you can also use it to add to the right campaigns. If you forget to use it in the right way, you can always use a segmentation rule just to do a quick one-off and add people to the right campaigns, but use it. And again, be extremely careful with custom redirects and the way that the Pardot tracking works. Super important to highlight that if the prospect is not cookied, the custom redirect will not have completion actions functioning. And then the reporting. I mean, both in Pardot in Sales Cloud, you have really good reporting tools. And the ones in the sales cloud are extremely effective. Some of you might even have, uh, B2B Marketing Analytics, uh, and you’ll be able to use also the reporting functions there. But to really make reporting a key part of, uh, of your work. Because, I mean, from everything I’ve seen, nothing really beats, uh, seeing these results in the system where sales is and where you can go in, show the results, click on the reports or in the graphs, and drill down, show all the activity. So you will be able to really show all the results that you have been doing with marketing activities. So this was, um, a very fast twenty-five minutes with a lot of information. So I’m opening it up a little bit for questions now.

Speaker 0: Okay. Um, we have a lot of questions here. Um, I’m going to start with the oldest. Uh, this is from Marco. Yep. Um, what is more effective, customer redirects or UTM links?

Speaker 1: We are using custom redirects, um, uh, more than UTM links, but we are actually now trying to use UTM links a little bit more. We have, um, we have been having a little issue with UTM links, the way that we load up our forms on the website, where we needed to, uh, we need to have some extra code so that we can capture those, uh, links. But custom redirect is probably the easiest to start using.

Speaker 0: Great. We have another question about custom redirects for Marco. Um, if you add a custom redirect with a completion action to an email sent by a Pardot, does this email cookie them, or would you still recommend having a form at the other end?

Speaker 1: The email should cookie it. Uh, it’s brand new, this new upgrade from Apple, so I’m not a 100% sure what’s gonna be the impact of it. But before the upgrade, it should cookie it, and it should work. Right.

Speaker 0: Here’s one from Courtney. Uh, did I hear correctly that if you use a Pardot landing page for a white paper download, for example, that you should create that on your own site to get a lead source attribution.

Speaker 1: Yeah. I can clarify that. So let’s take a practical example. Let’s say that we’re running, um, Google Ads campaign to get people to sign up to be clients. So you sign up on the spot to become a client. If, uh, for this campaign, we use a non-index page and the landing page on our website, then we will be really 99.999% sure that whoever came to that page came from a Google Ads, and then we can really confidently attribute to that lead source to that, um, uh, to that person, to that prospect. In the case of a white paper, if you would have, for example, run a campaign on LinkedIn to get people to download white paper, if you will do the same, non-indexed page, landing page on your website, you would know that who fills that form to download the white paper must have come from LinkedIn.

Speaker 0: Perfect. Um, well, it is the top of the hour, and we are unfortunately out of time for questions. Uh, but I wanted to let everybody know there’s a chat functionality in the ParDreamin platform where you can message directly, um, in the next couple minutes if you have something quick that you wanna ask him, or here’s his contact information if you wanna reach out directly.

Speaker 1: Thank you, everyone.

Speaker 0: Thank you, everybody. Have a great day.

Speaker 1: Thank you. Bye-bye.