Speaker 0: Hello, everybody, and welcome to day two of ParDreamin’. I am Christina Mogulis joining you from Sercante. I’m here to introduce you to your presenters, Julian and Ivo, who are going to be giving a presentation on Salesforce Campaigns. I’m going to kick it over to them now.

Speaker 1: Thank you, Christina.

Speaker 2: Thank you, Christina. Good morning. Good afternoon, everyone. Greetings from Madrid, Spain. We are, uh, Julian, and Ivo and, uh, we are part of Eveco. We are a marketing operations consultancy, which is focused on connecting the marketing strategy with the business results. And today we want to present to you the strategy behind the tool—so how to implement the Salesforce Campaigns. So what we are going to do is to share with you the six tips for this successful implementation of these Salesforce Campaigns.

So when we start talking about Salesforce Campaigns or hearing about Salesforce Campaigns, we can feel a little bit overwhelmed. Right? We we start like getting a little bit crazy and that is normal, because what happens normally is when we start talking about Salesforce Campaigns, there are so many things going on: Connected Campaigns, attribution models, engagement dashboards, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. So it can be a lot of things to implement, and we don’t know where to start. So that’s why we are here, because we want to share to you what we normally do in the process to implement the Salesforce Campaigns and to share with you the six tips that will help you on this successful implementation of the of the campaigns.

Tip 1: Spend More Time on Planning The first thing is to spend more time on planning. A lot of time what happens when we start a project with different customers is that we see that the teams spend a lot of time on reporting, building very nice graphs, and looking to create these really nice reports, putting the metrics in the Salesforce dashboard, et cetera, et cetera. But what happens is that they don’t take a lot of time on campaign structure and defining and talking to the different stakeholders to define what they want to measure and how they want to measure it. Also, another important thing is that normally what happens is that they don’t know exactly how to track all the touchpoints that the leads have or the contacts have with the marketing campaigns. So what that gives at the end is a lack of alignment between the stakeholders. Some people are looking to measure one thing. Others are expecting other things. Also, there are some touchpoints which are not tracked. So that gives us some loss on the information. So we don’t get at the end the good reporting that we are looking for.

So our first tip, very basic but very important one, is to take more time in defining what is the right structure of your campaigns, to talk to your different stakeholders and work on how to implement this in Salesforce, and then to define how you’re going to track the different touchpoints that your leads have with your marketing campaigns, and that will give you a good reporting. So for talking about the campaign structure, I let my colleague, Julian, to talk about the second tip.

Tip 2: Build the Right Campaign Structure Thanks, Ivo. So, yes, we focus tip two on looking together on how to build the right campaign structure. And first of all, it is all about aligning stakeholders on the definitions. Indeed, when we start working on a campaign structure project, we often see this kind of organization where people or the teams are organizing their campaigns with parent campaigns to keep track of the period of time the campaign is on, all the different channels and conversion points, and so on and so forth. Relying a lot on parent campaigns and parent naming to be able to find out what’s happening in their strategy. Right? The thing is when you’re doing that, at some point, you’re mixing up a bit different concepts which are channel, conversion points, or even umbrella campaigns. Right?

So let’s take an example. Let’s say you’re launching a webinar. Right? So you will have different channels on which you will distribute your webinar campaigns. Might be an email campaign or LinkedIn ads. So those two are a channel. And then you will have a webinar landing page where your user will end up to sign up for this webinar. This is a conversion point. And the the whole stuff can be grouped into a kind of umbrella campaign to regroup all the all the the performance of the of this of this webinar campaign. So the issue here is that, as I said, we cannot we cannot compare channels and conversion points and umbrella campaign performances because they’re not the same. They’re not the same concepts. So here, it’s super important to start with and, basically, align your stakeholders on what it is that you want to track and what it is that you want to track against your business revenue and your costs. Okay?

Once you’ve got that right, then, I will share with you some tips or hints that we usually use to implement this structure properly in in Salesforce.

Use Record Types: The first one is using Record Types on your campaign object to separate layouts on the different concepts. Right? If you’re tracking marketing channel, you might want to have some information on the channel. When you’re tracking the conversion point, you might want to have some other stuff, other sort of information. So this is where you’re going to separate a bit the two concepts and the the information gathering there.

Use Custom Fields: For that, we usually we usually use custom fields. So for instance, if we are talking about channels, we will use custom fields to properly track the channel, for instance, a page or what we could say the sub-channel, which could be AdWords or Facebook or LinkedIn ads. And then the countries that are issuing those campaigns or the goal or or whatever you want to qualify your campaign on. And this will be super useful for you at the end to be able to filter your reports, filter your dashboards on on on those information and group your campaigns, not only relying on the naming, which can be subject to human errors and and this kind of stuff. Right?

Use Start and End Dates: On the same page, I would strongly recommend not relying on parent campaigns or naming to classify or to organize your campaigns on time period, like flagging them by Q3 or or or by month or whatever. But instead of that, properly use the start and end date that you’ve got available natively on the campaign object because this will enable you then afterwards to filter on your report on the period you want to analyze. So super important to use it. It’s often overlooked, and it’s a pity, I would say.

Use Parent Campaigns for Grouping Actions: And, finally, in our case, we often recommend to use parent campaigns to properly group the different actions. So if we’re talking about channels here, group the different channels you will use to distribute your main campaigns. So for instance, in our webinar example, we will group our email, page, Facebook campaign, and LinkedIn organic, let’s say, all those three channels under the same parent campaign. So we can gather and group all the performance of my actions, my global action, under the same one. Right?

So, basically, we will go from a not that actionable and scalable structure to a real proper campaign database that you will be able to use and query however you want from different sources. Right?

Tip 3: Auto-Associate Campaign Members (The Record-Triggered Flow Trick) Now that we’re clear on the data structure, let’s see how to push your leads or contacts to those campaigns. Okay. We all know this. I won’t spend too much time on that one. We all use Pardot, so we all know the automation rules, Engagement Studio, completion actions, and so on and so forth to to push our our user to the campaigns. But what we’re going to share with you today is a thing that we we we implement in general on the record-triggered flows in Salesforce. This technique will enable you to push automatically your leads and contacts into the campaigns without having to run a new automation rule or a new completion action each time you’re running a campaign. So it’s a way to save a lot of time on your marketing operation team, and they will love you.

Let’s start. Okay. Let’s say that we all know this. Right? The UTM source, medium, content—things that we will append to our our URL to track our campaigns. Right? So the only thing that we will need to do is at the time we create our Salesforce campaign, we will retrieve the ID of this campaign in the URL. Oh, well, always starting with 701. Alright? And we will append this ID in a new parameter on our links. So here I call the parameter Salesforce Campaign ID, SFC ID. You can call it whatever you like. Okay?

So here we’ve got the three IDs for our three campaigns for our webinar. Let’s say our user clicks on our email. It will land on our website, and working along with your IT team, you will be able to collect this ID in your parameter and store it into your cookies so that your user can navigate your website, see your product page, blogs, et cetera. And at the moment you will decide to fill out a form, then you will be able to capture this ID in a hidden field of your form and pass this information to Pardot and hence to Salesforce, to the Lead or the Contact object. And so you can know on your Salesforce subject the campaign your user came from. Alright?

Now, the last stuff, not the least one, the idea is to build this flow that will look at this Campaign ID, at your Lead ID or your Contact ID. It will say, “Okay. Is this lead already in this campaign?” If the answer is no, then you will push and create the campaign member. If the answer is yes, then you will only update your campaign member to update, for instance, the Campaign Member Status. Okay? And you’re done. You don’t need to create any more automation rule or or anything. Your lead will directly go into the campaigns each time they will fill out the form. And this is your marketing operations team.

Tip 4: Go Beyond the Trackable (Using Document Referrer) Next tip, tip four is beyond the trackable. So what if I can’t have control over the URL and the parameters? So, yes, this, we know how to do it. We’ve just talked about it. But what about SEO, social media, referrals? Stuff like that where people are coming to our website, and we don’t have control over those parameters, over those UTMs or or whatsoever?

Well, here is the trick. I don’t know if you already know, but every single website has, like, a little box, called Document Referrer, where there is this information stored. So this information is the URL where your user is coming from before landing to your website. So imagine here, I will click on LinkedIn. This is a non-tracked link. Okay? So I will I will click on LinkedIn and land on on the website. Here, you will be you will see that on the Document Referrer information document, you have the source where I come from, linkedin.com. And then, well, the process is more or less the same, so I will go quicker. But, basically, we’ll store this information in the cookie, and you will pass it through a hidden field in your forms to send this information to Pardot and Salesforce.

And here, the same way you did with the ID, you will look… like the the the formula will be something like, “If there is no ID I’ve been able to retrieve, but I do have a URL in my referrer, then I can associate my lead or my contact to the organic campaign corresponding to this URL.” So for instance, if the guy is coming from google.com, I know and I don’t have any other UTM, I know it is SEO coming from Google. So you can then retrieve SEO Google, SEO Yahoo, SEO Yandex, whatever, and the same for your social media and so on and so forth as as as long as you associate your URL with your campaigns and you’re tracked. So instead of having a big campaign like a big bucket about unknown source or direct traffic that we all hate, now you’ve got a bit more of a granularity and information on your organic channels. Alright.

Tip 5: Organize Campaign Member Statuses Next tips, I will let Ivo talk to you about the member statuses and this important information.

Speaker 2: Thanks, Julian. So, yeah, let’s talk about tip number five. So, basically, we have seen, “Okay. We know already how to track and how to add automatically the leads or the contacts to the different campaigns.” So we have all the touchpoints associated to different campaigns. So now the question is how we build the Campaign Influence Report. So we know that one one recommended step that we need to put in place when building the Campaign Influence is to exclude or to include only the users who are in “Responded” status in the campaign influence. Right? In the auto-association rules of the campaign influence.

So here it will come the question of: What is “Responded”?

So here, the answer is not simple, and basically the answer is it depends. It depends because in several teams it can mean different things. For example, if we come back to the campaign when we have the the webinar and we are launching an email to promote this webinar, for some teams, the “Responded” status could start from the moment the user clicks on the email and then we set the status as “Responded” in this in this case. For other teams, it could be only from the moment the the user submits the form and registered to the webinar. And for others, maybe more strict, they will only consider the “Responded” status when the user in fact attends to the webinar or watches the recording of the of the webinar. Right? So, again, it depends. There’s no good or bad answer. It depends a lot on the way your company and your team decide the campaign influence should be taken into account.

The most important thing is to have an agreement with your stakeholders because in this way you are going to have the right reporting and you are going to have a reporting with that everybody agrees on. And when you have this definition in place, our suggestion is to do a plan that will collect all your campaigns. As in the example that you see on the screen, the campaigns are focused on the different channels. And for each channel, I’m going to define what is going to be the status that I will set and what is going to be considered as “Responded”. No. So, as I was saying before, for some webinars, I will, I will use, “Responded” in some cases, in other cases other. No.

And one important thing is, we know that when we have to create this status, we have the possibility to to customize them. But the problem is that they are open text fields. So that can bring us a lot of wrong data and a lot of problems on the information. So our suggestion is to use tools like for example this one that is the one that we normally use, Walloper, but we know that also Cercantes has other tool which has a similar similar job. This is basically a tool that will help you to define the status per each type of the campaign. So every time a marketer will create a campaign, the status of the different types of a campaign will be defined. And that is going to save time first, but it’s also going to save you from wrong reporting when you start building your reports and you have all this type of of status that can be can be wrong. No? So help yourself with these type of tools that will help you to have the right information in your reporting.

Tip 6: Exclude Non-Relevant Campaigns from Influence And tip number six, exclude non-relevant campaigns from your influence, from your campaign influence. This is super important because as we were talking before at the beginning, Julian was explaining that sometimes there is this misconception on on the type of the campaigns that we have to compare. And if we have defined, for example, that we want to to compare the different channels that we are investing on, then use the auto-association rules that you have in Salesforce when you are defining your campaign influence to exclude the campaigns which are not relevant for your campaign influence. So as I was saying, for example, if I decide, my team decide that we are going to compare only channels, then let’s exclude all the campaigns which are conversion types, for example. So in this case, I am not going to compare, for example, organic traffic versus demo requests. That doesn’t make any sense.

Bonus Tip: Decide the Best Time Frame for Campaign Influence And last, because we are generous, a bonus tip: decide the best time frame for your campaign influence. This is a question that we receive several times: “What is the best time frame that we have to define when we set up the campaign influence?” We know this is something that we can define in the auto-association rules.

So you can find yourself in two scenarios.

Scenario A: No Historical Data You can you can be in the scenario when you don’t have historical data. So you are starting the implementation of Salesforce Pardot. You don’t have any data to work on. So, I mean our best suggestion in this in this case will be to talk to your sales team to ask them what is the normal lead life cycle. And based on that, start testing the different data that you will get or the different reporting that you will get. The good thing of the campaign influence is that you can set, you can do the setup of your auto-association rules and then change it if the data is not coherent with what you are expecting.

Scenario B: Historical Data Available But if you do have historical data, our best suggestion and simple tip is to create a basic formula field in your report, a row-level formula in your report, that will be the Opportunity Close Date minus the date when the lead was created in Pardot. What we will get with that is the average of the days that it is it happens from the moment that the lead is created in Pardot until the opportunity is won.

Super important points when you are doing this analysis is:

Only consider your won opportunities because if you are using also the closed-lost opportunities, you can have mixed data which is not relevant for taking your decision.

Only compare the opportunities which are similar in terms of type. So for example, don’t mix the analysis between renewals and new business because obviously the time frame is going to be different. So this is going to damage your analysis and your data.

Summary of Six Tips So, that’s it. So basically, just to summarize, the six tips that we have are:

Spend More Time on Planning: Talk to your stakeholders before starting the implementation of any feature in your tool.

Define Campaign Structure: Take the decision on what is the best campaign structure you you want to to set up in Salesforce and then implement this structure in Salesforce to help and to make the life easier of your marketers to create the campaigns.

Auto-Associate Campaign Members: Use the tools that Salesforce provide in order to auto-associate the campaigns. In this way, we are going to avoid some leads or some contacts which are not associated to the proper campaigns.

Go Beyond the Trackable: Use these tools to go beyond the trackable. Use these tools to identify the leads or the contacts which are arriving to your website via organic sources and that you cannot track or you cannot use UTMs to track their traffic.

Organize Membership Status: Organize your campaign membership. This will help you on the definition of your campaign influence, but also in getting the right reporting.

Exclude Non-Relevant Campaigns: And finally, exclude non-relevant campaigns from your campaign influence.

And with that, of course, you will have a happy team, a great reporting, and everybody will be aligned. Thank yourself very much for your time, for listening to us. It’s been a pleasure and a really, really nice experience to talk to you. So you have our contacts there if you want to to contact us later. Perfect. Otherwise, I don’t know if we have time for questions, Christina.

Speaker 0: Yeah. We do. And we have a lot of great questions, um, that came in. So I’m just going to go through a few here. Um, we have this one. What are the benefits to building a UTM tracking system in Salesforce?

Speaker 1: Alright. I can take this one. I mean, this is not mainly based on UTM because UTM is mostly for your Google Analytics tracking and whatever you don’t see on analytics. UTM is only like a similar system you will have on tracking your parameters. So you can we’ve got some clients that use UTM content, for instance, to track their their campaign ID, which is, like, more like a native that they’ve got on the URL builder. However, you can have your completely separate parameter like SFC ID, or the one you want to track with. And then it depends really on what you want to track. If it is that you want to track the channels, then it will be mostly similar to UTM. If it is that you want to track conversion points, then nothing to do with it. But the methods will remain the same, passing the ID of the campaign in the URL and and collecting it.

Speaker 0: Awesome. Um, we have another question here. Do you recommend using the Google Analytics Pardot Connector?

Speaker 1: I mean, this is something native, so you can use it. It’s fine. Be careful when you connect your campaigns to deactivate the option that will automatically create campaigns from analytics. If not, you can become a mess. The thing that you need to take into account is that Google Analytics will only take the first source the user is coming from. So it can be an interesting information, but for me, it’s not as complete as you will need if you want to deep dive more.

Speaker 2: Especially in B2B when you have different touchpoints, it’s necessary to take into account that if you if you remain on on your first touchpoint, on your first first engagement, the information won’t be complete, and you won’t be able to create a really proper attribution model. So it’s important. I mean, the connector, as Julian was saying, is great because it’s simple to activate it. But one important thing is to try to identify, “Okay, how I’m going to track all the rest of my different touchpoints?” And that that’s why the advice of Julian of having these systems to track the different campaigns that the user is interacting with.

Speaker 0: Um, so I those are the only questions that we have time for today, but, um, the presenters obviously provided you with contact information. Please feel free to reach out to them if you have questions, wanna continue the conversation. Thank yourself much for joining us for this session. Thank you to our presenters for preparing it. Um, and, of course, thank you to our sponsors as well. ParDreamin’ would not be possible without our sponsors. If you have some time, please go visit their booths, learn more about what they offer. Um, we have a lot of great sessions coming up for the rest of the day today. Um, one is getting started in just a little bit about using Pardot to run internal email campaigns. We hope to see you at other sessions throughout the day, and thank you so much.

Speaker 1: Thank you, Emma. Thank you, everybody. Bye bye