Measuring the impact marketing is having on lead-based businesses is a challenge. In this case when we are talking about the impact that marketing is having we mean the leads, opportunities, and revenue that is directly attributable to marketing. First and foremost you have to integrate multiple systems to get the data you need – usually a Marketing Automation platform like Pardot, Eloqua or Marketo with a CRM like Salesforce. The data marketers need is an accurate source of how every lead gets into Salesforce, then what that lead ultimately results in (a sale, a qualified lead, junk, etc.). And, second even if you get those platforms integrated together and accurately capturing detailed lead source data from your web forms the recommended approach that those tools typically recommend you use for measurement have some significant limitations. Case in point Salesforce Campaigns and Salesforce Lead Source.

Before we dive into the limitations of both Salesforce Campaigns and Salesforce Lead Source attribution, let’s first talk about how the data is typically captured. In most cases, if a company is using these types of measurement values, they have implemented them in a way that is giving them incomplete data. From what we’ve seen most companies who are using these values are hard-coding them into hidden fields on a web form or in a marketing automation rule connected to that form. The thinking goes that we’ll setup different forms for our different campaigns (whether it’s paid search landing pages, or a webinar promotion that we are doing) and when someone fills-out that form we’ll assign it to a pre-defined Salesforce Campaign and give it a descriptive Lead Source. While on the surface that makes sense, it doesn’t end up working well in most cases. Here are a few of the challenges.

1.) You will only get high level attribution. Assigning Lead Sources to a lead or assigning it to a Campaign in Salesforce is a manual process. Because it’s manual almost all companies only create high level buckets for measurement. If everything goes right with accurately capturing the source based on the issue above, you probably are only assigning it to a group that has Medium and maybe Source level attribution. So, you may know that the lead came from Paid Search – Google Adwords, but you don’t know what Campaign, Ad Group or Keyword (or Ad for that matter) actually generates the leads that turn into sales and which ones turn into disqualified leads. While cross tactic optimization is helpful (spend more in search and less in social as an example) it doesn’t help you really optimize any of the tactics specifically, because the data just isn’t there.

2.) Hard coding the values in the form (or as a related marketing automation rule) only accurately captures the source if the person fills out the form on the landing page on their first visit. From what we’ve found this is the exception not the rule. Especially for high consideration products/services which most lead-based businesses are, people tend to take more than one-visit and want to read more than one page of the website before they commit to filling out a form. With a hard-coded sourcing approach, you won’t accurately source any lead that doesn’t convert on the page you wanted them to fill-out a form OR if they leave that page or the site and come back before completing the form. This can cause significant under-reporting, especially for early and mid-stage consideration audiences (where things like banners, dedicated email and paid social typically play).

3.) One lead can be assigned to many Salesforce Campaigns at a time. The pros and cons of this are a series of blog-posts in and of themselves, but let’s talk about it from a “sourcing” point of view for now. When I say source I mean what actually started the first interaction with a customer that ultimately led them to be a lead and ultimately a buyer. We are an inbound demand generation agency, so yes we care about this a lot, but it’s also where a lion-share of most marketers budget is spent – creating new leads. So, we think that accurately capturing source attribution for which tactics are generating the most and best new leads is an important thing for everyone. This doesn’t mean that this is the only way to measure marketing (we’ll have more posts on other types of measurement), but when deciding where to spend dollars for inbound marketing activities this is a big one.

Anyway, the fact a single lead can easily be assigned to multiple Salesforce Campaigns inherently causes some measurement challenges. One, you will count way more “Campaign Members” than the number of leads that have actually been created. This can be confusing to management, and overstate the impact of certain tactics where Campaign Membership is assigned based on something as simple as opening an email (like email nurture). Second, as a lead gets converted to an Opportunity, Salesforce picks a “Primary” Campaign to assign to that Opportunity. The standard logic for that is to assign the last Campaign a lead was assigned to as the Primary. So, when you run an Opportunity Report and view the Primary Campaign, you are only seeing the last campaign a lead was assigned to, which is in many cases not what sourced it. Again, this will often create some (or a lot) of false positives. While it’s absolutely important to know that your email nurture programs (or other lead nurture activities) are helping the sales process, if you aren’t able to fully measure which inbound sources are ultimately turning into Opportunities then you can’t make the optimal investment decisions with your inbound dollars.

So, how do you make sure you are collecting complete and detailed original source data? And, doing so in a way that allows you to clearly report performance to your leadership and optimize your inbound marketing activities? We’re glad you asked…check out Part II to find our recommended approach!