Fanatical Analytics

This is the second in a two part series regarding how to accurately measure the success of inbound marketing in Salesforce. If you missed part 1, you can check it out here.

So, it’s time to unveil our recommended approach for accurately capturing detailed source information for all of your inbound leads. We’ve developed this approach to effectively measure the initial lead source for all new leads, however the approach I’m about to share is not designed to capture multi-touch attribution either before or after conversion…that’s a topic for another day. This approach though will allow you to optimize your investment between and within your inbound marketing tactics to invest your dollars in the specific media placements that are driving your best leads.

What Data to Collect

For accurate lead sourcing, we recommend using 6 custom fields within your Marketing Automation Platform and within Salesforce. These 6 fields break out into two groups:

Source Fields: we follow the Google Analytics convention for capturing detailed source information. This includes using UTM_Medium, UTM_Source, UTM_Campaign, UTM_Content and UTM_Term. These 5 fields allow you to drill-up and drill-down in your data to get an incredible level of detail. Most marketers are already using Google Analytics so tagging your URLs with these values is pretty commonplace. If you aren’t familiar with UTMs, check this out.

Conversion Type Field: we distinguish this from Source for a reason. And, unfortunately many marketers we’ve found typically collapse the conversion type with the source data. So, some of their sources are paid search or banners and others are whitepaper or webinars. We consider the source to be the path the person used to get to the website or where the lead was captured (including organic, direct type in, and referral in addition to paid media sources or off-line sources like tradeshows). Conversion type is what got the person to convert on your website. Conversion type should be the call-to-action that they responded to that made them fill-out a form. These include things like a whitepaper, webinar, request a demo or even a phone call or chat.

How to Capture Accurate Data

As we discussed in Part 1, many of the marketing automation platforms recommend hard-coding values into your forms or writing logic that assigns leads from a particular form to a Lead Source and Salesforce Campaign. We’ve found that this works when capturing “Conversion Type”, but not for capturing the detailed source fields.

Every form should be connected to only one conversion type, like a whitepaper or request a demo. So, it makes sense for that value to be directly linked to what form they filled out. When capturing the conversion type you don’t really care what source they came from, you just want to know what asset was it that made them get over the hump and give you their contact info. This can be used to optimize which offers/CTAs are driving the highest engagement, and also to measure which types of leads convert through the sales funnel the best.

Capturing detailed source information is a bit trickier. The goal here is to capture what source brought the visitor to the website on their first visit, and this isn’t always the visit that they end up filling-out a form. With some customization both Pardot and Marketo have the ability to capture the UTM values of a visitor if they fill-out a form on their first visit on the page they land on, unfortunately for most companies that happens less-often than the person coming back for multiple visits or converting on a page other than what they landed on. Natively Eloqua doesn’t do even this level of source capture. Pardot does use a cookie and can store source information on a visitor even if they navigate around the site much like Google Analytics. Marketo unfortunately only can capture these UTM values if the person never leaves the landing page.

For reference we’ve built our own custom JavaScript tag that allows us to store these values regardless of which marketing automation platform is in use. And, we can apply other logic to assign proper source credit. If you are interested in licensing our JavaScript tag, please contact us here.

The ideal scenario is that the 5 UTM fields along with the conversion type information are captured in hidden form fields on the website. Then those hidden field values get pushed into Salesforce along with the leads personal information. This then ensures that whatever happens to the lead in Salesforce the detailed source and conversion type information is present.

Some Additional Recommendations

Once the detailed source and conversion type info are stored on the lead, we recommend a few things to make sure the values are present in all of your Salesforce reporting.

1.) Make sure to convert Leads into Opportunities. Salesforce will maintain the lead information on the Opportunity only if the lead is actually converted into the Opportunity. If your process includes converting leads to Contacts, then later creating Opportunities from the Contact or Account that attribution will be lost.

2.) Create field mapping in Salesforce pulling the Source and Conversion Type information from the Lead Record to the Opportunity Record. This is helpful, so that when you pull Opportunity Reports in Salesforce these values are present in your report. Otherwise you’ll have to only pull Leads with Converted Opportunities reports.

We also recommend using the UTM fields for all list uploads. So, if you go to a trade show or buy a list make sure to include values in these fields with all of the details from the show or list. This will help make sure that all leads that get into Salesforce have a value. Also, work with your sales and channel team to get them to use Lead Source and/or your UTM values to capture the details of the leads they source as well. Null Source values for leads are a bad thing. Try to get a source on everything, otherwise you can’t be sure if something is broken.

The Benefits of This Type of Reporting

Having the originating source for every lead gives you the insights you need to properly optimize your marketing investment. And, having granular source details means that you can optimize those activities both at the Tactic (or Medium) level, but also down to specific placements/keywords within those tactics. This insight can make your marketing investment much more effective and produce huge improvements in results from your inbound marketing.

Let us know what you think, and/or if you have any questions in the comments. Thanks for reading!

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!