Pardot 101 Campaign Influence
Attribution Models

Is your marketing team struggling with connecting the dots from campaigns to KPIs, including revenue?

Any business wanting to serve its customers well is juggling a number of marketing campaigns and collateral at any given time – website visits, landing pages, webinars, newsletters, blog posts, social shares, and trade shows – to name just the most popular ones.

Planning and keeping track of all major campaigns is no small feat, especially when gathering relevant metrics proves elusive. Marketers want to be able to calculate the return on marketing efforts for one of two main reasons:

• ROI calculations, or;
• To help plan future marketing campaigns

So any detailed information on all the touchpoints in a customers’ journey –  from initial contact to a closed-won opportunity –  is highly sought and valued.

Salesforce Opportunity page layout has a field that provides the name of the Primary Campaign Source (provided the Opportunity object is set up accordingly), and ROI reports can be generated taking that information into account.

However, the Primary Campaign Source is hardly ever the one point of conversion for a customer. We can’t ignore the initial point of contact, several connections along the way, and lastly the final point of conversion.

Pardot, on the other hand, has previously provided campaign attribution only as a thematic first-touch point for a Prospect, and subsequently, a Campaign has a one-to-one relationship with a Prospect.

This is not very helpful to a marketer unless the only goal is to measure visitor-to-prospect conversion. There is not much more that can be derived from this attribution with regards to opportunities or conversions.

In addition, this has been slightly confusing when it comes to Salesforce integration since we know that in Salesforce a Campaign has a one-to-many relationship with a contact, but I digress.

So here’s the big news – Pardot has announced a new release: “Pardot Campaign Influence Attribution models,” expected to be available starting November 14, 2017. This release enables multi-touch attribution models to be viewable on Salesforce dashboards.

With the Campaign Influence Attribution Model, out-of-the-box enablement will allow marketers to view and track different touch-points of the customer’s journey – first touch, last touch, and even distribution. This data will be available from within the Salesforce CRM, supported by the Opportunity records.

In Salesforce, in addition to the Primary Campaign Source Model, here are the three new ones that will be enabled:

• First Touch model – will show the point at which the prospect first interacted with the brand.
• Last Touch model  – will track the point in the campaign that helps close the deal; the final point of conversion.
• Even Distribution model – will track the performance of all interaction between a prospect and several campaigns, as the case may be.

The Campaign Influence Attribution Model is a powerful new release, one that will not only provide more accuracy in ROI reporting but will also help marketers in planning, budgeting, and executing future campaigns with confidence, and greater chances of success.

For all users working on both platforms, this move towards seamless integration of Salesforce and Pardot Campaigns cannot come soon enough.

As always, we’re here to help if you have any questions or would like to know more about using your Pardot or other Salesforce investments to their maximum potential.