Salesforce campaign attribution is one of the best ways to assess the ROI of your marketing efforts and the channels you’re using to connect to leads, contacts, and prospects.
In this article, we’ll go over how campaign attribution works in Qualified, how to set it up, and, how to create your campaign attribution reports.
What if you’re using Pardot? No problem. Pardot allows you to also track attribution using their source campaign field or what we recommend, using Connected Campaigns with Salesforce. We’ll also cover Pardot attribution in this article as well.
Salesforce Campaign Basics
Before we dig into campaign attribution, you’ll want to become familiar with the basic concept of Salesforce campaigns.
Salesforce campaigns are an object within Salesforce that helps track marketing initiatives. For example, your outbound emails, marketing events, advertisements, and conversational marketing strategies are different types of campaigns.
Within your Salesforce campaigns, you'll have campaign members. Campaign members are those leads or contacts that you're trying to market to within that campaign. For example, the people in your email distribution list or the visitors on your website who have had a conversation with your chatbot or live chat.
There are different “Campaign Member Statuses” that you may assign to each campaign member (e.g. Sent or Responded), but we will not be referencing that value for Qualified’s recommended reporting.
Now that you understand what a campaign is and how you have campaign members within those campaigns, let’s talk about campaign attribution specifically. Marketers use campaign attribution to measure campaign influence, such as how campaigns generated revenue by influencing prospects to buy. More specifically, campaign attribution happens when a campaign member interacts with one of your marketing campaigns.
For example, let’s say Jane Smith is on your marketing email list and you’re sending out an email campaign that features your newest product. Jane receives your email, clicks on the CTA inside the email and is now on your website. Jane Smith continues to browse your product page and finally clicks on your Qualified chatbot and interacts with your sales rep to ask a few more questions before she books a meeting to get a live demo later that week.
A meeting was booked, awesome! If you’re not using campaign attribution, you might not be able to see which campaign played a part in Jane’s decision to book a demo and purchase from you. Campaign attribution helps you answer these questions and continue to invest your marketing efforts wisely.
Campaign Attribution and Qualified: How It Works
Now that you understand how campaigns, campaign members, and campaign attribution work let’s take a closer look at how it all works specifically within Qualified.
As visitors come to your site and have conversations with your chatbot or with your sales reps, those visitors will be pushed into Salesforce or Pardot and associated with the campaign you've designated in your lead or contact mappings.
A conversation in Qualified is defined as a simple back-and-forth interaction between a visitor and a chatbot or sales rep.
We’ll break down different scenarios below to show you what happens behind the scenes with your known and unknown visitors and campaign attribution.
Attribution Within Salesforce
New Leads (Unknown Visitors)
When a new lead enters your site and has a conversation within your Qualified chatbot or with a sales rep, we add campaign attribution as soon as the lead is created. A lead can be created two ways:
- The visitor hits a Salesforce push node in your experience.
- A sales rep manually creates the lead during or after a live chat with the visitor as shown below.
Campaign Attribution will be determined by the settings that you’ve set in your Qualified Lead mapping.
Existing Leads or Contacts (Known Visitors)
When a known visitor, an existing Salesforce lead or contact, comes to your site, Qualified will associate them to a campaign five minutes after the visitor leaves the site or one hour after the visitor goes idle. If the visitor doesn’t have a conversation, we won’t add any campaign attribution to that lead or Contact in Salesforce.
You’ll want to keep in mind that in order for campaign attribution to happen automatically for your known leads and contacts, you’ll need to set this up in your contact and lead mappings. We’ll show you how to do that in detail in the next article.
Attribution Within Pardot
New Prospect (Unknown Visitor)
Now, let’s say someone who is not a prospect in Pardot comes to your site and has a conversation within your Qualified app. We’ll update your source campaign automatically in Pardot as soon as the prospect is created. A prospect can be created in two different ways:
- Via the push node in the experience when a visitor hits this automatically
- When a sales rep manually pushes a new visitor into Pardot
If you are using Connected Campaigns with Salesforce, you’ll see campaign attribution happen in Salesforce after the Pardot prospect syncs. Keep in mind that Salesforce leads can be associated with multiple campaigns while Pardot prospects can only be associated with one source campaign.
Known Prospect in Pardot
When a known Pardot prospect comes to your website and has a conversation with your Qualified chatbot or one of your sales reps, we won’t automatically override your Pardot source campaign.
We understand that most likely your known Prospects already have a source campaign attributed to them. If you’d like to override that source campaign at any time, you can do so just by setting this up in your Pardot sync push node in the Experience Builder.
Remember Jane from earlier? Let’s assume she was a prospect in Pardot and clicked on a link in your email campaign, which led her to your site and interaction with your sales team using the Qualified app. Since Jane was already a Prospect, we won’t override her source campaign field. If she syncs to Salesforce as a lead, however, we’ll associate her with your Qualified campaign in Salesforce.
Connected Campaigns
If you are using Connected Campaigns with Pardot, you’ll notice that changes made to your Pardot source campaign will also be reflected in Salesforce.
Your source campaign will not be updated in Pardot after it has been set by Qualified or an outside source unless you specifically request this in your Pardot push node. However, we will continue to associate your Salesforce leads and contacts to campaigns. What this means is that your Pardot prospects will only have one source campaign but the lead in Salesforce could have multiple campaign associations.
Summary
To summarize, campaign attribution is a powerful tool to help you better assess the ROI of your marketing efforts. Qualified will apply campaign attribution in a few different ways, depending on who the visitor is and if you’re using Pardot.
Campaign attribution for unknown visitors will happen as soon as they are created as a p-prospect or lead by Qualified or manually by your sales team. Known visitors will be updated at the end of the conversation with Qualified, but we will never update a known prospect in Pardot source campaign (unless you ask us to in the experience push step).
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