Campaign Influence in Salesforce

Campaign influence allows you to gain more insight into which marketing efforts contributed to closing opportunities. It allows for you to associate an opportunity to multiple marketing campaigns and weigh the revenue of the opportunity to each marketing campaign separately.

In this article, we'll go over why campaign influence is so important and how to set it up in Salesforce so you can track your Qualified campaign.

Setting up Campaign Influence in Salesforce

Before setting up campaign influence, you’ll want to have a good understanding of campaign attribution and have your campaigns set up in Salesforce and Qualified.

As a prerequisite to using campaign influence, you’ll also want to be using these Salesforce objects to track your marketing efforts and opportunities within Salesforce:

• Salesforce leads
• Salesforce opportunities
• Salesforce contact roles in opportunities
• Salesforce campaigns and parent campaigns (optional)
• Pardot campaigns (optional if using Pardot)

To get started, we’ll first need to start by configuring campaign influence in Salesforce, if it’s not done already.

If you use Pardot, you’ll want to make sure to first turn on Connected Campaigns to enable you to report on Pardot campaigns within Salesforce.

In Salesforce:

1. Click on Setup. 
2. Enter Campaign Influence in the Quick Find box. 
3. Click Campaign Influence Settings.
4. On the page, select Enabled. 
5. Click on Save.

Campaign Influence 1.0 vs. Custom Campaign Influence

When you begin to set up campaign influence in Salesforce, you’ll have a choice to make between Campaign Influence 1.0 and Custom Campaign Influence models. 

Campaign Influence 1.0 is an out-of-the-box solution that gives 100% of the credit to the campaign first associated with an opportunity. It allows you to auto-associate your campaigns to opportunities and is easy to set up. 

In contrast, Custom Campaign Influence allows you to split the revenue of your opportunity and weigh each marketing campaign against that revenue depending on the level of influence each campaign has. 

For example, let’s say you choose to enable Custom Campaign Influence. You might have a few campaigns going on at one time: email, campaign, marketing events, and sponsored dinners where you get one-on-one time with your prospects. 

You wouldn’t necessarily want your email campaigns to have the same weight as your sponsored dinner. Campaign influence custom models allow you to weigh those campaigns differently rather than having them all equally balanced.

Campaign Influence 1.0 

Once you’ve enabled Campaign Influence 1.0 you’ll then want to set up your auto-association settings. 

This is where you can define a number of days for a time frame or other filtering criteria that must be met before a campaign can be auto-associated to an opportunity. You might also choose to leave this blank so that all campaigns will be automatically associated with your opportunities.

When finished, you’ll see that out of the box 100% of the credit goes to the campaign first associated with an opportunity.

Custom Campaign Influence

Within Custom Campaign Influence you can choose from three different models:

• First-touch: focusing credit (opportunity revenue) on the campaign (touch point) that moved prospects through the awareness stage.
• Last-touch: focusing credit (opportunity revenue) to the campaign (touch point) that moved prospects through the consideration/negotiation stage.‍
• ‍Even Distribution: giving equal credit to all the campaigns (touch points) that a prospect interacted with during the buying cycle.

With Customizable Campaign Influence, you define the weights for the first-touch campaign, last-touch, or stick to an even distribution model (all campaigns have equal percentage influence). Use any of the models that you’d like or even any combination fo them together. 

Keep in mind that Salesforce uses two date fields to determine first and last touch for all models listed above.

• First touch: Salesforce will look at when the campaign member was created to decide which campaign was a contact’s first touch with your business.
• Last touch: Salesforce will look at the campaign members' last modified date to decide which campaign the contact interacted with before the opportunity's status became closed won.

Summary

Campaign influence is a powerful tool within Salesforce that can help you determine ROI for your marketing campaigns. Salesforce gives you two options for setup: Campaign Influence 1.0 or Custom Campaign Influence models. 

Either of these options with help you fill the gap between the campaigns you're running now and the revenue from your closed won opportunities. Once campaign influence is enabled, you can configure reports and dashboards to specifically show how your conversational marketing experience in Qualified are helping to influence your overall revenue.