Join us at the Bay Area Content Meetup

Posted on September 8, 2018 by AttributeApp

Join us for a Multi-Touch Attribution presentation and discussion in San Mateo on October 4th.

Details

Done right, multi-touch attribution models can provide a better view into marketing and sales’ contributions to revenue, compared to first touch or last touch models.

At this Meetup, Jeremy Hurley, Founder of AttributeApp, will explore key considerations and challenges to getting started and some of the available tools to help unlock insights.

We’ll have pizza and networking at 6:30pm; Jeremy’s presentation will begin at 7pm.

Marketing Attribution: Multi-Touch Attribution Models, Processes and Tools

Thursday, Oct 4, 2018, 6:30 PM

Bovet Office Center
155 Bovet Road, First Floor San Mateo, CA

6 Content Enthusiasts Attending

Done right, multi-touch attribution models can provide a better view into marketing and sales’ contributions to revenue, compared to first touch or last touch models. At this Meetup, Jeremy Hurley, Founder of AttributeApp, will explore key considerations and challenges to getting started and some of the available tools to help unlock insights. We’l…

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How to Expose Permanent Pardot Marketing Data at the Contact level in Salesforce

Posted on August 9, 2018 by AttributeApp

Are you looking to expose Pardot marketing automation data and attach it permanently to the Salesforce contact record (and not through an iframe)? This can be accomplished using AttributeApp. After the initial data sync using the Pardot API, this marketing contact touch data will be available in Salesforce. The data is exposed in the Marketing Data Tab under each contact record:

(chart label is the Pardot marketing touch/asset and campaign name from your environment)

You can also drill down into the specific Marketing Data Name record for even more detail:

These are the steps to implement:
1. Download the AttributeApp managed package
2. Connect the app through the Pardot API – this pulls in selected Pardot activity/campaign data at the contact level and builds a custom object that stores this data in SF and can be accessed
3. Run AttributeApp initial job – suggest to test this, we start with just a few days or a week’s worth of data (can go back and run a full historical job later). There is no need to implement Javascript tags with AttributeApp as we use our historical data and current setup.
4. Expose Permanent Pardot Marketing Data at the Contact level in Salesforce:
Setup -> Object Manager -> Contact
-> Related Lists
Drag “Marketing Data” to the bottom
-> Related List Properties – Marketing Data
5. Select Fields – recommended to choose the first 4 fields below, and the rest of the fields can be navigated to from there:

6. SAVE Layout

As long as you have AttributeApp installed, you’ll have access to this data and view at the contact level.

How do you get your Sales team to use Opportunity Contact Roles?

Posted on October 7, 2017 by AttributeApp

A common question and pain point for B2B marketers is how do you get your Sales team to use Opportunity Contact Roles for the purpose of Salesforce Attribution reporting? Without correct opportunity contact role data, it’s usually not possible to report on marketing’s influence on deals or get a true ROI analysis on which channels, tactics, and campaigns are driving revenue.

The honest answer – You don’t get your sales team to use Opportunity Contact Roles. They never will. And if you force them to it will just result in garbage info. Not to mention that fact that for most B2B marketers with any kind of complex sale, there will be multiple influencers and decision makers at the account over time. Salesforce Campaign Influence is limited to only doing 100% Last Touch Attribution models (and then there are double counting issues).

Better to look at all the actions at the account level. B2B marketers sell to accounts, not contacts. This is very clear with the rise of account based marketing (ABM).

Even if reps did fill out Opportunity Contact Roles perfectly correctly, there are still a few main issues with Salesforce Campaign Influence reporting, including a reliance on highly flawed 100% Last Touch Attribution models, double counting campaign influence, no marketing automation data, or fractional/Multi-touch attribution reporting or weighting.

AttributeApp solves this problem by:

Combining your marketing automation and Salesforce campaign/Account/Contact/Opp data in a Salesforce custom object.
Closes the “Opportunity Contact Role Gap” by looking at the activities of all the contacts at the account level – whether the sales rep took the time to select them in Salesforce, or (far more likely) not.

Sales is just not going to fill out this information correctly, but the data is in your system. You can try to force process down the throats of an unwilling sales team, or buy purpose built software to do the job. Tools like AttributeApp can close the data gap and provide multi-touch attribution reporting combining your marketing automation and Salesforce data for true ROI insights and analysis.

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Combine Salesforce and Pardot Campaigns Data – New Feature Added

Posted on March 31, 2017 by AttributeApp

AttributeApp now allows the option to combine Salesforce and Pardot Campaigns Data into the app. You can now run attribution reports based on the following marketing touch data sets and fields:

Salesforce Campaigns
Salesforce Sales Actions (from the task field, i.e. calls, meetings, demos, send quote, etc.)
Pardot Campaigns
Pardot Tactics (forms, landing pages, videos, white papers, files, page views, email clicks, etc.)

All of this is combined with Salesforce Opportunity Data level to allow for multi-touch attribution reporting. AttributeApp can also assign attribution at the Account level, regardless of whether reps have filled out Opportunity Contact roles or not. This allows for Account Based Multi-Touch Attribution.

Using Lead Source as First Touch Override – New Feature

Posted on February 16, 2017 by AttributeApp

Based on customer requests, a new feature has been added to AttributeApp Multi-Touch Attribution reporting – the ability to use the Lead Source as First Touch point in Multi-Touch Attribution reports.

When this setting is enabled, the first touch credit for any opportunity in Salesforce goes to the Lead Source, even if there is an earlier Pardot marketing touch point. This can be useful when data is coming in from multiple sources and Salesforce is the one point of truth for first touch/lead source. This touch point overrides any earlier Pardot marketing touches and gives the first touch attribution credit to the Lead Source.

The Lead Source is an auto populated field in Pardot which is determined by the prospects referring URL.
The Referring URL is the page the visitor was on directly before landing on your page. For example someone saw a tweet for an offer of yours and clicked through to yourcompany.com/landingpage, Twitter is the Lead Source. Generally this is the first true touch point. Later – perhaps later that visit, a month later, 6 months later – whatever form, landing page, or event that converts into a prospect is the Pardot Source Campaign.

AttributeApp pulls in both data points and allows weightings to be adjusted on each. There is also an option to pull the lead source from the Contact in the Opportunity with the earliest “Pardot Create Date”.
Lead Source as First Touch also gives the user an easy way to generate and save multiple Top of Funnel reports, either from a Salesforce Lead Source or Pardot marketing touch filter.

How to Combine Content and Account-Based Marketing

Posted on January 17, 2017 by AttributeApp

How Multi-Touch Attribution Analysis bridges the divide

With all of the fuss around account-based marketing (ABM), you might feel a little out of the loop if you haven’t given it a try yet. For most marketing organizations, account-based marketing will not replace inbound marketing efforts. With its high price tag and intensive content requirements, teams who try to make a hard switch from inbound to ABM are in for an unwelcome shock.

At AttributeApp, we have found that our customers are most successful when they continue their inbound marketing efforts and pepper in account-based efforts. Our argument is that these two disciplines need to work together, with insights from the marketing data stack acting as the bridge between two programs.

Capitalize on previous inbound marketing investments

With countless hours and money spent on your content marketing program and building your inbound engine, you’ve got the brand equity needed to create demand online. While account-based marketing doesn’t directly rely on that kind of search engine “pull”, you should still leverage your content marketing learnings to create the right “push” for ABM prospects.

Use inbound efforts to test content

Since account-based marketing requires highly targeted content, use your inbound leads to evaluate how well your content is resonating with key personas. Write your content with a persona in mind, then look at the types of leads that are downloading the content to verify that you’re writing for the intended buyer. If you’re writing for VP’s but only get inbound leads from managers, consider that your content might need to “manage up” a little better.

Uncover website behaviors that tip the scale toward conversion

Once you catch the attention of an ABM prospect with personalized, targeted advertising and content, your two goals are to get them on the phone with your sales team, and get them to browse your website to see the value that you provide. By using Multi-Touch Attribution Analysis, marketers can uncover the key website behaviors that drive buying behavior. Using Pardot, assign important web pages to different Pardot campaigns; this will tell you which page the prospect first landed on to start their session. Also, by using page actions you can add prospects to Salesforce campaigns when they hit important website pages.

All of these steps will allow tools such as AttributeApp to pick up on key website behaviors — showing you which pages are “tipping points” prior to purchase or conversion. The unique ability to customize your attribution model will enable you to focus on the campaigns that are added at the end of the lifecycle. Once you have identified the pages most indicative of buyer behavior, you’ll know exactly where to drive your ABM targets on the website.

Figure out what content is part of the decision making process

Once an inbound lead has been created on your website and they begin talking to sales, pay close attention to what content they either request, or come back for. Maybe a lead was roped in by a high-level thought leadership piece, and later comes back to read case studies. Or, maybe there’s a video your sales team has been asking for because it helps answer all of the right questions for your buyer. All of this research performed on your inbound leads should help you find the right lifecycle to take your ABM buyers through. By using Multi-Touch Attribution Analysis, let’s say you notice that toward the middle of the sales cycle, you consistently get the CIO (a key stakeholder, but not the buyer) downloading some technical specs. Take this information and begin to proactively send him the information as part of your outbound cycle.

See the “Whole Account”

There are two very important factors in ABM that specifically relate to your database/CRM. First, you must have the ability to quickly and easily source the correct key contacts at the organizations you’re targeting. Consider investing in a software tool that helps you source the right prospects for your outbound ABM efforts. Tools such as data.com take the guesswork out of this part of the proess. Second, and more importantly, make sure you are using attribution reporting that allows you to see all activity on the entire account and how that relates to revenue growth. Many standard CRM reports and/or marketing automation tools fall short and only show you activities that pertain to contacts who are correctly added to opportunities. AttributeApp, instead, automatically allows you to look past this divide and include all account contacts. Ultimately, your ABM program will only get the funding it deserves relative to the success you prove. Make sure there are no reporting barriers in your way.

Don’t Forget the Human Touch

There are many ABM tools and platforms emerging to help solve the challenge of targeting key accounts — or better yet — the right people at these accounts. Don’t forget that you are still marketing to individuals that are part of a larger organization. Just like your inbound marketing and content programs, there’s a wealth of data about the sales touches your team is using. A well-timed phone call can go a long way beyond automated emails and targeted advertisements.

Use MTA analysis to evaluate not just the campaigns your targets are participating in, but also to see what types of sales interactions are moving the needle. Recently, AttributeApp began including sales tasks and activities in reports for just this purpose. Study your successful deals and make note of when sales and manual interaction played a key role in progressing a deal. Ensure your sales team are logging their activities for this to work well. MTA analysis is all about highlighting the key actions that led to success, and looking at them through various lenses to make sense of your process.
Whether you are trying to bridge the gap between inbound and outbound, sales and marketing, or automated touches with a human touch, MTA Analysis can show you how and where to invest time and dollars to maximize your results. If you have questions about how AttributeApp has helped others do this, contact our team today.

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Pardot Account Based Marketing — 8 Tips

Posted on January 11, 2017 by AttributeApp

For those who plan to start Pardot Account Based Marketing, the AttributeApp team has compiled 8 Pardot-specific tactics that can take your efforts to the next level:

1. Use Pardot Grading Profiles to Establish your Target Buyer

A key consideration of B2B and account-based marketing is that even though you’re targeting businesses, you’re still selling to people. Use the demographic and firmographic data you have available to create Pardot grading profiles that will help guide your persona targeting. Consider separating your profiles based on their role in the process (i.e. – decision makers or influencers).

With your profiles established in Pardot, run analysis on your current customer database to evaluate the average grade of your customers. Are the contacts who have become a decision maker, who made a purchase, scoring at an “A” level? If not, the grading profile should be adjusted. This is the benchmark you’ll use to judge future prospects.

2. Reap the Rewards of Research

There’s no doubt that in your quest for Pardot ABM greatness, you’ll be doing a LOT of corporate research. The highly targeted nature of ABM requires vast amounts of data that make personalization possible. AttributeApp recommends using new custom fields in Salesforce and Pardot that house this information. Don’t let your research go to waste, make it sustainable and reportable by keeping the data at the account or contact level.

Ensure these data fields are mapped to Pardot — (hint: they can be used for personalization later)

3. Invest in Good Contact Sourcing

Once you have established the buyer profile that gives your company the best chance to break into a purchase consideration, and set up your required data set with custom fields, your next task is to gather the set of outbound prospects you’ll be targeting. This is a joint effort with your sales team. Each rep is sure to have a shortlist of his top accounts he wants to target. But to supplement this effort, consider investing in a strong and reputable source outbound contacts. (data.com, ZoomInfo, Insideview, Avention, Demandbase, etc)

We’re focusing on the term outbound here because it’s important to remember that most ABM prospects have not opted in to your marketing campaigns. Be sure to follow Pardot’s SPAM philosophies and guidelines.

4. Select an ABM Technology Partner

Once you have been testing ABM strategies and you know what’s working, you might be ready to select a technology partner. Most account-based marketing tools are a significant investment for marketing teams. We suggest that before you get into it, put in the time and thoughtful analysis required to make AMB a success.

Some tools offer buying “triggers” that analyze prospect behavior. It’s a good idea to integrate these triggers such that they can kick off various marketing campaigns such has lead nurturing, direct mail, or scheduling sales follow up. Here’s a full landscape of ABM vendors.

5. Track Manual Steps with Campaigns & Activities

Most ABM Programs incorporate tactics such as IP Address-targeted advertising, direct mail, or outbound calls and emails. Most of these touches can be recorded in your CRM automatically, but make sure that 100% of them are tracked if you want to do the best analysis of what is work and what is not. If your inside sales team performs a call blitz, or a field marketer invites a prospect to dinner, make sure these manual interventions are logged in the CRM as a task or campaign membership. This will allow AttributeApp to capture the action and include it in Multi-Touch Attribution analysis. As you may already know, this type of analysis is the key to choosing the correct order of specific tactics to nurture your ABM prospects.

6. Consider Account Engagement

Another way to capitalize on Pardot functionality to understand ABM and how it’s paying off, is to use the lead score Pardot provides. Even the default scoring functionality will show you which prospects are interacting with your ABM campaigns with a score increase. Be sure that you’re awarding extra points for conversions and important web page visits.

On top of typical scoring, make sure you are evaluating the score of an account overall. Since ABM is all about the account, it’s important to make sure that you understand if the right buyers at the target account are engaged. One prospect might have a high score, but if this person is not the buyer your efforts might be paying off in the wrong place.

Use this method to evaluate account scores. To make the report effective, look at the total score AND the average score of an account. You might choose to throw out scores over a certain threshold as well.

7. Use Pardot’s Dynamic Content for Hyper-Targeted Campaigns

As mentioned before, ABM is all about being highly customized and targeted in your outreach. What better way to achieve this than to use custom words and images in your marketing programs? Pardot’s dynamic content is a great way to achieve this level of personalization. Since each layer of dynamic content introduces additional time investments, we suggest starting off small and working with sales to identify the top 10 accounts who merit these special campaigns. Use your custom data points to fill in the blanks around what software the prospect already uses, the name of their company, the person’s job title or other facts about them; even the company logo.

8. Implement AttributeApp Multi-touch Attribution to measure Revenue Attribution at the Account Level

AttributeApp marries your Pardot marketing touch data to Salesforce rep activity and account/contacts/opportunities. Rather than relying on reps filling out “Opportunity Contact Roles” for analysis and reporting, AttributeApp looks at all of the contacts at an account level whether the rep has filled out that field accurately or not (hint – usually they haven’t).

With the data in one place and normalized, AttributeApp gives a clear view of all of sales and marketing’s actions from first touch to closed won deals (and beyond) that helped influence the sale. This is a true Pardot Account Based Marketing, Multi-touch attribution report. Adjustable weights and scores allow you to customize reports based on your sales cycle and processes to provide actionable ABM/ABS insights like:

1. - Top conversion paths taken and commonalities for target ABM/ABS accounts
  - Highlight what tactics/channels/campaigns have influenced top deals/accounts
  - Top “First Touch”, Net New Lead generation tactics/campaigns/channels at the account level
  - See all contacts at an account in one timeline view with their key marketing touches

By arming you with various Pardot tactics to assist in Account-Based Marketing, we have also made sure to incorporate the various layers of data required to evaluate the success of your campaigns. ABM is a big investment, and the winners of the game will rely on multi-touch analysis that will allow them to dial up tactics that work, and optimize those which need to improve.

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Getting Started with Multi-Touch Attribution: To-Do List

Posted on November 29, 2016 by AttributeApp

Before getting started with multi-touch attribution, many marketers are intimidated or daunted by the idea of “cleaning up” their database. This is true for even the most sophisticated of programs; no dataset is perfect. The AttributeApp team has worked with many groups over time and we’ve learned that data quality is a journey — not a destination. By implementing the right processes and tools, you can begin multi-touch attribution without having to restart your database. Often times, the data revealed in your MTA program will help inform your perspective about new processes to help keep your data in good condition.

So, if you don’t have to overhaul the entire database to start measuring your marketing data stack in a more sophisticated way, what is required to start off on the right foot? Read on below to see our top recommendations.

Get cross-functional buy in

The most common key stakeholders of MTA Analysis are marketing leadership, sales, and finance. Before getting started with Multi-Touch Attribution, get the input of these 3 core voices. Be inquisitive and make sure you understand which questions they would like to have answered. Your program is sure to get the support it needs if it is aimed at answering the right questions for the business.

There’s a chance that you’ll need outside support of a 3rd party tool or resource to really get to the bottom of your investigation. When requesting funds for the project, make sure you remind stakeholders of their previous buy-in and reiterate how you’ll be adding to the bottom line by informing marketing decisions with more horsepower and insight than ever before.

Harmonize your databases

If data quality is a journey, you need to start off by making sure everyone is in the same car, driving down the same highway. Many marketers use multiple systems to create and record marketing data. Various systems for CRM, web analytics, and marketing automation are the backbone of your dataset. It’s important to make sure all of the systems are integrated and talking to each other so that your data is ultimately getting back to the CRM. You don’t want to have leads in the CRM that are not in the marketing automation database. Then, map all fields possible between the CRM and marketing automation tool. Harmonize the data across both tools and make sure you’ve carefully chosen how those fields get updated and which dataset is the master. This will help down the road, knowing that you are evaluating one set of information. Also consider Salesforce Data Quality Solutions for Marketers to clean up CRM data.

Clean up scoring and grading

If you’re using marketing automation such as Pardot, a score and grade are available to you in efforts to evaluate the quality of your prospects. We suggest taking a look at how these are running and making some tweaks to improve them if necessary. Once you dive into your MTA analysis, you’ll be making findings about which marketing campaigns work, and when they work. After you make determinations and start changing your campaigns, lead score and lead grade are two ways to evaluate a “before and after” to see if your changes are making an impact in the marketing funnel. Other good diagnostics are close rate, opportunity age, and average deal size, all of which should improve when you are doing better marketing.

Determine how your company will use campaigns

Marketing campaigns are the backbone of attribution analysis. Make sure you have set the strategy for how you want your team to use campaigns because this will feed the data that is analyzed in your MTA tool. Some things to keep in mind:

If you use Pardot, remember that the Pardot campaign is an indication of the “first touch” campaign. Each Pardot prospect has one campaign assigned to them.
The Pardot campaign can be changed — make a decision about whether you want the campaign to serve as first touch or if you would like to change the campaign based on certain behaviors. If you do want to change it, use automation rules or completion actions to do this.
Salesforce.com campaigns have a many-to-many relationship with leads and contacts. Each prospect can be a part of many campaigns. For this reason, many marketers use both Pardot and salesforce.com campaigns to tell the full story.
Pay attention to the way your campaigns are named. This will make reports easier to read and digest. Don’t be afraid to rename campaigns that were set up with a confusing title. Set a standard, and enforce it.

Ultimately, and most importantly, getting started with Multi-Touch Attribution requires an open mind and a willingness to set aside some of your previous assumptions. You may find that your most tried and true marketing campaigns don’t move the needle quite as much as you thought, and discover new programs that are making a huge impact which previously flew under the radar.

Marketing Attribution Errors: How NOT to do B2B marketing attribution

Posted on November 1, 2016 by AttributeApp

Here are examples and anecdotes of marketing attribution errors and how NOT to do B2B marketing attribution. Sadly many of these stories are real stories from the B2B marketing battlefield:

“We are shifting most of our marketing budget this quarter to Publisher Y. We ran a report and saw that one of the leads they generated off a white paper for us two years ago turned into a million dollar sale!”

There were likely lots of factors that helped close that deal with a two year sales cycle and to provide 100% of the attribution and ignore all of the other sales and marketing touches that influenced the deal can bring you to a poor conclusion and plan. Better to give proper credit with a Multi-touch attribution model (MTA) to all the touches along the way. Also get granularity in your reports at the opportunity level so one single outlier deal doesn’t skew overall marketing spend strategy.

“Our marketing ROI reports rely on sales reps entering in the Opportunity Contact Roles. We’ve made this a required field and stressed the importance and reasoning to sales so we have good data.”

What really happens: the reps hurriedly and haphazardly pick out a primary contact and move on with more important things (to them) and don’t give a thought to the secondary influencers or buying team that had input into the decision and how those touches roll up into marketing reports and influence marketing spend decisions.

A better idea is to not rely on the reps to manually enter data, but build models that automatically look at the account’s activity as a whole. This also ties into your Account Based Marketing (ABM) strategy and using MTA to support and measure. Rollup the marketing touches at the account level and recapture lost attribution that marketing drove but didn’t get associated due to contact roles.

“Don’t send us any duplicate leads, we throw them out and don’t count them.”

Generally this is said by a marketer that is using a simplistic First or Last touch Attribution model instead of MTA. The reps don’t get to see potentially important prospect actions (their contact viewed a white paper for a new product line, etc.), publishers get shortchanged for helping to nurture along and further educated a lead, and marketing doesn’t get credit for the touch and draws poor ROI conclusions. MTA solves this problem.

A related one is from a B2B marketing agency:

“We make media plan decisions and which publishers to allocate spend to based on Cost Per Lead (CPL) and Volume.”

Agencies are in an even tougher spot. They are usually understaffed with lots of turnover, overworked and managing lots of clients and campaigns. Critically, they typically don’t have any (or limited/infrequent) visibility into the client’s CRM system in order to do properly attribute ROI and do any sort of true closed loop marketing. So they fall back on metrics that they know are flawed but have no choice. Share MTA reports with agencies.

Do you have any stories of Marketing Attribution Errors and how not to do B2B marketing attribution? Comment or Tweet at us.

Enhanced Salesforce Opportunity Filtering – New Feature

Posted on October 28, 2016 by AttributeApp

AttributeApp’s new Salesforce Opportunity Filtering now allows users to build more granular multi-touch attribution reports with their combined Pardot and Salesforce data. The interface should be familiar for all Salesforce users as we are mirroring the filters and settings for building typical Salesforce Opportunity Reports. Filters can also be combined and available pick list fields are populated with the data from your Salesforce org.

Below are some of the available filters along with some possible use cases:

Stage
Probability %
Amount or Expected Amount
Close Date
Open Date
Opportunity Type – Look at Existing Customer Upgrades only, New Customers, etc
Opportunity Name – Can include or exclude certain words in the Opportunity Name. Can be useful depending on your Salesforce Opportunity Naming Convention, i.e. All opps that include “XYZ” product name.
Next Step – Run a report showing all upcoming demo meetings. Drill down into the reports to see what common marketing content has influenced these deals, or get a complete view of each individual opportunity and the Pardot and Salesforce activities that have taken place at that account.
Created Date
Last Activity
Lead Source

Salesforce Opportunity Filtering

The new Salesforce Opportunity filtering within AttributeApp gives users great control to build multi-touch attribution reports and answer key questions on marketing’s contribution to sales and what is driving pipeline and revenue at a much more granular level.

Pardot Salesforce Data Sync – New Feature Added

Posted on September 15, 2016 by AttributeApp

The first step in any marketing attribution project is getting your data in one place and standardized to report on. AttributeApp’s Pardot Salesforce Data Sync combines relevant marketing actions from Pardot with Salesforce contact/account/opportunity data for the purpose of multi-touch attribution reporting.

One challenge that can come up for some orgs in the Pardot Salesforce data sync is account and contact records that exist in Pardot but not yet in Salesforce.

Generally with Pardot’s CRM connectors, for Pardot to sync a prospect with a record in CRM, an existing Salesforce contact with matching email address must exist, OR the prospect must be assigned in Pardot.

AttributeApp allows a little more flexibility and granularity for companies that want to create new contacts and accounts that exist in Pardot but not yet in Salesforce. This can close some of the gaps in attribution reporting for contacts that exist in Pardot but not yet Salesforce.

The AttributeApp has several user defined controls in place on setup, including:

Contacts Only – select this option to create new contacts in Salesforce that exist in Pardot but not Salesforce (if email address already exists – activities are appended to that matching contact)
Accounts Only – (if Account name does not exist in Salesforce database, a new Account record is created)
Timeframe – select how far back in time (via “activity lookback window”) to pull Pardot data from
Activity Types – select which Pardot Activity types to include. Default is to exclude activities like “email sent” and include relevant, meaningful marketing activities like “video watched”, “attended webinar”, etc.
Sync Frequency – Can be set daily or hourly (as frequently as once an hour for a near continuous Pardot Salesforce Sync) to pull in net new Pardot activities.

Pardot Salesforce Data Sync

Other Considerations:

This is a one way sync – AttributeApp does not write from Salesforce to Pardot.
Account and Contact Duplicates – we recommend a data cleansing/governance strategy to clean up any account and/or contact duplicates (i.e. “Walmart” and “Wal-mart Stores, Inc.”. Third party tools like RingLead’s Data Quality Platform are a great solution.
Sales reps sell to accounts, not just individual contacts. AttributeApp is also set up to roll up attribution reports at an account level, regardless of opportunity contact role that may or may not have been filled out by a sales rep. This is especially important with B2B marketer’s increasing focus on Account Based Marketing (see Account Based Marketing in Pardot – 3 Ways Multi-Touch Attribution Supports and Improves).

By ensuring a proper Pardot Salesforce Data Sync, AttributeApp can help close the gap on any accounts that have opportunities in Salesforce and make sure all relevant marketing activities are tied to that account. This gives a complete view of the buyer’s journey and insights into all of marketing’s contributions to sales.

Pardot/Salesforce Data Export – New Feature Added

Posted on August 3, 2016 by AttributeApp

Based on customer requests we’ve added a new feature at AttributeApp – the ability to do a Pardot/Salesforce data export of the combined CRM/Marketing Automation marketing touch data stack we build on integration.

***Update – if you are looking to do a one time Pardot activity export (moving to another marketing automation solution, connecting data to a corporate BI or CDP, etc.), we can do that through AttributeApp for a one time fee of $599. AttributeApp is a managed package that you download into your Salesforce environment. You enter your Pardot API credentials, select the type of data you want to import from Pardot and the date range, then run the job. You can also marry this data with SF campaigns and opportunity data at the contact and account level. This creates and exposes a custom object in Salesforce. Depending on the amount of data (there is a test before importing), it may take a day or so to run the job. From there you can then export via CSV. If you’d like to learn more or get started – Contact us

Go to AttributeApp Setup -> Marketing Data Report. Then build a report/filter and Save as a Report in Salesforce, or export to XLS or CSV. The final report will have married all Pardot and Salesforce marketing and sales activities at the contact/account/opportunity level:

You can also easily summarize (group) info by contact, campaign, opportunity, etc.

One of the key benefits of AttributeApp is getting your Pardot marketing automation and Salesforce sales and opportunity data in one place. From there we have pre-defined Multi-touch attribution reports and tools to easily build and run your own attribution models.

However, some customers may want to export this combined data to do offline analysis with other BI tools, or use the data for other purposes.

There is often a debate among SaaS companies as to whether to allow customers to export data and how to handle those requests. Some software vendors make it difficult to extract your data in the hopes of “reducing churn” amid worries that you’ll take your data out of the app and cancel. Our view is that the data is yours – not ours – and we should make it easy for you to extract it at any time, for any purpose. In the AttributeApp setup tab it’s easy to filter the data set you’d like and export to CSV or XLS.

Salesforce Sales Attribution Reporting

Posted on June 24, 2016 by AttributeApp

New feature added: Salesforce sales attribution reporting

Salesforce Sales Activity has now been added along with Pardot marketing touch data to the multi-touch attribution reporting within AttributeApp. Users now have the following options for Multi-touch attribution reporting with their combined Salesforce and Pardot data:

*Pardot Activities/Campaigns only
*Salesforce Sales Activities only (calls, demos, meetings, etc.)
*Combined Salesforce Sales Activities and Pardot activities

This provides a complete view of Sales (Salesforce activities) and Marketing’s (Pardot activities) contributions to pipeline and revenue.

This data gets rolled up at the Marketing Tactics and Campaigns level. You can also drill down into a single opportunity and get a clear view of both Sales and Marketing’s contributions to closing a deal. Here’s a simple example that combines both Pardot (Video, Website Visit) and Salesforce (Send Quote) activities to give a complete view of a single deal:

Salesforce Sales Attribution

There are now 10 out of the box attribution reports that allow insights into

*Pardot data, Salesforce sales data, combined Salesforce and Pardot data

*First Touch, Last Touch Models (for baseline comparison)

*Multi-touch Attribution Models

*Revenue Attribution (i.e. “Closed Won” in the last 90 days)

*Pipeline Attribution (i.e. “50/70/90% Open Opportunities last 90 days)

And of course all reports have customizable multi-touch and contact weightings, or create a new custom report and filter on opportunity stage, timeframe, activity lookback window, etc.

Please keep the feature requests coming!

What is Multi-Touch Attribution (MTA)

Posted on May 19, 2016 by AttributeApp

What is Multi-Touch Attribution (MTA)?

There has been a lot of buzz lately in about Multi-Touch Attribution (MTA). Exactly what is Multi-Touch Attribution (MTA) and why should B2B marketers care?

A synonym for Multi-Touch Attribution you might hear is “Fractional Attribution” which helps to explain the concept. In a nutshell for, MTA attempts to split up the credit for an opportunity, giving each marketing touch an appropriate amount of ROI credit for helping the deal from initial interest/lead through to close.

Traditionally, many companies have relied on simple First or Last touch attribution models which give 100% of the marketing credit to a single touch point. Marketers realize this is a highly flawed model to be basing decisions on, but are often stuck with it due to technical tracking limitations with their CRM, marketing automation and/or lead flow process. (see Marketing Attribution Model Comparison which breaks down a single opportunity between first touch, last touch, even multi-touch, U-Shaped, Time Decay, and finally custom MTA models).

MTA models are particularly useful for B2B marketers that have longer sales cycles, higher value deals, and more complex sales with multiple members and influencers on the buying team. These types of B2B marketers are almost always using a marketing automation and lead nurturing tool like Pardot, Marketo, or Eloqua; running multiple lead generation campaigns through various media partners and channels, and engaging and tracking lots of different landing pages, partner programs, and content marketing assets (white papers, webcasts, etc.).

With all of this complexity and marketing budget being spent, it becomes a huge challenge to tie back closed revenue to the efforts that are truly influencing pipeline.

Consider an example where your company won a $50K deal that took 12 months to close, with 4 influencers at the customer (IT Staff, CIO, CFO, IT manager) that took 30 distinct, significant marketing influenced actions (webinars, demos, white papers, etc.) over the course of the sales cycle. Companies relying on First Touch or Last Touch Attribution models would give 100% of the credit to a single marketing action, ignoring everything else. This is clearly a very simplistic (and wrong) view, yet many marketers still rely on these models. With Multi-Touch Attribution, we can give fractional credit to every marketing touch based on variables that actually influenced the sale like timing of the action relative to lead or opportunity created or closed, role/title of the buyer, etc.

Today with third party Multi-Touch Attribution tools like AttributeApp for Pardot, marketers can get a better view into what activities are truly influencing deals all along the journey from lead to close (and even beyond to renewals and upsets). This type of reporting can deliver:

Attribution rollups of ROI at campaign and tactics/asset level to gain truer insights into best performers
Single view of opportunities – visually see the path of key opportunities from lead to close with marketing’s contributions along the way
Account Based Marketing Attribution reporting – go beyond the limitations of Salesforce Opportunity Contact Roles and capture everything that is happening to influence a deal at the account level. see Account Based in Marketing in Pardot – 3 Ways MTA Supports and Improves

Hopefully with an answer to “What is multi-touch attribution (MTA)?”, marketers can recognize the need to go beyond First/Last touch models and consider third party attribution tools to continue on the path to data driven marketing.

Getting Started with AttributeApp

Posted on April 28, 2016 by AttributeApp

AttributeApp Implementation Guide – Step by Step Tutorial

Setup Time: 10 Minutes

Step 1: Install the Package in your Salesforce environment

Click on the link supplied by AttributeApp or through Salesforce AppExchange (must be a Salesforce Admin or a user with “Download AppExchange packages” permissions to install)

There may be as many as 3 choices depending on how your Salesforce org is setup: Install for Admins Only, All Users, or Specific Profiles. AttributeApp does not charge per seat. Here we select install for All Users. If you have Marketing or Management specific roles that may make sense. Or test with admins first and roll out to the rest of your org later.

Step 2: Approve Third Party Access (pi.Pardot.com)

Click Yes to integrate with your Pardot installation. AttributeApp pulls your Pardot marketing data into a custom object in Salesforce over SSL encrypted connection. No outside providers or servers have access to your data.

Step 3: Installation Complete

The AttributeApp managed package has been installed into your Salesforce org.

Step 4: Check Setup, Installed Packages

You can check to see the managed package has been successfully installed: Setup->Installed Packages

Step 5: AttributeApp Tabs – locate AttributeApp setup

Press the “+” column. You can see 4 tabs have been created: “AttributeApp” (main reporting tab); “Marketing Data” (marketing touch stack that marries Pardot/Salesforce data into custom object); “Custom Marketing Reports” (9 pre-configured out of the box reports, plus any user added reports or defaults); and “AttributeApp Setup”. Click “AttributeApp Setup”.

Step 6: Pardot Credentials

Enter and Save your Pardot Credentials (Pardot username, Pardot password, and Pardot API User Key*).

*To obtain Pardot User Key: In Pardot, Settings->API User Key. Copy and paste into AttributeApp setup.

Important – Save Settings/Credentials.

Step 7: First Run Settings – Pardot

For the initial Pardot marketing data import, it’s important to limit the imported data to only touches that are meaningful and actionable. It’s recommended to stay close to default settings when first setting up AttributeApp. Additional data can be pulled in later.

A) Set the initial “Import Date Cutoff”. Default is “90” – this means AttributeApp will pull in 90 days of your historical data from Pardot and Salesforce campaigns into the initial data set.

B) Set the Included and Excluded Types of Marketing touches from Pardot. For example, “Email Sent” is not a meaningful marketing activity that attribution should be assigned to (and would result in slowing the data import), however types like “Attended Webinar” or “Site Visit” are important to capture.

C) “Create New Accounts And/Or Create New Contacts”. Generally these fields are unchecked. If checked, any new accounts and/or contacts that exist in Pardot but not in Salesforce will be created in Salesforce as new records. Use this setting with caution as it can create duplicate records in Salesforce. Consider using a third party tool like RingLead for data dedupe and cleanse.

D) Import Page Views – check this box if you’d like to import page view data recorded in Pardot (can be a lot of data).

E) Import Email Clicks – check this box if you’d like to import Pardot email click data (can be a lot of data).

F) Optional – “Check Import Size”. Clicking this button will check to see how many Pardot contacts and activities will be updated and created as tasks in Salesforce. If your org has over 2M activities, consider shortening the Lookback Window and/or excluding more Pardot activity types.

G) “Save Settings”

Step 8: First Run Settings – Salesforce

AttributeApp also gives the option to bring in Salesforce campaigns data and Salesforce sale rep task data (from either the subject or task fields) into your marketing attribution reports.

Step 9: Schedule Job and Pardot/Salesforce Data Synch

A) Click “Run Full Job” – this begins the initial Pardot data integration. This process may take up to a day depending on the amount of historical data you are pulling into the app. The job is broken down into smaller batches so your Salesforce org is not disrupted.

B) Set Job Schedule Frequency and Time for the data to be regularly synched from Pardot to Salesforce. As a best practice, set to Once a day, Midnight (0:00). This means a nightly job will pull in new data from Pardot and marry it to the Pardot/Salesforce marketing touch data stack that AttributeApp creates. If you need a more continuous synch, this can be set to as frequently as every hour. This will take in any new Pardot activities since the job was last run. Select Hourly or Daily and “Save and Schedule Job”.

*Optional: “Clear All Pardot Data” deletes all data that has been synched from Pardot to Salesforce so that you can start over.

*Check the Job Details tab on the bottom of the setup screen to check the status of the data import

Step 10: AttributeApp Reporting

Check back the next day that the initial batch data import job has run. Access the AttributeApp tab to run the app. For a tutorial on getting started with out of the box reports, filters, weighting, and using AttributeApp see the blog post How to do Pardot Multi-Touch Attribution in Salesforce – Tutorial.

Account Based Marketing in Pardot – 3 Ways Multi-Touch Attribution Supports and Improves

Posted on February 25, 2016 by AttributeApp

Account Based Marketing in Pardot

According to SiriusDecisions, over 90% of marketers recognize the value of Account Based Marketing, with 60% planning to invest in the practice over the next 12 months. First thought of as an enterprise-only process, this new method of targeting key accounts is gaining popularity as supporting technologies pop up to aid in the process. Yet, many marketers don’t have the support they need to report back on the success of their own account based marketing initiatives. Read on to learn 3 ways that Multi-Touch Attribution analysis can support and improve Account Based Marketing in Pardot efforts:

1. See the Entire Account

With the power of marketing automation software tied to CRM, everything from lead nurturing campaigns to dynamic content can be powered at the account level. Even still, most marketing analysis done in the CRM is tied down by which contacts are associated to ABM campaigns or the master opportunity. With MTA Analysis, marketers gain the freedom to analyze the success of marketing tactics across the entire account. So long as Account Based Marketing efforts are being tagged to contacts at the point of interaction, these touch points will be visible in the marketing touch data stack. Make sure you choose an MTA partner that allows you to drill into opportunities by geography or sales rep for ease of reporting. With AttributeApp, simply select to see “all contacts” associated with the account of that opportunity. This is a simple, purpose-built way to envision the influencing tactics across an entire account. No need to pressure sales to add each and every contact to the opportunity in the CRM. The best part? Take it to the next level by determining how to distribute influence across all of the contacts with different proven MTA models such as u-shaped attribution, time decay models, and more.

Bonus Tip: with AttributeApp, the marketing touch data stack feeds straight from Pardot or your marketing automation vendor via API. For the best view of how your ABM steps pay off, use naming specific to the account being targeted. When using a dedicated landing page or email campaign; name the Pardot campaign and the assets accordingly so that analysis can include ABM-specific activities plus generic content marketing efforts.

2. Evaluate ABM Strategies in Context of their Goal

Some of the most popular tactics of ABM include dedicated retargeting ads, prospect specific offers, dynamically personalized website content, elaborate direct mail campaigns, and more. These tactics aren’t deployed in a batch-and-blast style; rather they are carefully planned per account in partnership with sales. Certain tactics are inherently better geared toward a specific part of the sales funnel. MTA analysis is the single best way to ensure that you measure ABM tactics according to their intent.
Check out the chart below to understand 2 examples of how tactics line up to MTA models and reports with AttributeApp.

ABM Tactic	MTA Analysis Model	AttributeApp Reports
Early funnel retargeting ads for the Southeast sales teams’ key accounts	Custom Model (giving extra weight to the first contact hooked in by the campaign)	Filter the report to find accounts in the Southeast and evaluate the Pardot campaign for these ads
Mid funnel high-touch direct mail campaign sent to decision makers	Custom U-Shaped model (giving more weight to the last touch at the account before the opportunity closed)	Filter the report to include opportunities in your custom Salesforce.com opportunity stages most closely aligned with ID’ing decision makers

3. Prove it to Sales

Proper Account Based Marketing requires a high degree of trust and alignment between sales and marketing. Phase one is a joint effort of building the target market and key account list. Phase two hands the ball to marketing to target these accounts digitally. Using marketing automation, marketing must surface the key points of interaction to sales in real-time. Then sales takes over and begins concerted outreach to key contacts with targeted offers. Over time, marketing continues to be involved in the sales process. With so much back and forth, sales must be completely bought into the ABM process.

Use MTA to show sales how important it is to target an entire account. Once they have proof of the improved funnel velocity, higher close rates, and success of ABM tactics, they’ll be hooked on the program. As necessary, AttributeApp can show success down to the sales rep level — allowing marketing to run contests among reps, build custom programs for each person and custom Multi-Touch Attribution reports based on that salesperson’s program and style.

If you are in the 60% of marketers planning to take on Account Based Marketing in Pardot this year, don’t go it alone. Make sure that your marketing automation strategy is aligned to support your ABM strategy. The power of marketing automation, account based marketing, and multi-touch attribution is the most promising way to ensure your sales and marketing alignment is at an all-time high in 2016.

Salesforce.com Multi-Touch Attribution vs. Purpose-Built Tools

Posted on February 23, 2016 by AttributeApp

Do I need a Purpose-Built MTA Tool or can I use Salesforce.com Multi-Touch Attribution?

The majority of marketers will attempt to use some form of Multi-Touch Attribution analysis in 2016. Once you’ve decided that MTA is right for you, the next step is choosing how to tackle a Salesforce.com Multi-Touch Attribution project. Ask yourself these questions first:

Should my analysis include marketing automation efforts?
Who will perform the analysis?
What is our internal level of expertise in statistical analysis?
Who is the audience reviewing the data?
Do I want to use my own custom model or a proven one?

The answers to these questions can largely impact the decision of whether to use Salesforce.com standard functionality, export all of that salesforce and marketing automation data for SQL analysis, or invest in a purpose-built tool that can make MTA as easy as plug and play.

Salesforce Standard Functionality:

There are a few different campaign influence reports available in Salesforce.com, each with their own nuances, that are helpful in getting started with MTA. Understanding these nuances begins to expose some of the limitations of MTA with Salesforce.com. First, campaign influence reports can be done two ways. An ROI report at the campaign level will only treat PRIMARY campaigns as influential toward marketing ROI. This means that of all the campaigns an opportunity can participate in, one must be designated primary to get the full serving of ROI credit. A more general opportunities with campaign influence report can show you all of the campaigns that an opportunity participated in, but only if the contacts in the campaigns have been added to the opportunity. And, they cannot be presented in any order of a specific attribution model such as time decay or u-shaped modeling.

For those who have a small, limited team with a wealth of information in Salesforce.com campaigns, this might be the best option for getting started. Typically those using Salesforce.com influence reporting cannot integrate their marketing automation data.

Exporting The Data for Analysis:

Salesforce.com data becomes the most pliable when it is exported for deeper analysis. If your team has resources for heavy lifting of data analysis in tools such as SQL, all Salesforce.com data could be exported and manipulated manually. An API feed could be setup to pull data from the CRM into custom spreadsheets where models are made manually. You’ll need a team member that is well-versed in statistical analysis and Salesforce.com architecture. Once the data has been exported, your team can create your own custom model that assigns influence to any contact at the account with successful opportunities. This is a good way to get around some of the limitations in the Salesforce.com UI such as choosing only 1 primary campaign. If a full data warehouse is available, your team might be able to set up jobs that send marketing automation data to the same environment for reporting.

This method of analysis often requires a full-time data scientist who can also manipulate reports to be understood by members of the selling organization. It’s most successful to use these complex, excel reports for internal marketing audiences only. Taking reports out of the CRM often raises questions about the data and its validity that your team will need to be prepared to answer.

Adopting a Purpose-Built Tool for the Marketing Touch Data Stack:

For those teams getting started in MTA who don’t have a full-time data scientist, a native Salesforce.com tool that peforms dynamic Multi-Touch Analysis across the entire data stack focused on marketing automation may be the way to go. If you are a Pardot user for instance, upon setup and integration with AttributeApp a nightly batch job runs and marries your marketing automation and Salesforce.com data. From there marketers can access out of the box MTA reports, drill into data, create different views/filters, and customize based on their specific customer and prospect research and buying behavior. Marketing automation touch points such as web behavior or lead nurturing programs can be seen in the context of the account-based analysis.

Native Salesforce.com tools are ideal for those who want to present reports inside of the CRM to their leadership or sales teams. AttributeApp arrives on day one ready to leverage proven MTA models such as the u-shaped attribution model, with the flexibility to create a custom model of your choosing. All contacts at the account can be included, or you can limit to include primary and secondary opportunity contacts.

Reports are easily segmented based on varying stages of opportunities, which can change at a moment’s notice. Rather than waiting for data to be exported, worked with, reported and analyzed, your AttributeApp reports update frequently based on a fast-moving sales team. The best part? Proven, statistically relevant reports are available out-of-the-box the moment you get started. Go beyond the limitations of Salesforce without earning your PHD in stats.

A purpose-built MTA solution is ideal for marketers who want to dive in and get started quickly with MTA focused on their marketing touch data stack created by marketing automation efforts. Contact us today to find out how easy it is to get started!

How to Start Multi-Touch Attribution Modeling – Three Clues that MTA is for you

Posted on February 18, 2016 by AttributeApp

Choosing and How to Start Multi-Touch Attribution

Many marketers have named multi-touch attribution as a top priority for 2017. Have you already decided that MTA is for you? Here are three clues that it’s time to add Multi-Touch Attribution to your ever-growing project list and tips on how to start Multi-Touch Attribution reporting to unlock ROI insights and get a clear view of the buyer’s journey from lead to close and marketing’s full contributions:

1. Your company has a long, complex, B2B sales cycle

Organizations whose products are high value with a large price tag have seen their sales cycles become increasingly long and complex. When selling to businesses, the influencer might start out doing the research but needs to bring in a team of decision makers or get a purchasing department involved in the final signature. Because of this, marketers are looking for ways to shorten the sales cycle by finding tactics that get to the right contact who can help make a decision faster. MTA analysis can reveal programs that decision makers participate in. Once identified, sales and marketing can work together to get those programs launched into the sales process faster.

When your sales cycle lasts upwards of 6 months to 1 year, measuring the ROI of marketing programs on a monthly or even quarterly basis can be challenging due to the time between lead generation and gaining a new customer. This has lead to the rise in popularity of MTA analysis that can lend insight to activities that happen over a longer period of time.

2. Your marketing department has impact on the top, middle, and end of the funnel

If the long sales cycle applies to you, then you have probably already begun creating marketing programs that are aimed to impact different parts of the marketing and sales funnel. In many companies, this begins organically by sales coming to marketing and asking for help with closing a deal. In most B2B applications, marketing programs sorted by their place in the funnel might look something like this:

Top of the Funnel	Middle of the Funnel	Bottom of the Funnel
Paid Search Advertising	Case Studies	Custom Sales Proposals
Tradeshows and Sponsored Events	Lead Nurturing	Sales Meeting Support
Inbound Content Marketing	Custom RFP Replies	Custom Prospect Demos
Content Syndication	Field Marketing Events	Tools such as ROI Calculators

When marketing lends more support to the entire length of the marketing and sales cycle, a new type of analysis is required. Let’s look at the example of lead nurturing. If you were to evaluate that program based on its ability to bring in new leads for sales, it would never appear to be successful. This is because you only nurture leads that you already have in your system, thus their lead source will never be ‘lead nurturing’. As tools like Pardot have enabled marketers to nurture leads they have already gained, the success comes from getting those leads to close faster and more effectively – better measured by length of sales cycle or close rate.

3. Your lead sources and first-touch attribution are in good shape

First things first, do you know where leads are coming from? This shapes the foundation of a marketing analysis strategy and shouldn’t be overlooked. MTA analysis is even more useful when it is paired with foundational knowledge of where leads and opportunities are sourced. We recommend that you use tools such as Pardot and/or Google Analytics to help determine the right lead source for your new leads. Where possible, Pardot will fill in a lead source automatically or lead source can be populated at the form level with completion actions.

On their own, first touch models are more effective for B2C products. The researcher is often the same person to make a purchase online with their credit card. Imagine that you’re browsing Facebook and you see an ad for an online clothing retailer. You click the ad, browse the site and make a purchase. This attribution is pretty straightforward for that retailer and it’s easy to calculate the return on the Facebook ad.

Once first-touch attribution is established, Multi-Touch Attribution really takes things to the next level. By creating a marketing touch data stack within Pardot and Salesforce, you get the ability to report on where leads come from, but also what happens to them next. Marketing can take more credit for the progression of those leads — even the ones that were originally sourced by sales! Even in the case of our simple retail purchase, let’s think about the next steps of their process. How do they encourage repeat purchases? No doubt they included you into their email marketing campaigns and began retargeting ads based on products you might not have bought. Even retailers can benefit from MTA analysis to understand how their campaigns work across the repeat buying process.

If these three things are true for your marketing organization and especially if you’re using marketing automation, it’s time to take things to the next level and get started with Multi-Touch Attribution.

How to do Pardot Multi-Touch Attribution in Salesforce – Tutorial

Posted on September 24, 2015 by AttributeApp

Pardot multi-touch attribution – How, Why, and Getting Started

So, you are a Pardot customer that already understands the benefits of Multi-touch Attribution as a Catalyst for Data Driven Thinking and how many more actionable insights a multi-touch attribution model yields when compared with first or last touch attribution models particularly for complex B2B sales. But how can you implement Pardot multi-touch attribution reporting?

The options are limited and not available within Pardot directly. Here’s a step by step guide to do so using AttributeApp, a native Salesforce app for multi-touch attribution modeling and reporting.

1. Marry Your Pardot Marketing and Salesforce Data in a Marketing Touch Stack to enable Pardot Multi-Touch Attribution

The main goal is to combine your Pardot marketing touch data with your Salesforce.com opportunity, contact, and account data in one place. In our opinion Salesforce.com should be the “one true source of data” as it is closest to customers/sales, and it is already used, understood and trusted by sales, marketing, and the executive team.

After signing up for an AttributeApp account with 30 day free trial here, a 10 minute configuration pulls your relevant data from Pardot right into Salesforce. This builds a custom marketing activity object that combines your Pardot touches with Salesforce opportunity/contact/account data. If you require a custom setup or prefer help with this process, an AttributeApp implementation specialist can capture your requirements and do the configuration for you. Also of note is that since your data never leaves Salesforce it is 100% secure. From there lots of interesting things start to happen.

2. Utilize out of the Box First, Last, and Multi-Touch Reports

With your Marketing Touch Data Stack created, several out of the box reports with common default settings are available.

Step 1: Choose an existing report

Get immediate insights at the Pardot Campaigns rollup or underlying Pardot Tactics/Assets level.

Here we’re looking at all Closed Won opps in the last 90 days with standard multi-touch attribution settings (90 day lookback window from when the opportunity was closed, 40% attributed to first touch, 20% to all other touches, 40% to last touch; counting all contacts at the account).

Data is presented at the Pardot Campaign rollup level – here the most marketing attribution credit is given to “Field Marketing Campaign #1”:

Alternatively, look at the underlying Tactics level to see attribution rollup on Pardot tactics/assets like Seminars, White Papers, etc.:

Step 2: Drill down into a report to see the underlying opportunities

Step 3: Drill down into a single opportunity to get a view of all the marketing touches with their weighted attribution that influenced the deal at critical points in the sales process

3. Modify existing reports and weightings; create custom models

For existing report, or any new report created there are lots of variables and filters. Reports render in the app realtime – no overnight processes to see how different models, assumptions, or filters effect your ROI conclusions.

Step 1: Filter your set by Salesforce or Pardot values

Filter by Salesforce Fields like Account (regions, reps, types), Opportunity (stages, date ranges, $ value). Perhaps you want to look at All Closed-Won deals this quarter, in the US.

Filter and drill into data by Pardot fields like Campaigns, Tactics, and Assets.

Step 2: Adjust Multi-Touch Weightings

With multi-touch weighting on, the user can allocate different percentages for the First Touch, Last Touch, and All Other Touches based on your own marketing funnel characteristics or theories.

Out of the box First Touch Attribution Settings:

Out of the box Last Touch Attribution Settings:

“U-Shaped” Attribution Settings (in this case 40-20-40):

Step 3: Set your Lookback Window
The Lookback window determines what touches from Pardot are pulled into the Marketing Touch Stack and reported on. Here with a 90 day lookback window AttributeApp pulls in all marketing touches that occurred within the 90 days prior to the opportunity closing.

Step 4: Select and Weight Contact Roles

Opportunity Contact Roles are handled differently by many companies. This has a huge effect on marketing and lead attribution reporting. AttributeApp is flexible.

Is your company good about requiring and keeping up to date Opportunity Contact Roles? If so you can turn on this setting and adjust weightings for Opportunity Contact Roles.

Opportunity Contact Roles Only:

Want to capture lost attribution that marketing drove but didn’t get associated due to missing opportunity contact roles? Use Opportunity Contact and Account Roles to assign attribution to both associated opportunity contacts and other contacts at that same account that are not associated to the opportunity.

Opportunity Contact and Account Roles Settings:

Don’t use Opportunity Contact Roles? You can still do multi-touch attribution reporting in Pardot and Salesforce. Toggling Contact Role Weighting “Off” will assign attribution to all contacts within that account that match the filters. If your organization is focused on Account Based Marketing this is a great feature.

Contact Role Off (ignores opportunity contacts and spreads attribution to all account contacts):

Conclusion

Of course changing any of the filters, roles, weightings and settings has an effect on marketing and lead attribution reporting. In AttributeApp you can see how your data is effected immediately with different filters and lenses over your data to test assumptions and glean insights. AttributeApp also sends automatic monthly and quarterly PDF reports highlighting top Pardot campaigns by attribution, top Pardot assets by attribution, and a breakdown of Top 10 Closed Won opps with multi-touch attribution timeline to help prove marketing’s contributions to revenue.

Ready to see how your data looks in Pardot multi-touch attribution reports? Sign up for the free 14 day trial with AttributeApp here.

Salesforce Data Quality Solutions for Marketers

Posted on August 25, 2015 by AttributeApp

As a customer relationship management (CRM) product, there are few services more valuable to your business than Salesforce.com – regardless of the industry that you happen to operate in. With Salesforce, you now have access to every last piece of actionable information regarding your business’ interactions with customers at your fingertips. For many businesses, however, the key failing of Salesforce is data quality. Just because it allows you to keep a record of every last word spoken in every last interaction with a customer doesn’t mean that all of that data is valuable. As more data is entered, it can be difficult to find the wheat through the chaff and identify the information you really need. If you want to improve data quality in Salesforce.com, you and your employees will need to keep a few important things in mind.

Salesforce data quality issues to look out for

The root of data quality issues in Salesforce can usually be traced back to one key source: the employees themselves. More specifically, you’re relying on sales representatives and other key personnel to manually enter data themselves. Without a rigid set of best practices and guidelines in place, this can result in everything from bad data that you’ll never need to use again to missing or incomplete data and more.

For an example of this problem in motion, consider what happens when a rep fails to fill in the primary “Contact” field in Salesforce. You may have a huge volume of actionable and important information about that customer, but it will do you little good if you don’t actually have a way to contact them to guide them further along the sales funnel. Not tying a Primary contact or secondary contact to an opportunity can make it difficult to run proper attribution reports – a problem that needs to be corrected if a marketer is going to get a true ROI for different channels, assets and tactics.

Salesforce Data Quality Solutions to Common Data Quality Issues – Software and Process

Luckily, the answer to these types of issues is a great deal more straightforward than you probably think it is. One of the major benefits of Salesforce is that it is inherently customizable, meaning that you can adjust the way it works and even the way that your employees are interacting with it depending on your needs.

If you’re trying to get your reps to fill in the primary “Contact” field in Salesforce, for example, you can customize your own particular deployment to make this easier than ever before. You can configure Salesforce to make this a mandatory field for reps to fill out when either opening up or closing an opportunity. Attribution reporting applications like AttributeApp can also intelligently look back at an account’s recent history and assign contacts to opportunities based on a a pre-defined algorithm.

Third party data append services are also a great way to eliminate other types of data issues moving forward. There are firms out there that can append literally any type of data that you may need – from demographics to lifestyle data and everything in between. Making use of these services is just one of the many ways to dramatically increase the quality of the data that you’re storing in Salesforce.

If you’re experiencing issues with data quality due to a high volume of low quality information, the answer is simple: eliminate open ended text whenever possible. Again, just because Salesforce allows you to keep track of a virtually limitless amount of data doesn’t mean that this will actually do you, your customers or your employees any good in the long run.

Use pick lists to help create a set of defined choices that your employees can select from, allowing you to both identify what values you consider important and streamlining the data entry process for your employees. Limit the total number of choices that they have available to create the best possible situation for everyone involved.

If you only want your employees to keep track of X, Y and Z, for example, don’t make A, B and C options at all. Suddenly you’ve made your employee’s job easier by eliminating much of the guess-work that they had to deal with in the past and you’ve dramatically increased the quality of your Salesforce data in one fell swoop.

A mix of Salesforce configuration, good data construct and hygiene, and third party services like AttributeApp and data append companies can produce a clean set of Salesforce data that can produce actionable marketing and lead attribution and ROI reporting.

Marketing Attribution Model Comparison: First, Last Touch and Multi-Touch Attribution

Posted on July 8, 2015 by AttributeApp

Data Driven marketers, particularly those at B2B companies with complex sales cycles understand that first and last touch attribution models shortchange marketing’s contribution to sales. These simplistic models don’t give a clear, full picture on ROI that different marketing activities contribute to pipelined and won revenue. Read on for a Marketing Attribution Model Comparison for B2B marketers.

First/Last touch models were built for ecommerce, B2C or low price point products with simple, linear progressions from lead to sale. For organizations that have longer sales cycles (often up to 12 months or longer), multiple decision makers and influencers, and lots of research and marketing activities that happen prior to a deal finally closing, marketers need to move to Multi-Touch Attribution models.

The problem with First and Last touch attribution can be illustrated with an example.
Consider a very simplified scenario for a B2B company that successfully sells a software package to Bank of America for $100K. Here’s the timeline of events:

Jan 1 – Joe Smith (IT manager) downloads white paper, entered as lead
Jan 5 – Joe asks for a proposal, oppty entered at 50%
March 1 – Joe Smith visited trade show booth
April 1 – Joe Smith downloaded a case study
May 1 – Sally Jones (CIO) attended a webinar
May 2 – Joe asks for updated proposal, now had identified budget and timeline, gives verbal yes – deal moved to 90%
June 28 – Ralph Carter (CFO) downloaded ROI report
June 30 – Joe asks rep for contract – Closed Won deal!

First Touch Attribution Model:

First Touch Attribution Model
It took 6 months to move this deal from initial opened opportunity to close. In the First Touch model all $100K attribution is given to the initial lead source when the IT manager downloaded a white paper at the very beginning of the process. Key moments that clearly influenced the deal like the CIO attending a webinar and then immediately asking for an updated proposal and approving the budget, or the CFO reading an ROI report and then the deal being closed shortly thereafter receive $0 credit.

Last Touch Attribution Model:

For a high value, high touch B2B sale the last touch attribution model makes very little sense. In this scenario we give $100K credit to the report the CFO downloaded prior to the deal, but nothing to the marketing activities that got sales foot in the door initially or moved the deal along at other key stages.

Multi-touch Attribution Models

Here are some other models to consider that attempt to capture the proper attribution for all activities that influence the sale. AttributeApp allows you to weight and customize based on factors that matter to your business:

Even Multi-Touch Weighting

Multi-Touch Even Weighting
This model assigns even weighting to all touches. May be a little simplistic and shortchange the first and last touches.

U-Shaped Model

U Shaped Attribution Model
A model that gives 1/3rd attribution for first touch, 1/3rd for last touch, and 1/3rd spread out over remaining activities. This gives extra credit for the activity that brought in the lead and the activity that theoretically helped close the deal, while also giving credit to other mid-funnel touches that assisted the deal.

Time Decay Model

Time Decay Model
It may make sense to apply a time decay filter, which gives more weighting to activities that occurred closer to the deal than those in the past. Time decay could also be combined with other models like U-Shaped.

Custom attribution model

Custom Attribution Model
A custom model might build off the above and include weighting by other variables like contact title, contact role, asset type, etc. Your custom multi-touch attribution model might look like this chart above, and give more weight for the first and last touches, a key touch by a high value contact that caused a jump in opportunity stage, and less attribution to a few other less influential activities.

For any one deal, it can difficult to ascertain what activities truly influenced the deal. It’s part art, part detective work and there are many variables at play. However over time and with a large enough sample size of Opportunities and Activities, the data becomes much more meaningful and reliable. As this Marketing Attribution Model Comparison has shown, multi-touch attribution models can yield actionable insights for marketers.

Learn more about How to implement multi-touch attribution in Salesforce using your Pardot data or Contact AttributeApp to discuss implementing Multi-Touch attribution models for your business.

Multi-Touch Attribution as a Catalyst for Data Driven Thinking

Posted on June 30, 2015 by AttributeApp

As a B2B marketer, if you aren’t doing any type of multi-touch attribution modeling currently, it’s akin to driving down the road blindfolded. You may or may not be on the right path, but there’s little way to know for sure (until you crash into a tree or the rumble strip). With your data in one place and a multi-touch attribution modeling and reporting solution on top of it, you can begin to see what is happening and make adjustments over time. There are a lot of adjustments that may need to be made (steering, acceleration/breaking, engine repairs, etc) based on the circumstances and environment.

First Step: De-Siloing Sales and Marketing Data

The first step in doing true multi-touch attribution to determine what marketing activities are truly driving sales and pushing prospects along the funnel is to get all of your sales and marketing data in one place in order to report on it. Salesforce.com is a great place to do this. It’s the de facto industry standard for CRM. A secondary benefit is that sales lives in Salesforce, and reps should be able to see key activities their contacts/prospects are taking. This informs their sales calls (i.e. calling John Smith, he just read a white paper on xyz topic last week); and also gives reps and sales leaders greater visibility into what marketing is doing to push leads along the funnel and support sales efforts.
Management also uses and trusts Salesforce.com reporting over most any other data source. Opportunity data is the lifeblood of a sales organization and it lies within Salesforce. It’s closest to the customers and should be married with data from Marketing Automation platforms like Eloqua, Marketo, and Pardot.

Next Step: Report on the Data

Multi-touch attribution reporting tools like AttributeApp allow marketers to drill into data, create different views/filters, and customize based on their specific customer and prospect research and buying behavior.

Setting up customizable Multi-Touch Attribution models and analyzing the variables typically opens up lots of questions and theories that can lead to actionable insights for data driven marketers:

Are there certain assets/marketing activities that are more impactful at certain opportunity stages?
What marketing tactics are best at moving deals from MQL to SQL, from SAL to Closed-Won, etc.
Do some assets/activities yield better results in specific regions? Times of year? Product lines?
What are trends over time for assets/activities/campaigns, etc?

Last Step: Improve Data Over Time to Drive Marketing Data Driven Thinking

Put the reporting solution in place first, and then work on your data quality issues. Data cleansing and processes are always going to be a work in progress and never 100% perfect. Easy to use, relatively inexpensive must-touch attribution reporting allows visibility and guides as you refine any underlying data quality issues.
Multi-touch attribution isn’t “set it and forget it” – it’s a constantly changing, shifting process, just like marketing itself. Getting started or advancing along the road to true data driven thinking can yield huge benefits for B2B marketers.

Welcome to AttributeApp: Multi-touch Attribution in Salesforce.com

Posted on June 9, 2015 by AttributeApp

Historically, many marketers have used simple attribution models to tie back marketing spend and activities to Closed-Won deals. Marketers have been forced to use simple first or last touch marketing attribution models due to limiting factors like data quality, imperfect sales processes, silos of information between CRM and marketing automation tools, and limited reporting functionality within Salesforce itself.
Relying on only marketing automation data can also be limited and not capture the real contributions of both sales and marketing to bring a lead from initial touch to close.

Smart, data driven marketers understand that for complex, B2B sales there are many factors that influence a deal from start to close – particularly for companies with high value products, multiple decision makers/buyer personas, and long sales cycles. To truly understand how successful your marketing and lead generation efforts are and where to increase or decrease spend, every touch that positively influences a deal should receive proper credit.
There are many variables that can be different for each business from content/campaign types, opportunity stages, deal velocity, product mix, etc.

There are a few new vendors popping up to address this known issue. Unfortunately many of these solutions themselves add further complexity and challenges and are quite costly.
AttributeApp’s aim is to simplify the process and give marketers out of the box multi-touch attribution models to provide immediate value, and can be refined over time based on results and further/better data. A simple, clear, easy to use solution that is focused solely on multi-touch attribution in Salesforce, natively.

Interested in finding out more? Fill out the form and find out about the beta program to get started.

Details

Marketing Attribution: Multi-Touch Attribution Models, Processes and Tools

How Multi-Touch Attribution Analysis bridges the divide

Capitalize on previous inbound marketing investments

See the “Whole Account”

Don’t Forget the Human Touch

Get cross-functional buy in

Harmonize your databases

Clean up scoring and grading

Determine how your company will use campaigns

New feature added: Salesforce sales attribution reporting

What is Multi-Touch Attribution (MTA)?

AttributeApp Implementation Guide – Step by Step Tutorial

Setup Time: 10 Minutes

Step 1: Install the Package in your Salesforce environment

Step 2: Approve Third Party Access (pi.Pardot.com)

Step 3: Installation Complete

Step 4: Check Setup, Installed Packages

Step 5: AttributeApp Tabs – locate AttributeApp setup

Step 6: Pardot Credentials

Step 7: First Run Settings – Pardot

Step 8: First Run Settings – Salesforce

Step 9: Schedule Job and Pardot/Salesforce Data Synch

Step 10: AttributeApp Reporting

Account Based Marketing in Pardot

1. See the Entire Account

2. Evaluate ABM Strategies in Context of their Goal

3. Prove it to Sales

Do I need a Purpose-Built MTA Tool or can I use Salesforce.com Multi-Touch Attribution?

Choosing and How to Start Multi-Touch Attribution

1. Your company has a long, complex, B2B sales cycle

2. Your marketing department has impact on the top, middle, and end of the funnel

3. Your lead sources and first-touch attribution are in good shape

Pardot multi-touch attribution – How, Why, and Getting Started

1. Marry Your Pardot Marketing and Salesforce Data in a Marketing Touch Stack to enable Pardot Multi-Touch Attribution

2. Utilize out of the Box First, Last, and Multi-Touch Reports

3. Modify existing reports and weightings; create custom models

Conclusion

Salesforce data quality issues to look out for

Salesforce Data Quality Solutions to Common Data Quality Issues – Software and Process

First Touch Attribution Model:

Last Touch Attribution Model:

Multi-touch Attribution Models

Even Multi-Touch Weighting

U-Shaped Model

Time Decay Model

Custom attribution model

First Step: De-Siloing Sales and Marketing Data

Next Step: Report on the Data

Last Step: Improve Data Over Time to Drive Marketing Data Driven Thinking