A Campaign is essentially a mechanism for us to group assets & objects together so we can fully understand where ROI is coming from.
An easy one I go by is if you’re spending money on something, you may need a campaign for it. For example, LinkedIn ads, a new website as part of a rebrand, Organic posts (bonus ROI - or you can use staff costs!), events, webinars, the list goes on.
Your time is paid for, so make sure you’re number phone in cambodia tracking these organic’ activities because there’s always a cost somewhere.
Connected Campaigns
Great multi-touch attribution starts with Connected Campaigns.
Note how in the above example, Pardot used the first action as the source campaign but B2B Marketing Analytics used this as a point of reference (the first touchpoint).
Connected Campaigns really help with custom campaign attribution models.
These campaigns have a 1-1 relationship with a prospect in Pardot and show where the ROI should be directed in terms of a Source Campaign’.
The Pardot campaign will house all of the assets associated with a marketing campaign (Landing pages, emails, forms, links…). It all becomes clearer when we look at Engagement History a little later in this post.
Now, I won’t go into detail on how to turn Connected Campaigns on because Salesforce have already done this here. But, I will say that if you haven’t got Connected Campaigns turned on yet then please do!
Pardot always tries to work backwards and work out where prospects came from. To see the full list of sources it can actually work out, see here: How a Prospect’s Source Field Is Populated.
However, the above will be superceded if you are using Google UTM parameters in your URL.
I must stress something here because it catches everyone, the UTM information will only populate when it’s the prospect’s first touchpoint only. This is absolutely key. If the prospect triggers the Pardot tracking code in any capacity beforehand, the UTM info won’t populate.
Example of UTM tracking in Pardot
Campaign Hierarchy
Chances are, you may not have a clear strategy in place yet for Pardot Campaigns.
Don’t feel bad about it though, I’ve noticed that the main reason businesses don’t have this clear vision yet is mostly because there’s no real understanding or visualisation of why we need this robust structure in place.
Subsequently, teams just tend to hone in on the granular metrics and this is essentially how and why vanity metrics were such a big thing for such a long time.
An example of how you can manage Campaign hierarchy is available on Trailhead.