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What is Salesforce Campaign Influence? (+ an Easier Way to Attribute Marketing Revenue)
Salesforce Campaign Influence allows you to effectively track the impact of your marketing campaigns on revenue, but is there an easier way?
Marketers need to demonstrate their value to the business, even more now than ever before.
To do this, marketers need to know exactly how their strategies impact the opportunity and sales pipeline.
However, for too long, marketers have relied on vanity metrics such as lead volume, page views, and site traffic as the primary measure of success.
While vanity metrics often look good on the surface, underneath the hype, they’re empty.
They tell you nothing about the role marketing plays in growing and maintaining revenue within the business.
Fortunately, for Salesforce users, they have access to campaign Influence. This feature allows marketing and sales teams to track which campaigns lead to the most valuable sales opportunities and revenue.
While campaign influence has many ways to visualise your impact on opportunities, it comes with some big question marks: Is it reliable enough to measure the effectiveness of your marketing campaigns?
Let’s find out together.
In this article, we’ll discuss:
💡 Pro Tip
Want an easier way to attribute marketing revenue in Salesforce? Learn how to match data captured from lead generation such as web forms, phone calls and live chat with revenue data in Salesforce and gain end to end visibility of your customer journeys.
How to track lead source revenue in Salesforce
For those of you that don’t know, Campaign Influence in Salesforce is an out-of-the-box feature that allows you to leverage CRM data and connect the dots between opportunity revenue and campaign data.
It allows you to identify how many opportunities a campaign has influenced and reveals which marketing tactics are most effective in driving revenue.
To enable Salesforce Campaign Influence, all you need to do is follow these steps.
Important note: For Pardot users, you’ll need to turn on Connected Campaigns first. This will allow you to report on Pardot campaigns within Salesforce.
Once Campaign Influence is enabled, you can optimise your reports to show how marketing activities are contributing towards the sales pipeline and closed revenue.
When you start with Campaign Influence in Salesforce, you’ll have the option to choose between Campaign Influence 1.0 and Custom Campaign Influence.
At first glance, Campaign Influence 1.0 and Custom Campaign Influence share a lot of similarities, but they do have a few differences.
The purpose of Campaign Influence 1.0 is to help marketers understand the return of their campaign investments. To achieve this, Campaign Influence 1.0 awards 100% of the credit to the first campaign that is associated with an opportunity.
For example, let’s say John is an opportunity in your Salesforce CRM.
John’s first known interaction is when he downloads an eBook after receiving an outreach email from your marketing team.
In this event, the outreach campaign would receive 100% of the credit for this opportunity.
Customisable Campaign Influence is essentially the same as campaign influence 1.0, but it offers a few more capabilities not currently available in the standard version.
One stand out difference is that Customisable Campaign Influence lets you understand how multiple campaigns work together to deliver opportunities and revenue in Salesforce.
Unlike the standard version, Customisable Campaign Influence allows you to measure the impact of your campaigns using three different attribution models.
Campaign influence in Salesforce has made it possible for marketers to assign credit to the campaigns that drive opportunities and revenue, but it isn’t perfect.
Campaign Influence is a “built-in feature”.
In other words, the customer journey in Salesforce only starts once a lead has been created.
Let’s say you send out an email campaign with a link to download your eBook.
Someone clicks the link and converts it into a lead. In Salesforce, this would be considered as the first touchpoint.
But how did this lead end up on your mailing list?
Had they previously visited your website via a Google Paid ad and subscribed to your newsletter? Maybe they found you via organic search.
Using Campaign Influence alone, you’d never know.
💡 Pro Tip
With our guide on customer journey tracking, you can follow users’ movements across multiple touchpoints and figure out which channels, campaigns, keywords and ads result in the most value.
Download the guide on how to track your customer touchpoints
While campaign performance data is readily available in Salesforce, Campaign Influence doesn’t provide much insight into marketing source data, and as marketers, we want to know the following:
1. WHERE our leads are coming from i.e. social paid, organic search.
2. HOW our leads are converted i.e. eBook download, demo.
Read more: How to track marketing lead source data in Salesforce
Although, more importantly, we want to see how our efforts influence the pipeline and revenue outcomes.
Combining Salesforce activity with marketing source data provides you with a better understanding of your customer journey and can help you prioritise marketing spend in the right areas.
Unfortunately, Salesforce was geared towards sales teams, and is not designed for marketers.
So, it doesn’t hold the data you need to connect your marketing campaign with sales and revenue activity.
That said, if you manage lots of multi-channel and multi-device campaigns then you can invest in a 3rd party platform that supports multi-channel attribution to help solve this disconnect (we will get to this shortly).
Typically, Salesforce campaigns are built for gated content.
This is to ensure that anyone consuming content is an existing lead in the CRM system, as they’ve already had prior interaction with your business.
The issue is that the majority of the content on your website is ‘ungated’, such as your blog posts, landing pages and videos.
So, it’s likely that these crucial touchpoints are going unattributed if you’re using Campaign Influence in a silo.
Setting up Campaign Influence is time-consuming.
There’s a lot of configuring and testing involved, and even then it’s never perfect.
With that said, Campaign Influence is often used infrequently for selected activities.
It’s near impossible to drill down to your daily marketing tasks, and it’s usually these initiatives that have the biggest impact on your performance.
As it stands, Campaign Influence in Salesforce does allow you to associate one opportunity with multiple campaigns.
However, an opportunity can have only one primary campaign for a rollup summary.
In other words, Campaign Influence will allow you to view an opportunity’s relationship with multiple campaigns, but the opportunity can only be attributed to a primary campaign when it comes to ROI reporting.
This is fine for marketers that experience short sales cycles and have a limited number of campaigns.
Although, this isn’t practical for the rest of us that have invested a lot of time and resources into multi-channel campaigns.
Campaign Influence is daunting for marketers who aren’t familiar with the ins and outs of Salesforce. Fortunately, there is an easier way to connect your marketing campaigns, online and offline, with opportunity and revenue data in Salesforce.
Believe it or not, most modern marketers do have the data they need to track the effectiveness of their marketing across the marketing and sales funnel.
The problem is that it’s disconnected and stored in various data points.
To unlock this data and justify the effectiveness of your marketing activities, you need a solution that can:
1. Capture all interactions throughout an individual customer journey.
2. Integrate with Salesforce along with other data sources, such as Google Analytics, Google Ads and Facebook to gain complete visibility of the buyer’s journey.
All you need to track every lead across multiple touchpoints and connect your marketing campaigns with opportunities and revenue data in Salesforce is to invest in a tool like Ruler.
In a few short, simple steps, you can start to track each and every form, call and live chat session and loop your closed sales back to the marketing channels and campaigns that influenced them.
Ruler is a marketing attribution solution. It can connect revenue from Salesforce to your leads, allowing you to track your visitor’s multiple touchpoints and attribute value accurately across the entire sales cycle.
Related: How to track leads in Salesforce with Ruler
Ruler will monitor every single visitor to your website and store data on their browsing history, referrals and more.
When that user converts into a lead, Ruler sends all of the data held on that individual over to Salesforce. A conversion could include a form fill, phone call, live chat enquiry or offline event.
In the meantime, Ruler will continue to monitor and refresh the data on that lead.
You can send pipeline data from Salesforce to your opportunity report in Ruler. This allows you to stay informed, by tracking the impact of your marketing campaigns at every stage of the pipeline.
Then, at the point of sale, Ruler can scrape revenue data assigned to that user in Salesforce and attribute it back to the marketing channel and campaign that influenced it.
So, no matter if your leads take six months to convert, or if they convert offline, you’ll be able to view accurate revenue directly in marketing apps like Google Analytics.
There are a number of benefits to connecting Ruler Analytics’ marketing attribution software with Salesforce, such as:
Ruler allows you to drill down deeper into your marketing touchpoints. By integrating Ruler with Salesforce, you can track marketing leads across the entire customer journey and use that insight to optimise your campaigns for better results.
With Ruler, you can identify which pages on your website lead to the most successful deals in Salesforce. On the flip side, you can see which pages have the lowest conversion rates and optimise your landing pages to drive more qualified leads.
Basic call tracking can help you identify which channels are driving the most phone conversions. But, with Ruler, you can go beyond call conversions and identify which marketing sources drive the most offline revenue and long-term value.
Related: How does Ruler’s phone call tracking work?
Marketing attribution in Salesforce is essential for any marketer who is serious about scaling their impact.
Not only will it help you evidence how marketing is impacting the bottom line, it will help streamline key processes.
Download our eBook to help you get more out of Salesforce to learn how to update your Salesforce leads with marketing source variables to evidence the impact of your multi-channel campaigns.
Or alternatively, book a demo to speak with one of our attribution experts.
