by Sarah Kelleher 
When discussing attribution of marketing ROI, I am asked regularly “Surely other companies must have this same problem?”. And my answer is always yes. They do. Attribution is very difficult and there’s no secret sauce that will magically tell you what made a customer buy something. However, that’s no reason to despair. By using the native connection between Pardot and Salesforce Campaigns, you can generate some excellent insights that will show the success of your campaigns and help you determine where to spend your precious marketing dollars. There are a number of attribution models and the appropriate one for your company will depend on the types of campaigns you run and your sales process. Some good places to start are:
- First Touch
- Tipping Point
- Campaign Influence (or Multi-Touch)
The most important consideration is how to weight your ROI based on the kinds of campaigns you are tracking. A large sponsored event may generate a number of new leads, but they may only become customers weeks or months down the line after interacting with several other campaigns in the meantime. It might not seem appropriate to attribute all the revenue to that initial event, but at the same time you need to make a decision whether to sponsor it again next year. This article from Ricky Wheeler provides great examples for how his company, Ebsta, track their Campaign Attribution, which will hopefully inspire you in your quest for Marketing ROI reports.
The truth is Campaign Attribution is hard. There are many different models, including more advanced ‘Multi-Touch Attribution’ which weights every marketing touch on the way to a sale — or more basic models like Last Touch or First Touch which are significantly easier to implement and manage. There is no one-size-fits-all for campaign attribution models and the route you take, will be governed by the type of business and campaigns you run.