Bizible: Online vs. Offline Channels

Conner_Hatfield
Marketo Employee
Marketo Employee

***Posted on behalf of Kimberly Galitz‌, Marketing Automation and Attribution Specialist at Bandwidth.*** 

 

One of the (many) advantages to using Bizible is the ability to track your marketing efforts from both online AND offline channels, giving visibility into the performance of channels where it may not have been available before.

As cut and dry as online vs. offline may seem, it can be complicated to determine when things should be associated with an offline vs. online channel, and beyond that - which actual engagement should count as a touchpoint.

Most simply put, online channels are any channels that would be directly associated with your website or any integrated site – any display advertising, paid search, paid social, organic search, organic social, email, chatbots, etc.

Offline channels are associated with initiatives like direct mail, trade shows or hospitality events, marketing or sales research, and pretty much any other channel where a person’s engagement cannot be tracked digitally. The best way to begin is to write out all the marketing channels you have, and bucket them into online or offline.

 

Pro tip: It is important to understand that offline channel logic in Bizible is actually determined by the Campaign object, specifically (when using Salesforce), the Salesforce Campaign Type - that is how all the touchpoints are mapped into channels and subchannels. So be sure to have all of your “SFDC Campaign Type” ducks in a row before you implement!

 

Sounds pretty simple, right? There are always some curveballs in this game, so let’s look into just a few examples of challenges you might face.

 

Scenario 1:
We did a third party webinar, where all the leads registered for the webinar on the third party website—but this was a paid webinar where we received the list of leads after the webinar. How can we track the ROI here?

 

Tricky. Since it’s a website, you immediately think “online!” which is true - however, since the registrations were done on a third party website where the registrants were not tracked with the Bizible javascript code, the registration touchpoint won’t show up for you. For this instance, I suggest using a campaign in your CRM where you can enable touchpoints, adding all the leads you acquired for that third party webinar to this campaign. By adding all these leads to the campaign with touchpoints enabled, they will all get a touchpoint for that particular campaign/third party webinar.

Pro tip: You can update the touchpoint date inside the SFDC campaign to be the date of the webinar, to be most accurate

 

Scenario 2:
We sent out a direct mail postcard, asking people to visit a webpage to sign up for a demo at a tradeshow. We’d like to track the ROI of that postcard, what’s the best way to do this?

 

For instances like this it may be a personal preference, and may also depend on the tools you have in place. If you sent the postcard out with a vanity URL such as “https://www.mywebsite.com/meetus” you can use data from something such as Google Analytics to track page visits, and since there is a form on this page, you may also be able to track the form fills on that particular page, or from that referrer if the vanity URL initiates a redirect to a page that exists. Personally, I want to be able to track the conversions in an SFDC campaign where I can also input the costs to send the postcard out. So I would enter all the people we sent the invite to as “invited” (or sent, or whatever status you have!) and then I would have a trigger campaign in Marketo (or any other tool you use) that would change their status in that campaign to “registered” if they fill out the form. This way, we can see the ROI in the campaign because we are only adding touchpoints to “responded” members, or “registrants”. Of course, you can put referrer parameter criteria in place so that you are only counting those that filled out the form that came from the postcard.

 

So there you have it. Online vs. Offline channels are not too terribly hard once you think it through, but it is certainly helpful to sit down and make sure you know which of your channels play in each space before you get started.

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