Checklist for Attribution Reporting

Brian_Law_MKTO
Marketo Employee
Marketo Employee

Customers often ask me for assistance to trouble shoot issues with their attribution reporting. Here a checklist you can use to help make sure you have set-up everything correctly. I will explain each topic and their importance in an upcoming article.

  • Establish a good program naming convention that can be used as a filter in reports
  • Create only the channels which are necessary to reduce confusion and accidentally using the incorrect channel
  • Create only the program statuses which are necessary
  • Remember to set success for each program
  • Make sure the analytics behavior for each channel except Operational is set to inclusive
  • Make sure to use the correct channel when creating or cloning a program
  • Create acquisition programs for all records which enter Marketo
  • Create smart campaigns to set acquisition for each acquisition program if necessary
  • Add monthly period costs to all programs if you want to be able to sort by cost time frame
  • Define tags before starting to create programs. Make all tags required.
  • Make sure all opportunities are using the standard amount field
  • Make sure all opportunities are associated to at least one contact via the contact role/primary if syncing to a CRM

Finally, here is an article about the different attribution settings you can choose in Marketo.

Attribution Exercises (Understanding Attribution).

Here are some additional resources for learning about the Marketo integration with SFDC.

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15 Comments
Anonymous
Not applicable

Hi Brian Law, I have 1 question: let's say we only want to count marketing attribution (MT) if the program success is within 1 year before opportunity creation date (to avoid claiming influence on an opportunity when the only touch was a booth visit 3 years ago, for example). Does RCE allow us to add this type of filter?

Thanks,

Yen

Rachel_Egan
Level 7

I would like to know this answer as well

Brian_Law_MKTO
Marketo Employee

Hi Yen, I am only aware of filtering opportunities in the Program Opportunity Analysis report by closed and created Year, Quarter and Month.

Mareike_Bug
Level 1

Regarding Marketo automatically changing the program status: I understand that we do have to define e.g. a success status and a trigger campaign to set this status.
But what about a simple Email Blast program?
In Marketo, it is set up the following way:
10 Clicked
10 Opened
10 Sent
20 Converted (Success)
30 Unsubscribe

In our smart smart canpaign, we said:

1. Send Email
2. Change Program Status to "Email Blast -> Sent"

We thought once the email has been sent out and the leads are program members, that Marketo would automatically update the program statuses to "Open" or "Clicked", just like the reporting tracks opens and clicks.
Is there anything wrong in our setup or do we also need different trigger campaigns for each status change, like:

Opened email is XY

-> Change Program Status to "Email Blast ->Opened"

Clicked email is XY

-> Change Program Status to "Email Blast ->Clicked"

This is something I unfortunately did not fully understand yet.

Many thanks in advance for any helpful explanation.

-Mareike

Lavinia_Badea1
Level 1

Hello! This is a super helpful article, thanks so much for sharing!
I do have a question, maybe someone has confronted the same situation.

We have implemented a new instance of Marketo this year in April and we have only used the reports out of Marketo for less than 1 year. We currently operate with the Implicit Attribution Model, due to the fact that we cannot have the Contact Role mandatory on the Opportunities. We're almost 100% reporting the Programs Marketing Influenced Pipeline and Revenue from Marketo. We are using the Program Opportunity Analysis report to follow-up on each program's results.

Our concern is the accuracy of the reporting in time. What will happen when we will pass to the next year? Will next year created and closed-won opportunities continue to be attributed to 2019 created programs if Marketo finds successes in 2019 of people from the same Account?

Is it possible to restrict the period of time in which Marketo searches for Programs Success that happened before the Opportunity was created/closed?

Thanks,
Lavinia