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Marketo Master Class: Bizible Attribution with Libby Koebnick

Will_Harmon2
Marketo Employee
Marketo Employee

In the August edition of the Fearless Forum, we're diving deeper into the topic of marketing attribution. In a recent challenge on Purple Select, a lot of Marketo users signaled they struggled with proving marketing's impact to their organization. In order to shed some light on how the experts are successfully proving their marketing impact everyday, we asked Libby Koebnick of PitchBook to help us understand how she's leveraging Marketo + Bizible.

Q1: Can you describe how marketing attribution works at your organization?

Web visits and form fills are captured via Bizible’s tracking scripts, and offline activities, including prospecting, are tracked via Salesforce activities. Our model takes all these touchpoints, connects them to and normalizes them in the buyer journey, and attributes a percentage of revenue back to them. This allows us to see how marketing and sales are contributing to our bottom line.

Q2: How did you manage your marketing attribution efforts before implementing Bizible?

Before Bizible, we were using a siloed last touch attribution model. This means we would attribute an entire contract to a single action of a single individual on that account. Since we’re a B2B SaaS Company with enterprise subscriptions, that model doesn’t make much sense for us. Now we use a custom Bizible attribution model that takes into account all the touchpoints of all the individuals involved in the conversation of the sale.

Q3: Can you share a specific benefit you’ve seen from implementing marketing attribution?

Our Bizible attribution models have showed us that over half our potential clients’ early interactions with us are via pitchbook.com. Citing this data, we successfully petitioned leadership for the resources to redesign our entire website.

Q4: How do you use Bizible with Marketo?

The way we get Bizible to see Marketo campaigns is to tag all the links in our emails with UTMs that Bizible will parse out when it captures landing pages from web visits. We just have to make sure all our links direct to our website or other pages that have the Bizible tracking script on them.

Q5: What are some unique ways you’re using Bizible with Marketo?

We started using in-platform forms in social media, which are super effective, but they don’t allow us to add Bizible tracking scripts. We found a workaround by using a Marketo campaign triggered by the form fill that creates a Salesforce activity task with the appropriate medium, source and campaign values. Bizible then turns those activities into touchpoints under the correct channel and subchannel.

Here's a closer look at how Libby leverages a campaign trigger in Marketo to turn activities into touchpoints in Bizible:

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Q6: What was the most challenging part of choosing/implementing/building out your attribution model?

The most challenging part is getting our entire organization to correctly and consistently use UTMs. Web visits are bucketed into channels by building rules around landing page UTMs. Every time someone uses a new UTM (such as a new channel) or has a typo in their link, I have to create a new rule in Bizible.

Q7: How did you decide on the particular attribution model you’re using?

We are using Bizible’s Full Path model that attributes 22.5% of the revenue to each of the following buckets:

  1) First touch

  2) Lead creation

  3) Opportunity creation

  4) Close

The remaining 10% is attributed to the other touchpoints prior to the closed deal. Our old last touch attribution model was attributing 100% to the opportunity creation touchpoint. The Bizible model gives us context to the sale, more like account based marketing. We can see how the account first learned about PitchBook, how we warmed them up over time, and what eventually contributed to the win.

Q8: What advice would you give to Marketo users who are considering more advanced attribution?

Start collecting Bizible touchpoint data now! Bizible will naturally collect touchpoints, so by the time you’re ready to build your model you’ll already have your data. It takes a long time to build up historical data, and you don’t need an attribution model to start tracking touchpoints.

No attribution model is going to be completely right or wrong, and you can always adjust as you go. The model we went with was the most logical, considering our sales process, and the output passed the gut check.

When you put it all together, here's what attribution data looks like in Bizible Discover:

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We hope you enjoyed reading about how PitchBook is setting themselves up for success when it comes to proving their marketing impact. For even more tips and tricks on best practices, check out our brand new edition of the Fearless Forum which features a special video by Marketo Champion Juli James​!

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27 Comments
Devraj_Grewal
Level 10 - Champion Alumni

I appreciate the insight Libby, especially your experience with marketing attribution before implementing Bizible.

Grace_Brebner3
Level 10

Great insights!

JD_Nelson
Level 10 - Community Advisor

Love the format of this -- the Q&A was concise and not confusing at all. Nice job!

Chris_Saporito
Level 9

I agree with the format, thanks for sharing!

Dory_Viscoglio
Level 10

Great to see this feedback. We are in the collecting stage, and hopefully will move on soon!

Nicholas_Hajdin
Level 7 - Champion Alumni

Great to see a detailed customer use case. Thanks!

Kyle_McCormick
Level 5

I definitely like this format.  Will be interesting to see how Marketo decides to build Bizible into it's platform.

Michelle_Miles3
Level 9 - Champion Alumni

Great format

Jackie_Gragnol3
Level 2

Awesome Q&A that hit on some things I've been pondering while re-acquainting myself with Bizible!

Libby Koebnick If you're able to answer the questions below, I would find it super helpful, and perhaps others have the same question:

1) What channels do you currently put into SFDC campaigns?

2) What channels do you not put into SFDC campaigns because they are taken care of by Bizible? (for example, do you have an SFDC campaign for each email send? If not, why not?)

3) Are there any lessons learned as you got started that you said, "oh if I hadn't created XYZ campaigns, I would have saved myself a lot of time..."?

Thanks in advance!

Jackie

Libby_Koebnick
Level 1

Hey Jackie,

I'll try to answer your questions without getting too into the specifics of our unconventional Marketo and Salesforce setups.

1) We don't really use the SFDC campaign object, but we do track our offline campaigns via Salesforce activities. For example, we upload event attendance lists to Marketo and create notification tasks on the attendees in Salesforce. As long as I've built a rule in Bizible, those activities will be turned into event touchpoints.

2) All of our digital campaigns (with the exception of the in-platform ads) are tracked by Bizible without a Salesforce assist. We just have to be diligent about adding UTMs to every link we provide to prospective clients via paid and organic channels. We don't create touchpoints for every email send, but if the campaign was effective enough get a lead to click on a link that directs to our website, Bizible will turn that web visit into a touchpoint with the UTMs for that particular campaign.

3) At the very beginning, we built out rules to track  form fills by using Salesforce activities, since we create tasks for our sales reps for all inbound leads. However, Bizible was already catching the form fill with their tracking script, so the Salesforce activities were just duplicating all those touchpoints. You should only use Salesforce activity tracking for touchpoints that the Bizible scripts can't track.

Also, as far as saving time, I can't stress enough how important it is to start collecting data early, especially if your business has long sales cycles.

I hope that helps!

-- Libby