Child Program System for Attribution of Offer-Channel

[Josh_Hill13]

While I know we can use child programs, these may not work effectively with what I propose:

Programs can be Offers or Channels, not both. Under the current system, we can attribute a Success to an Offer or Channel and sometimes multiple Channels that lead to the same Offer.

For detail on the idea, see
http://perkuto.com/blog/marketing-automation/marketing-attribution-model-for-marketing-automation

What I'd like to do is have a Program Offer at the top level and then sub-programs by Channel that are pullling in leads from the various external platforms like AdWords, LinkedIn, etc.

Then a report would be generated that says:

Whitepaper X had 100 leads register with 5 Channels. Channel Y obtained 10 leads with 5 Opps and Channel Z has 57 leads with 2 Opps. The CPL is...the ROI per Channel is...

Each Program could be synced to an SFDC campaign, but doesn't have to be. Each program still has success statuses, but they wouldn't overlap. That is, if I look at the Whitepaper X Offer, I see 100 successes with a Cost per Success based on the hierarchy cost, just like in SFDC Campaigns. If I look at Channel Z, I see that it is associated with a Whitepaper Offer and it has 57 successes at $G cost.

Then I could run a few reports that say

For all Whitepaper Offers, Channel Z is the worst performing in terms of Opportunities created, but avg sale is the best.
For all Offers that used Channel Z, how well did we do?

You can do this with SFDC Campaigns, but I'd like to see this built into Marketo so that it's easy to setup and doesn't require a lot of cloning or steps.

[Anonymous]

Love this idea. I'm constantly debating between Offers and Content for different things as Marketo treats these both the same. For example, a company may have a PPC channel that contains a Google offer and a Content channel that contains a case study asset. Using the Marketo method, someone would be part of both of these Programs which can cause doublecounting challenges. 

As food for thought (and it might now make sense), may even want to give an option to flip the model for companies that find they want to focus on the Offers.

Content A
---Offer A
---Offer B
---Offer C

Content B
---Offer A
---Offer B
---Offer C

OR

Offer A
---Content A
---Content B
---Content C

Offer B
---Content A
---Content B
---Content C

[Kenny_Elkington]

Hi Josh and Jeff,

Could you explain what difficulties you've had trying to implement this model via custom tags?  On first look it seems like it could be implemented this way, but I may be missing something.

[Josh_Hill13]

Kenny,

Custom Tags can be helpful here, however, it is challenging for some users to setup 1 program for the Offer and 5 others to collect data from each channel they use to drive traffic to the Offer. Yes, I can do something with SFDC Campaigns  essentially and URL parameters. I don't want to have to clone things 10 times and I'd like a clearer distinction between Offer-Channel.

What I'd like to see is a way to say:

My Offer is a Webinar on Jan 5. I am going to promote it on these places and these ads. Here are the codes. Please collect everyone together so I can view it in a variety of ways in a report. 

[Josh_Hill13]

Also, how do I associate a Channel to an Offer in a report? 

[Anonymous]

Kenny:

Been giving this more thought lately. To summarize it all, Content and Offers are DIFFERENT and we should treat them as such. Marketo makes you treat them the same when it comes to influence and acquisition reporting. Yes, tags help but they don't solve the issue of which offer drove the deal and which content drove the deal.

As both Josh and I have noted, using Programs means there will be some doublecounting going on as someone will come through a Google PPC program and attend a webinar.  Under this scenario, both Programs would get credit with one of them getting the acquistion credit. Why should a 100K deal get split between the webinar and the Google PPC programs? I'd argue the Google program should get all of the offer credit while the webinar should get all of the Content credit.

Would love to be able to break out these out SEPERATELY. How about the Google PPC program gets acquiring credit as the OFFER program and the webinar gets the acquiring credit for the CONTENT program?


REPORTING
Acquiring Content OR Acquiring Offer
Show me all my content channels and which one was the acquiring content asset. Do our whitepapers drive the most acquisition? Or do webinars drive acquisition. 

Multitouch reporting
Show me all the content touches and how they add up to revenue. do the same thing in a SEPERATE report for offers.

SF Syncing
With this process in place, marketers can sync all offers and content programs over to SF campaigns. Marketers can setup those SF campaigns in a number of ways to get the proper reporting flexability.

Setup
This might get tricky for Marketo because of backaward compatability but I'm sure you could find some ways to phase this in. Here's an example of how it could work once setup. Basically, a user would define if a program is an Offer or a Content program when the program is getting created.

[Kenny_Elkington]

I think I understand better now, Jeff.  You want separate attributions for types of programs which have different goals, which isn't currently possible since Programs are credited out of a grouped bucket.  This definitely makes sense.  Thanks for clarifying, guys.

[Anonymous]

On my side, exactly Kenny. Josh may have different ideas on the child program side.

This crossroads occurs with just about every client I work with and there is always some tradeoff somewhere. We try to work around it using Lead Source and Content Asset fields (1st and last touch). However, those sometimes conflict with the Program strategy--ideally those would work hand in hand.

As always, happy to discuss further if/when Marketo gets to the point of prioritizing this project.

[Josh_Hill13]

Hi Jeff,
Was just thinking I could make this clearer with a diagram and your description helps. Essentially I want to automate this process such that I can create a top leve Offer Program like " Whitepaper". Then marketo asks me which Channels I want to use (these could be custom tags). For each Channel, I get a Status just like I normally do.

When I look at the Offer Summary, i can see everyone who registered, the # of leads, CPL vs. budget for total and each channel created.

Then I can also click on the individual channels to see the details of leads from that channel and the stats acquired.

I would also be able to use just 1 page+Form if I wanted, although I wonder if it could just auto generate additional pages by channel once I have one page.

Then the system displays something like Channel and URL to use based on any codes I want to track. This would be more automatic than the UTM tool that's there now. I could say, here are the fields for Most Recent Touch that I want to use system wide, then add fields if needed.

Then the Program displays the codes and URLs for each channel. I suppose these could be editable, based on picklist, or customized Tags.

I'm not sure how we would handle passing this detail back to SFDC. I've been doing it with Parent-Child, so that could work too if it were automated somehow. Maybe we can have a GTM or discuss next time I'm in SF.

[Josh_Hill13]

Maybe what I'd really like to see is a touch system that's more accessible and customizable than the current Program Channel and Tag system. More like Campaign Member records that can be collated, analyzed, etc.

[Josh_Hill13]

Kenny Elkington​ what I think we're really saying is what I put below: a touch record like campaign member status in SFDC. Each touch is recorded and customizable for the org. I know some third parties can assist on this sort of thing, but why not embed it in Marketo and make RCE more powerful? Or use some sort of guided process to making this happen.