** As announced in the Release Notes, these fields are slated to be deprecated. Read more here. **
Today I wanted to provide some clarity around a few of Marketo Measure's fields that live on the Lead and Contact to explain how they are similar and different to the fields that live on the Touchpoint Objects. I get a lot of questions about this so I’m hoping this is helpful!
Below we have a quick screenshot taken from MM's taxonomy (to view the entire diagram, click here). We want to first focus on the two MM Custom Objects, the Buyer Touchpoint (BT) and the Buyer Attribution Touchpoint (BAT). I’ve outlined the same field on both of these objects – Marketing Channel. If you need a refresher on the difference between BT & BAT, here is the knowledge article.
Back to Marketing Channel as a field though, we’re all hopefully familiar with this field from onboarding and using Marketo Measure in general, but this field just tells us what Channel is responsible for creating the touchpoint record. Maybe it’s a Paid Search or Organic Social touchpoint tracked by the MM JavaScript; or maybe it’s a Webinar Attendance or Content Syndication touchpoint tracked by a CRM Campaign.
The point is that each Touchpoint will have a Marketing Channel value that is specific to that specific touchpoint regardless of the Touchpoint Position – it could be First Touch or Opportunity Creation Touch, for example.
In addition to these fields though, MM comes with “versions” of these fields that are built on the Lead and the Contact objects. The meaning of Marketing Channel is the same, it’s just that you have the option of selecting Marketing Channel FT and/or Marketing Channel LC.
Take a look at this screenshot for a visual:
In the screenshot above, we see two Touchpoints for one person. One touchpoint is the First Touch (FT) and the next is the second touchpoint which is getting credit for Lead Creation (LC). You can see that the Marketing Channel column shows which channel each Touchpoint was driven by. But if you look at the Marketing Channel (FT) field, it’s always going to say the channel that drove FT, Social in this case. Whereas the Marketing Channel (LC) field is always going to display the channel that drove LC, Direct in this case.
For picking which “version” of the field to use, it really just depends on what your reporting goal is and how you’re building your report. In general, most customers stick to the fields built on the Touchpoint records because the Touchpoint object is the central reporting object. That said, you can use the versions on the Lead/Contact if ever needed or wanted, just make sure you understand how they’re different!
Click here for a cheat sheet on recommended Marketo Measure reports!
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