Accurate First-Touch/Multi-Touch (FT/MT) Attribution Reporting on Existing Opportunities

[Dan_Stevens_]

As marketers, we play a significant role in influencing existing opportunities, pipeline and sales.  Often time, we're not the ones generating the initial lead (especially for those of us in large organizations who primarily market/sell to existing accounts).  At the same time, it's important to demonstrate marketing's impact on the business.

Currently, we're struggling to report accurately on MT attribution - specifically for those leads that are attached to existing opportunities.  For example, at event, one of marketing's primary objectives is to move existing opportunities along our multi-stage opportunity process.  The way we track these types of event attendees in Marketo is first, we upload the full attendee list to the event program after the event.  And then we change the program status to "Marketing Influenced Opportunity" (a success step) for those applicable leads, send an alert to Marketing Ops, who then attaches the contact record in CRM to the existing opportunity.  Here's where the problem arises: for MT attribution to work, success must happen BEFORE the opportunity is created to get pipeline credit.  In this case, the opportunity already exists - all we're doing is attaching this contact record to the opportunity - and therefore the activity does not appear in our MT attribution reporting.  I'd be interested to learn how some of you deal with this situation.

BTW, we use MS Dynamics as our CRM platform.  Not sure if this even matters in this case.

[Grégoire_Miche2]

Hi Dan,

To make sure we are on the same page:

Here's where the problem arises: for MT attribution to work, success must happen BEFORE the opportunity is created to get pipeline credit.

Are you talking here about the way Marketo computes MT or how MSD or even a third party reporting tool does it ?

-Greg

[Dan_Stevens_]

Hi Greg - that statement is how Marketo computes MT attribution.  These are the FT/MT rules for Marketo:

[Kenny_Elkington]

We have the change program success flow step for this reason.  It allows you to change the success date of your program status, to adjust your attribution.

[Dan_Stevens_]

Kenny, thanks for this.  How should this be used in the overall scheme of things?  For example:

• If the opportunity was created 6 months ago and the program wasn't even setup until last week?
• How does this flow step work in relation to existing/prior program statuses?  You wouldn't change the success ("attended") to be dated prior to someone registering for an event.

[Grégoire_Miche2]

Hi Dan,

If I understand correctly, you are talking here of recent Marketing actions that occur during the opportunity life?

If so, shouldn't it make sense that this marketing action/program influences the revenue but not the pipeline created ?

-Greg

[Dan_Stevens_]

Hi Greg - no, in our case, we report on marketing-influenced pipeline as well.

[Kenny_Elkington]

There's really no one-size-fits-all approach here, as it's designed specifically for out-of-band changes to attribution

>If the opportunity was created 6 months ago and the program wasn't even setup until last week?

Configure a campaign to change the success date of the program to reflect the reality of when "success" was achieved in this cases.

>How does this flow step work in relation to existing/prior program statuses?  You wouldn't change the success ("attended") to be dated prior to someone registering for an event.

Typically, no, but it's entirely dependent on the reality of what you're trying to record.  If you're backfilling the real record of a registration, after the event has taken place then it would be totally appropriate to change the success date of attendance to before the creation date of the registration record.

[Dan_Stevens_]

What if we have multiple success steps?  Will this just impact the first step or all of the steps?  For example, in an event program we have the following program statuses (we don't use them all for a single program - but they're available for the three main event programs we build in Marketo (traditional registration, RSVP with no registration, and registration with approval/denial capabilities):

[Kenny_Elkington]

Program Success in Marketo is absolute, so the success is part of the membership relationship to the program.  The flow step alters the relationship, success true or false, and/or the date of success, it doesn't alter the status in the program.  It doesn't influence the success value of a given status(unless you specifically do so by changing a lead in a non-success status to have success = true).