Acquisition Program – Which Program Should Get Acquisition?

[Leanne_Persang]

Hi community!

We have a form on our website that gates a piece of content. In the past, I have created a “Gated Content” program which listens for form fill out then sets acquisition (if empty) and sends the email with the link to the asset.

However, while the actual asset acquired the lead, various channels point to the gated piece of content (e.g., social media and digital ads). Did LinkedIn actually acquire the lead or the asset itself? Did the ad on the third party website acquire the lead or the asset itself?

For example, should I set up a “Social Media” program for this particular campaign and the acquisition program is the social media program (fills out form with referrer that includes the UTM parameters of social and the campaign)? Likewise, should I set up a “Digital Advertising” program for acquisition where the campaign listens for the referrer with the digital advertising UTM parameters? Doing it this way, we can add costs of the program and get cost per lead. We can also have more detailed reporting under one program.

I’d still need the “Gated Content” program since leads can find the page without UTM parameters – organically. Also, there can be other efforts I am not aware of pointing to the page.

Am I overcomplicating the whole “Acquisition Program”? What strategy is your company using for setting acquisition for effective reporting?

[Katja_Keesom]

The way I would approach this is to stamp your gated content program as the acquisition program and use the channel through which a person landed on your content page to allocate a Lead/Person source. That way you can make great cross-sections of which combinations of content vs channel you are most successful with.

[Leanne_Persang]

Thanks, @Katja_Keesom! We have a lead source program in place, so it sounds like I am over complicating this. I appreciate your suggestion of having the gated asset as the acquisition program. Within that, we could then create smart lists for the channels to see which are most successful in getting the leads to download the content (or whatever the CTA is on the page).

I will save the social media programs for when I have list uploads only. I have programs for web page forms and gated content for which channels drive to for downloads/demo sign ups.

Anyone else from the community take this same approach?

[Dan_McGinn3]

Hi Leanne,

I'm dealing with the same problem. We want to start using our website for most engagements and drive people to it from emails, digital ads, social media, etc. Our problem is similar, particularly in that we want to be able to track successes of the third party digital ads along with the costs to get an ROI. We historically built these programs separately and used marketo landing pages - very simple. Each program has its own landing page, cost and engagements - very easy to report on both landing page performance and program performance. By moving these to the website (or really just taking advantage of the existing website content), we will lose this visibility.

We're considering capturing the "referral" source in a cookie/URL parameter and limiting the time that cookie is stored so that the website will still get credit for any subsequent or future engagement not driven directly from the ad/social/email, but this is proving more complicated than I hoped.

In doing so, we could still have a digital ad program that looks for the specific url/cookie parameter to give proper credit to this program, but we would also have to restrict the website content program from taking credit by restricting any URL/Cookie parameter with the understanding that it would be nulled after form submission or after a certain amount of time. Make sense?

I'm sure this is overcomplicating things, but we can't get the tracking/reporting we want without complicating them a bit.

Would love to hear from some Marketo Champions on this topic?

Thanks,

Dan

[Phillip_Wild]

Hi Dan,

While the solutions that you have in place (and others described above) are a great start, ultimately, if you want to be very accurate on this, you will need to do attribution reporting outside of Marketo in a BI tool.

Then, you can take all touchpoints that a user interacted with before purchase / deal won and run attribution models that take into account more than simply the first or last touch. When you set attribution programs in Marketo, or even lead source, you are effectively taking a "first touch" attribution approach, which likely doesn't tell the full story. Pushing all touchpoints into something like Looker / Tableau / PowerBI will give you much more powerful reporting. 

Having said that, budgets and engineering don't always allow this, so within Marketo using Attribution Program (at a piece of content level) and Lead Source (from a channel level) is a great solution. But if you're allocating budget based on first touch attribution, you are only ever going to get part of the picture. 

I hope this helps: just my perspective - if you like, I can highlight this post to other Champs to get other perspectives.

[Amy_Goldfine]

We don't have any Marketo programs or SFDC campaigns for channels such as social, content syndication, etc. We have a PB in SFDC that stamps the UTMs to the campaign member and we report on that. That way you're not conflating attribution for the content vs the channel.

[jcharlesworth]

Hi @Amy_Goldfine,

What is your strategy for handling period/campaign costs when using the UTM stamping approach? For example, if you have multiple paid ads contributing to conversions within the same Marketo Program / SFDC campaign.

Thanks!

[Amy_Goldfine]

We're not using period costs (shhh don't tell the people who created the MCE, there are so many questions about period costs!)