Best Way to Measure Success Across Programs

[Keith_Nyberg2]

I am in the process of rethinking what we define as "Success" within a program. We originally built success to mean MQL as a result of a specific program. However, with our event and webinar programs, we tend to send all attendees to sales (MQL). Example 50 registrants 35 attendees, 35 marked as success.

Does anyone have any other philosophy here when it comes to program success? Should success be program specific or more of a non-program specific metric like MQL? What are the pro's and con's to each option?

[Anonymous]

Keith Nyberg​ I found these two resources that might help you:

1. This Marketo Blog post http://blog.marketo.com/2013/03/how-to-measure-the-roi-of-your-marketing-programs.html
2. This Measurement Cheat Sheet (with lots of good info)  https://www.marketo.com/_assets/uploads/MktgMetric-cheatsheet7-31.pdf?20130108205539
3. This Marketo Definitive Guide about Metrics: Marketing Metrics Definitive Guide: Harness Data, Improve ROI

Hope this helps.

[Anonymous · Accepted solution]

It really depends on the strategy. If you want your sales to call everyone that attends your webinar, this might work. It's plain vanilla. We typically, add scores associated with each action associated with webinar - attending On Demand, Attending live (higher score), downloaded a follow-up content we promote as part of our "Thank you for attending" email and taking more "substantial" actions post-attendance - all of these increase the score and upon reaching threshold, we alert sales so they call.

[Keith_Nyberg2]

Hi Deepa,

We use individual program status' to drive our scoring as well. My understanding of "Success" is that it's intended to give you a cross-channel measure for engagement so you could look across all of your channels and quickly see where you are getting the "interactions" that your company values. If other users simply use this piece to say, "We had 50 prospects open our email or attend our webinar" you might as well just pull your report based on program status. I really just want to understand how others are leveraging this piece in executive reporting because as of now it really is not as useful to us as I believe it should be.

[Anonymous]

I was hoping there would be more answers and insight to this question as it seems quite fundamental to how success is captured in a buyers journey.

I could be wrong, but I personally believe that program success is a micro-conversion or touchpoint along the buyers journey and that there could be many of these along the way to a macro-conversion (closed/won). Programs don't generate MQLs, and if they did then you'd be mis-attributing your marketing spend and ignoring all of the other touchpoints which influenced a conversion.

[Anonymous]

Success is defined by what your business objectives are - MQL or SQL.  But you should ensure that everyone agrees what success looks like before the program begins