Channel advice

[Anonymous]

We are revising our channels and I'm a bit confused as to how granular we should be getting with our channels. Two specific questions.

1. Website activity
Right now we have a program for our website but we also have a blog and another subdomain that we are tracking, should these all go under 1 channel "website" or should we have a channel for "website", "blog" and "subdomain"

2. Online Content
We have content peices that are posted online and available through our website. Typically they are posted and a campaign will drive traffic to a landing page, visitors can also navigate to the landing page from the website. In this case would we have a channel for the peice of content and then a channel for the campaign and set up two different programs?

I want to make sure we aren't setting things up to overstate results in the reporting, for example if we have a content program for a piece of online content that is also a member of a campaign. If a lead is a member of both programs will it get counted two in reporting.

Any advice would be helpful.

[Josh_Hill13]

Richard,

Do you mean the Program Channels and Statues or do you mean what Lead Status field values? Or maybe you mean all of these?

Typically, I've seen the following:

Program Channels similar to defaults in Marketo:

• Blog
• Direct Mail
• Content
• White Paper
• Webinar

So you see that Blog and Content could be the same, we could also have "Website" and whatever else. In your case I might stick to Website and Blog, keeping the blog separate because the content there is probably different.

Your premium content on landing pages would be under "Content" or "White Paper" or something like that. Just choose one category that makes sense for you.

Each particular piece of content has its OWN program that is synced to a unique SFDC Campaign.

The Progression Statuses will sync back to the SFDC Campaign, ensuring consistent results between systems.

What I would do is ensure your Lead Source picklist values are matched to your Program Channels and the forms are pulling that in.

I know some people are careful to pull in Lead Source based on the actual source of the traffic. For instance, a lead doesn't actually appear in a webinar, they come via your Website or an Advertisement, so that is the real source and some people also match those individual sources to specific SFDC Campaigns or other methods.

[Anonymous]

I stopped using "Content" as a channel, preferring more granularity of the type of content, White Paper, Webinar, etc. I still have some old programs which use the channel content, but we've moved into a more granular approach. Mainly because the Channel Analyzer is so much cooler when there are multiple types of channels. 🙂  Here are my channels.



I don't have a website channel. and we don't (yet) have a blog. 

I would not create a 2nd channel just for your campaign. If we have a single piece of content, like a White Paper. It has inside the program 2 landing pages, a form, a few lists, a couple of campaigns, a trigger email, and an engagement email. Everything around that one white paper in one place. 

[Patrick_Cava2]

Hi Adam,

I see that you have "demo request" as a channel. do you also have a channel for your website's "contact us" form?

[Anonymous]

Hi everyone,

We are currently going through Marketo implementation so fairly new to the system. Can you add multiple channels to a program? 

Also build campaigns around specific brands and technology, would you recommend building a channel for each brand and technology or not?

Thanks,
Jon