Defining acquisition, assigning to referring programs

[Cate_Ufford]

When our Marketo instance was set up, we were advised to use the flow step to manually set the Acquisition Program like this:

I feel like the reasons for this are well documented in the community.

However, we also use this same strategy to re-assign a new AP for referring programs (i.e. online ads, social media, and third party promotions.) We have started to question this and would like some feedback about what others are doing with regard to Acquisition Program.

So for instance, if an Anonymous Lead clicks an online ad (Online Ad channel) to go to a landing page (Content channel) and fills out a form there, the AP is automatically set to the Content channel.

However, we currently re-assign that AP to the Online Ad channel by doing the following within the Online Ad program:

1 - Smart Campaign adds all clicks (both known and anon) to a static list.

2 - Smart Campaign listens for anyone from that list who fills out the form on the associated Content Program Landing Page (which would assign that Content program as their AP). It then does the following in the flow:

The reason we've started to question this is really centered on the definition of Acquisition. Can a program that doesn't collect any information (i.e. display ad, social media post) really BE an acquiring program? Should the program that collected the lead's information (in this example, the Content Program) remain as the rightful AP?

If the answer here is "the program who collected the contact info gets acquisition," then is there some other field or metric we should be looking to (i.e. Lead Source?) in order to understand which of those ungated programs are bringing in the most leads?

[Jay_Jiang]

I think the definition of "acquisition" is different for people. e.g. acquisition for me is the program that captured the new lead i.e. enticed the lead to convert and generated a new name in the database

It sounds like what you have been doing is treating "acquisition" as first touch - the first program/channel that enticed the lead to visit your website.

[Cate_Ufford]

Thanks for your response, Jay. You're right that we've been treating it more like FT. We might have a more robust picture of a customer's journey if we didn't collapse those into a single moment. The same is true for understanding content program performance: There could be a single content program that is acquiring new leads left and right, but if the acquisition gets spread out over all the various "portal" programs that point to it, we'd never know.

Anyone else have thoughts on this? We realize that there is no perfect definition, but would love to hear if others are doing things differently, or if there would be a good reason to keep doing it the way we are.

[Jay_Jiang]

This discussion is now entering the realm of multi touch attribution. You can look into a solution like Bizible or other Salesforce packages, these are expensive in subscription costs and take a massive amount of resources to set up accurate reporting as well (they rely on having clean data for one). 

A DIY solution would be to create datetime and text pairs of custom fields to record key touchpoints e.g. First Touch, Lead Creation, Opportunity Creation and Closed Won (what is a key touchpoint is decided by you), and timestamp + record the last campaign for each and you can do your own modelling using a BI tool