How is everyone attributing success for programs?

[Nate_Oosterhous]

Hello All!

Everyone's case is different but I wanted to gather how things are being done from different perspectives.

Some examples would be great!  Thank you ahead of time!

Questions:

How is everyone attributing success for programs? 

What would you consider a success for a web form management program that simply watches for a web form to filled out and then populates some data and pushes them to Salesforce?

What would you consider a success for an email send to different stages?  Success for email send to customers vs leads?

etc.

[Justin_Norris1 · Accepted solution]

Nate Oosterhouse​

Hi Nate,

What I generally see (and recommend) is that success is defined as the lead achieving the intended goal of the marketing initiative, defined tactically within the context of the channel.

So when you deploy a webform, the goal is for someone to fill it out.

When you hold a webinar, the goal is for someone to attend it (either live or on-demand).

When you send an email, the immediate goal is typically clicks, although sometimes a company will be a bit more stringent and require some kind of subsequent form fill in order for the email to be considered successful. I tend to think a click is the most reasonable gauge of success.

I would avoid trying to define success differently for different leads based on their lifecycle context, as it starts to define success more in terms of upstream or downstream lead behaviors rather than reflecting how they engage with your specific marketing initiative, which is the intention of program stages.

That being said, I don't think it's bad to add stages beyond success to help track at a glance any leads that reached success and then did something else (e.g., reached MQL, closed won opp). The main requirement here is that all subsequent stages must be success stages as well and must be a subset of the previous stage - e.g., a program stage of "Sales Accepted" on a web form program means the lead filled out the form AND was then sales accepted.

This way you can still get a clean read on how many people reached your most fundamental success step.

[Nate_Oosterhous]

Hi Justin,

We for sure want to track whether or not they engaged with our marketing effort but also for ROI we would like to track which programs contributed to won opportunities.  In your opinion would you accomplish this by adding multiple successes for each program?  If so, what impact does multiple successes have on reporting?  How for reporting would you just look at the program successes that mark a won opportunity and not have the other successes in the mix?

Thank you for your reply.  It was helpful!

[Justin_Norris1]

Hey Nate Oosterhouse​,

This is a great question, and it goes to the heart of how revenue attribution is defined in Marketo.

The program is the atomic unit of attribution in Marketo. When Marketo calculates attribution for an opportunity, it looks at the programs that the people associated with that opportunity have reached success in. Those programs where a person reached success are potentially eligible for attribution credit.

If the program success happened before the opportunity was created, the program can get pipeline credit. If the success happened after the opportunity was created but before the opportunity closed, the program can get credit for the win (but not pipeline). If the program is the acquisition program, then it can get acquisition credit.

The detailed attribution rules can take some practice to wrap your head around, but with respect to success stages, the criteria is simply that the person reached a status in a program that is considered a "success". It doesn't matter what the stage is named or if there are multiple success stages. The important facts are whether success = true for the stage the person is in and the timing of the success relative to the attribution event (opportunity open or opportunity closed).

You can see that the definition of success in the program IS important but mainly from the perspective of ensuring that you are moving leads to a success stage only after an action which you feel is sufficient for that program to receive credit for any eventual opportunities that emerge.

Here is some documentation that is quite helpful, with examples: Understanding Attribution - Marketo Docs - Product Docs

[Nate_Oosterhous]

You are awesome.  Thanks Justin!

[Dan_Stevens_]

Justin's reply is spot-on.  Here are some examples of our successes within our channels.  Each of our channels have the key stages of our lead lifecycle as the final program statuses (achieved MQL status, achieved SAL status, converted-to/influenced opportunity and opportunity won).

[Nate_Oosterhous]

Hi Dan,

I just asked Justin a question by replying to his comment.  I am more than happy to get your thoughts on the question as well.

Thanks for your reply!