Tracking Program Statuses

[Anonymous]

I am considering making changes to Marketo program statuses in order to better track lead lifecycle movement, but before I do so, I am wondering if anyone else in the community has thoughts on the subject, arguments for doing this one way vs. the other, or other things I should consider.

Ultimately, I am looking for a way to track both Lead Lifyecycle Status AND Lead Campaign Status.

Right now, I am using Program Statuses to track literal program statuses, such as:

Webcast -  Invited / Registered For Webcast / Attended Webcast / Registered For Webcast, Did Not Attend / Viewed Webcast Recording

Event: Invited To Event / Registered For Event / Registered For Event, Did Not Attend / Attended Event / Attended Event, Visited Booth / Attended Event, Asked For Follow-Up

Etc, etc...

The upside of tracking statuses this way is that you can easily see how each contact interacted with the program - I can easily get a report and find out exactly who attended a given webcast or event.

I am considering making the following changes to Program Statuses:

Webcast -  Invited / Registered For Webcast / MQL / SQL / Opportunity / Closed Won / Closed Lost

Event: Invited To Event / Registered For Event / / MQL / SQL / Opportunity / Closed Won / Closed Lost

The plus side of doing it this way is that you can more easily see what type of results the program influenced. The downside is that you lose visibility into specifically how leads interact with campaigns.

Does anyone have any thoughts on this? Is there a good way to track both of these things (Lead Lifyecycle Status AND Lead Campaign Status)? Thanks in advance!

Steve

[Josh_Hill13 · Accepted solution]

There's a good webinar I did with Adam New-Waterson awhile ago.

Your current method is the best, IMHO. If you use Statuses for Lifecycle, instead of using the RCM for Lifecycle, you are then only saying you care about FT or LT within the PRogram. It's not really effective in my view. It's also not how  Marketo is supposed to be used since RCM/RCE will play off the success status for attribution on MT. And you could do the same thing with other BI tools.

[Josh_Hill13]

LeanData | Setting Up Program Channels for Success

[Anonymous]

Thanks Josh -- just watched the webinar, it was very insightful.

[Anonymous]

Thanks again for your help Josh! I watched the webcast and it was helpful in optimizing my master templates.

One thing I am continuing to struggle with, however, is how best to use statuses within my emails programs. Ultimately, I want to be able to report on successes (conversions) within every email so I can say "20% of email Y recipients converted to success". I am struggling to build out scalable master template logic to achieve this.

Clearly, "fills out form on landing page" could not be the filter unless that webpage is only linked to the email. As far as I know, you would have to use "clicked in link in email AND filled out form" to get something close to an email conversion smart list (although that still might not be 100% accurate). Even if you were willing to use that clicks link and fills out form logic, you would have to do some pretty granular work every time you send out an email to keep this up.

Do you have any other suggestions that might make managing email program statuses and tracking form fills that resulted from emails more scalable? I appreciate your time and expertise!

Steve

[Dan_Stevens_]

I know you directed your question to Josh here, but thought I'd offer some insight in how we approach this.  Success, within the email channel is considered the "click" (as they have progressed as far as they can within this specific channel).  Once success is achieved here, a lead will progress to another program/channel: Website Content (which is where most of our tactics/channels end up).  Within the "website content" channel, success is achieved by a form submit (if gated content) and/or downloading the content.  I realize you may perceive this as double-counting successes, but this approach works well for us as it allows us to measure the effectiveness of each channel individually (in some reports, we remove the "website content" channel and just measure the effectiveness of all channels leading up to the "website content" channel.  I provide more detail around this approach in my reply in this post: First, Last and Multi Touch attribution for UTM parameters and auto tagging emails

[Anonymous]

Thanks so much Dan - I appreciate your insights!

Your suggestion may be the best way for me to track this, although I would really prefer a way to know what percentage of people who get a specific email fill out a form that the email directs them to.

As far as you know, is there a scalable way to achieve this? If not, I'll probably move forward with your suggestion.

Thanks again!

Steve

[Dan_Stevens_]

We use a similar approach.  Although, some of the changes you're considering do a lot of assuming in terms of what's considered an MQL (which may be absolutely fine for your business).  For example, I see you've replaced "attended event" with "MQL".  If that's how you define an MQL, that's fine.  But for us - considering our long sales cycles - not all event attendees are considered MQLs (of course, there are always a handful that are fast-tracked).  In terms of how we leverage program statuses to track lead progression/attribution, have a look at this thread: Re: How are people standardizing their program status structures?