How Do You Set Up Program "Success" In Marketo?

[Anonymous]

How can you set up "program success" in Marketo? I know there is a way to identify the action that prospects can take within a campaign that would be identified as a success (e.g., clicks email, fills out form, etc.), but I'm not sure how to set it up.

Thanks for your help!

Steve

[Scott_Daily]

Hi Steve! Program Success if set-up in the Admin section under tags and determined by the program type and channel you select when creating a program. Screenshot below.

You'll need to then set-up a smart campaign to move leads to this status by selecting the applicable trigger and the flow step of Change Program Status.

[Anonymous]

Thanks Scott!

[Anonymous]

Hey Scott,

What is the best way to use the program success tags? How do you get value out of this?

Appreciate your insights!

Steve

[Justin_Norris1]

Stephen Schimmel​

I think you've asked a really great question.

At a high level, Program success determines whether the program will get credit in Marketo's calculation of multi-touch attribution (in RCE) and also affects some ROI metrics in standard reporting.

So how should we decide what "success" means? To do this we need a clear definition of what a Program is, so we know what is being successful or not successful. To my mind, the basic equation of tracking marketing performance in Marketo is

One discrete marketing initiative = one Program

The marketing initiative should be specific enough that you can adequately track your efforts but not so granular that it becomes meaningless. So an individual webinar, a single piece of content, a search-engine marketing campaign etc.

If these are your Programs, then your "success" event is the immediate program-specific action that you want the lead to take in engaging with your marketing initiative.

For a B2B sales cycle that generally shouldn't be "buy something" but is an action more local to the specific activity, e.g.

• Email success = click
• Webinar success = attended, attended on-demand
• Tradeshow success = visited booth
• Pay-Per-Click success = clicked
• E-book success = downloaded

And so on.

In other words, whenever you consider success, think about whether you would want that Program getting credit in your attribution reporting if the lead had taken that action.

Is simply signing up for the webinar enough to say that it truly influenced an opportunity? Or does a lead actually need to attend?

Is an email open a real success? Or do we need a click or even a form fill out to say the email was successful?

These are questions that different businesses may answer in different ways. Also keep in mind that attribution modelling is part art, part science and is always just an approximation of reality.

So my recommendation is to come to an agreement with your main stakeholders about how you want to view the world and stick with it unless something needs to change. Then you have a consistent model to benchmark and optimize against over time.

See also:

Understanding Attribution - Marketo Docs - Product Docs

[Anonymous]

This is the link: Create a Program Channel - Marketo Docs - Product Docs