Salesforce and Pardot connected campaigns bridge two distinct campaign reporting functions into one powerful feature. 

Prior to 2019, Salesforce and Pardot campaigns were independent of each other. But with the introduction of connected campaigns the two entities joined forces. And with that, the humble marketer’s life is made easier. 

The Difference Between Salesforce and Pardot Campaigns

Before we jump in, let’s do a quick 101 refresh on the difference between Salesforce campaigns and Pardot campaigns.

The Skinny on Pardot Campaigns

Pardot campaigns refer to the first touch interaction that could be tracked. It answers the question: “What brought this person to us?”

For example, let’s say someone visits your How to Be Good At Stuff webinar page. They didn’t sign up, came back 30 days later, and converted to a lead by downloading your I’m Awesome at Stuff whitepaper. Their campaign would be set to the How to Be Good At Stuff webinar, since that was the first initiative that brought them to you.

Pardot campaigns are one-to-one. That means each person has ONE source campaign. And every asset created in Pardot has to be tied to one campaign as well.

This gives you useful reporting data on the number of leads sourced by your campaigns and how these convert into closed-won opportunities downstream in the pipeline.

How Salesforce Campaigns are Different

Salesforce campaigns are more… how normal people think about campaigns. Campaigns are marketing initiatives, and each contact or lead can belong to multiple campaigns.

Tracking this in Salesforce is hugely impactful. If you leverage Salesforce campaigns to record who you touch with your marketing efforts, then you’re laying the foundation to be able to show all of the marketing touchpoints that led to a sale on each of your opportunities:

And at the campaign level, you can see the total volume of opportunities that were influenced by your marketing activities.

Marketers have been talking about revenue attribution for the last decade. But for most organizations, this stops with “talk.” We all like the idea of being able to link marketing campaigns to hard revenue numbers, but our disparate systems and measurements make that incredibly hard to deliver.

Campaign influence reporting finally makes revenue attribution doable for a typical marketing team — all with tools native to the platform. This comes together in first touch, last touch, or any other custom attribution models your team needs to analyze the impact of its marketing spend.

How to Set Up Connected Campaigns in your Pardot Org 

The good news is that connected campaigns are automatically activated for Pardot orgs setup after 2019. But, there are a few settings we’ll want to take a look at to make sure everything is functioning.

 The magic is in the Pardot connector!

Connected campaign settings are managed by the connector that bridges Salesforce and Pardot. 

In Pardot Lightning…

1. Click on Pardot Settings
2. Connectors (on left menu)
3. Click the settings cog under Actions on the right for the Salesforce connector
4. Select Edit Settings

On this screen, you’ll notice the campaign that is being used to connect contacts that come from Salesforce into Pardot. They will be marked with this “first touch” campaign when they sync from Salesforce. If you do NOT have a campaign here, you should create a campaign in Salesforce, something generic like “Salesforce Contacts,” and select it here. 

Question: I created the campaign in Salesforce and it doesn’t appear in this picklist?

This is pretty common. There are three reasons why the campaign would not appear, here are some troubleshooting steps…

1. When setting up the campaign in Salesforce you must check the box to make the campaign “Active.”
2. Be patient! It can sometimes take 5-10 minutes for the campaign to appear in Pardot. You may need to refresh the connector settings page to see it appear.
3. As a last resort, delete the campaign you created in Salesforce and create a new campaign. You might be shocked at how often this solves the problem.

Let’s Look at Campaign Settings

Once you have the connector settings worked out, click on the Campaigns tab at the top.

Let’s take a closer look at the setting options.

• First, ensure the check box for “Enable Connected Campaigns and Engagement History” is checked. This should already be checked by default, which turns on all the wonderful connected campaign magic. 

• Enable Campaign Member Sync should also be checked to ensure that when you add people to your campaign in Salesforce or Pardot they stay in sync. Note: If you add people to a campaign in Pardot but they do not exist as Contact or Lead records in Salesforce, you will not see them in Salesforce under that particular campaign. 

• Use Salesforce to manage all campaigns should be checked allowing you to create and manage campaigns in one place — Salesforce! No more duplicating efforts in Pardot.

• Limit Campaign Creation by Date – this handy feature gives you the ability to limit what campaigns sync to Pardot. If your Salesforce org has been around for a while, it undoubtedly has campaigns that were created and you may not wish to clutter Pardot with old campaigns. You can select a cut-off date here!

• Show unconnected campaigns in Pardot Campaigns tab is good to check if you wish to see what campaigns in Pardot are not connected to Salesforce. As the subtext under the box states: Unconnected campaigns are always shown unless Manage Campaigns in Salesforce is enabled.

• Finally, Campaign record types enabled for connection. This will say “Master Record Type” by default if you only have one Salesforce campaign record type. But some orgs are fancy and have multiple record types for different parts of the business. If this is the case, you can select which record types should sync to Pardot.

Once Connected Campaigns are flowing here’s what you’ll notice

• All new campaigns will be created in Salesforce — you can not create campaigns in Pardot.
• Every time you add a new active campaign to Salesforce, it’s automatically available in Pardot.
• You can add campaign members in Pardot through automation rules or completion actions. As long as they are assigned to a user, they will sync to Salesforce and show up as members of that campaign in Salesforce. 

PRO TIP: If you have a campaign set up for a weekly or monthly newsletter, add a completion action to your signup form. This ensures that when a prospect fills out the form, they are automatically added to that campaign.

These campaign fields will also be updated by Salesforce and pushed to Pardot:

• Name
• Cost
• Created By
• Updated By
• Updated At

Now for the Really Exciting Stuff: Show Engagement History on the Campaign in Salesforce & Report On It

To add another layer of awesomeness to this, Connected Campaigns allows you to also enable Engagement History on Salesforce campaigns.

What this means is that on Salesforce campaigns that are connected to Pardot campaigns, you can pass engagement metrics from:

• List emails
• Forms
• Form handlers
• Links & custom redirects

When you turn on Engagement History, new custom objects called ListEmail, MarketingForm, and MarketingLink are created and populated with data from corresponding Pardot records. These records DO count against your org’s data storage limits. 

Important: these custom objects do need to be added to your Campaign page layout! Here are detailed instructions to do this.

Benefits of Enabling Engagement History

Enabling Engagement History lets you add KPIs for these assets to the Campaign Page Layout:

And even better, it lets you get at this data in Salesforce reports & dashboards:

My heart literally flutters with anticipation of the power this is going to bring to marketers on the platform.

 A few general FYIs on what you need to make Engagement History work:

• Connected campaigns set up (duh)
• Prospects syncing with a Salesforce lead or contact, and added to the connected campaign
• The prospect must be assigned to a user, group, or queue in Salesforce (a requirement for it to sync to Salesforce in the first place)
• To access Engagement History data, users need the Sales User or CRM User standard permission set and field-level security access to the engagement history fields.

Ready to Roll with Salesforce and Pardot Connected Campaigns?

Once you experience connected campaigns, there’s no going back. (Literally and figuratively. Once it’s on, it can’t be turned off.)

To make this magic happen, you will need your Salesforce admin on board, since a lot of the configuration changes take place inside Sales Cloud. 

Do you utilize the power of connected campaigns? What’s your experience been? We’re dying to know — please share with fellow readers in the comments!

Original article: Connected Salesforce + Pardot Campaigns: How They Rock Our World

©2022 The Spot. All Rights Reserved.

The post Connected Salesforce + Pardot Campaigns: How They Rock Our World appeared first on The Spot.

Salesforce has robust native reporting capabilities that come out of the box. But what happens when you need more? What CAN you do? 

This Salesforce native reporting overview will make you a custom operational reporting superstar. That’s because it highlights the ways you can leverage custom objects and use joins in your reporting. 

The good news is, once you know what’s possible, the world of Salesforce reporting is much easier to navigate.

Where to Start: Create a Lookup Relationship on a Custom Object

We’re going to start by going through the process of creating a lookup relationship on a Salesforce custom object.

Why start here? In short, all Salesforce reporting is based on relationships between objects. 

Let’s say you have a custom object where you store all of your team’s required compliance paperwork. You want to report on which opportunities need which paperwork within that custom object. 

While you can create a custom report type for your custom object, there is no link between Opportunities and your custom object. 

The good news is that you can create one! 

Example: Creating a relationship between custom object and Opportunity

Here’s an example that we can use as we move through our reporting exploration. Specifically, these are the steps to create a relationship between a custom object and an Opportunity in Salesforce:

1. Open the custom object. In this case, I have created a custom object called “Compliance Documents.”
2. Select Fields & Relationships.
3. Select “New” to create a new field.
4. Select “Lookup Relationship.”

5. Select “Opportunity” as the Related to. This will create the relationship between Opportunity and the custom object, making them “linked” for reporting and other related purposes.
6. If you want the relationship to be consistent and there should be a value selected, make sure to select “Always require a value in order to save the record.” Also make sure that “Add this field to existing custom report types that contain this entity” is checked.
7. Click through the next few screens to verify permissions, Related list label and select what layouts to the new field to.

With these steps, you can now add the custom object in a report type AND the related list will appear for the Opportunity. So easy, right?

Exploring Salesforce Custom Report Types

So, now that we have linked our custom object with a lookup relationship, let’s get ready to report!

Use the following example to inspire your use of native Salesforce reporting capabilities.

Use Case Example: Set up a custom report type 

You want to be able to see what type of compliance reports have been completed (and what opportunities do NOT have documents) for your Opportunities. To accomplish this, we will set up a custom report type. 

1. Go to Setup and select “Report Types.”
2. Click “New Custom Report Type.”
3. Select the Primary object (see tip below for more information).
4. In our case, we will use Opportunities as our base object. We are interested in both Opportunities that have documents AND those that don’t. So, we’re calling it “Opportunities with or without Compliance Documents.”

5. Now we can select the related objects. In this case, we want to see Compliance Documents. 

Because our custom objects were created to support Activity creation, and Activity creation links to the Assignment object, we can add all these to maximize our report.

NOTE: We are selecting “A” Records may or may not have “B” records so we can see how many of our total Opportunities have records. If we selected Each “A” record must have at least one “B” Record, we would ONLY see these records and not be able to compare (which will be handy in our report).

6. Save your changes.

Tip: What is the Primary Object?

The primary object is the “base” Object for your report. You can select a custom or standard object. To decide which to select, consider what fields you want and whether they are connected as you select these. 

Remember that all reporting starts with relationships between objects. One tool that can help you “see” the relationships in Salesforce is the Schema Builder in setup, which is where you can select your objects and get a visualization of how they are connected. 

Good news for us, Salesforce report types makes this easy by only allowing you to select objects that are related and have lookup relationships. If you don’t see a child object, it’s because there isn’t a defined relationship. 

Add Lookup Fields in Salesforce Custom Report

So, great news! You have connected your custom object to a standard object and created a new report type. But what other data can we add from here? 

Let’s see what we can add using the “edit layout” section of the Report Type.

1. Click on “Edit Layout”
2. On the left, you can dropdown the list under “view” to see the objects in your report type.

3. Use the “Add fields related via lookup” to see what you can add to your report from other related objects.
   

4. You can see all the objects that have a relevant relationship to “opportunity” in this window. Clicking on the object name allows you to select fields to add to your report.

   In the example above, I am adding Account Name and Account Number. You can change the view to show any of the objects in the custom report type to select related fields. You can see which fields were added by lookup easily since they have a magnifying glass next to them in the layout window.

NOTE: Watch out for duplicate fields. For example, if I select the ID for Account using the related lookup, I will end up with two almost identically named fields when creating reports, which could be confusing. Not all lookup fields contain data. If a field is not required in a related object field, you may not get any additional data (just empty fields)

5. You can add sections, add and remove fields and do many other fun things in this window, but we’ll move on to creating our report with our shiny new report type! (more information on working layouts here.) For our use case, we are ready to move on.

Creating a Report Using Your Custom Report Type

Finally all your work will come together in an amazing report! Let’s jump in!

1. Go to Reports
2. Click on “New Report”
3. Be sure to select “all” to search for our New Custom Report type

4. On the right, you can quickly see what reports have been created with this report type and what objects are included. Click on “Start Report”. You can add whatever fields you need.

Using Cross Filters to Filter Records Based on Related Objects

Now that I have a report in progress, what else can I do to use other objects with it? One example of this is a cross filter. 

A cross filter allows you to filter your report type based on a related object. For example, If I have a report type based on opportunities, I can use a cross join to limit the results to opportunities that have related campaign influence records (without actually having to include the Campaign Influence object in the custom report type).

1. Click on “Filters”
2. Select the drop down next to filters and select New Cross Filter
3. Select Opportunities as the “show me” and Campaign Influence as the limiter

   NOTE: You can use “With” or Without” as the criteria to return records.

TIP: Check out the Sercante Campaign Influence Starter Pack for more information.

Using Joined Reports in Salesforce to Enrich Your Data

Joined Reports in Salesforce are a little tricky to understand but can be VERY practical. Here’s how the feature works.

Consider the following use case. You want to be able to show Products on Opportunities related to those with compliance documents. Your custom report type does not have Product information. 

No worries at all! If there are related fields between the two report types, you can join them together in blocks.

Here’s how to do that:

1. Click on “Report” at the top left of your report window.
2. Click on “Joined Report,” and click apply.

3. Click on Add Block.
4. Select the Opportunities with Products block.

5. Use the lookup window under “Group Across Blocks” to pick the field you want to group on. This will create a connection on a common field. 

In this case OpportunityID is most appropriate since I want to see detail for each opportunity. You can now see the fields I selected from my Custom Report type and fields I selected from the Opportunities with Products report.

NOTE: Once you create a Joined Report, you also need to manage filters for each one separately under the filter area. 

Now you can see how the Joined Report enriches your data! We can see if any Opportunities with or without documents have products linked.

So what happens now?

In our little summary we have reviewed the ways in which you can show data in Salesforce reports through Lookup relationships on objects for the following:

• Custom reports types
• Lookups on Custom report Types
• Joined Report
• Cross filters

The wonderful world of Salesforce Reporting is constantly changing and improving with every release. Knowing what you can do to bring your data together is the key to creating meaningful, actionable reports. 

I hope this summary helps in your understanding of what’s available and related use cases.

Looking for information about Salesforce native reporting?

Salesforce has a wonderful help section with videos and how tos that can help you on your journey. And remember, you can always reach out to the team at Sercante if you have any questions. 

Tell us what you’re going to build using Salesforce native reporting capabilities in the comments section.

Original article: Salesforce Native Reporting: Get More From Your Data

©2022 The Spot. All Rights Reserved.

The post Salesforce Native Reporting: Get More From Your Data appeared first on The Spot.