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.

With Pardot B2B Marketing Analytics Plus, you are able to bring external data, use an intuitive and customizable dashboard, activate Discovery Stories, and take advantage of Einstein Prediction Builder.

Difference between B2BMA and B2BMA+

Extracting Data

A case scenario is that there is a lack of visibility into usage as the data sits in an external system, getting it through that B2BMA. Extracting and bringing data is easy with the proper steps taken in B2B analytics. 

Remember that:

• Dashboards are only as good are your data
• Data is clean
• Quality data everywhere
• Joining in an effective way
• What questions are you answering?

Customizing Dashboards

A use case example would be that you are missing key usage data from an ABM Dashboard, so you’ll add an additional lens from it. The first thing to do to edit a dashboard is to clone it. Connect it to the right data sources. Drag and drop as easily as you can. 

Remember:

• Always copy the dashboard before editing
• Think first about user experience 
  • Who will be using this dashboard?
  • What data will they be looking for?
• What questions are we answering?
• Charts were not created equal

Discovery Stories

An example of this use case is how prospects engage with your content and how can you actually improve it? Common questions that Discovery Stories can help with are how are your downloads doing? Or Are there engagements in downloading e-books or whitepapers? Options and suggestions from Discovery Stories will be given in a decision and strategy point of view for the future.

You can identify changes that are predicted to improve. Always remember to:

• Not neglect combinations
• Select relevant fields

Einstein Prediction Builder

An example of a case scenario would be a high percentage of leads were being marked unqualified and we didn’t know why so running tests from this capability will prevent this and identify some root causes.

Always remember:

• Output is boolean or a number
• What data matters? (e.g. not phone numbers)
• Don’t include past leads that have already been unqualified

Takeaways

Pardot B2B Marketing Analytics Plus can give you a lot of advantages when it comes to data and being strategic in making decisions from it. There are plenty of capabilities that B2BMA+ offers including bringing external data easily to the dashboard, customization, Discovery Stories, and Einstein Prediction Builder. 

To learn more, click to watch the original video from Jess Pyne here.

Check out more MarDreamin’ videos. 

Further Reading

• Salesforce B2B Marketing Analytics Implementation Guide
• Pardot and Salesforce Marketing Reporting: A 101 Guide
• Recipe for success: Pardot B2BMA columns to rows

Original article: Demystifying Pardot B2B Marketing Analytics Plus

©2022 The Spot. All Rights Reserved.

The post Demystifying Pardot B2B Marketing Analytics Plus appeared first on The Spot.

In this blog, we will talk about data completeness, data hygiene, and data completeness KPIs to get you to have a better understanding and practice with Pardot B2BMA as an audit tool.

Data completeness

We’ll keep this straight to the point. You aren’t able to make great decisions if you don’t have good data. What is complete data? Are the fields being completely filled out? It’s actually about data you don’t know, what you need to know, and the diversity of sources you’re getting your data from.

How do you know if your data is complete?

Can you make decisions based on the data you have? Are you able to answer business questions or goals based on the data? Complete data does not necessarily mean asking every single question but only asking what you need.

 It’s best to make it targeted data. Knowing where it started, where it’s going, and what’s in the data are great practices to help you.

Data Hygiene

How do we control our data? We’ll start by getting the data we only need. Asking questions that would not be helpful to the goals can be avoided. 

• Avoid open text boxes for categories like fields on cities/states/country as it will be very difficult to put them together categorically.

• Be aware of convenience sampling. It is important to guide questions in a certain direction. Are we looking to find the things that we don’t already know yet? 

• Monitor sources. Where does your data come from and how complete are those sources? Knowing who your population is and getting a proper sample from them is key.

Data completeness KPIs

What is your most actionable data? If you can only know 5 things about each of the people you’re getting information from, what would be the 5 most important information you want to get from them? 

Make prioritizations

Determine what your priorities are. Is it Industry, Geolocation, or Title? 

• Identify non-actionable data. Are you collecting things because of everybody else? 
• Determine categories of data to enrich. If you’re looking towards 5 different things that are important to you and you value, categorize them. 

• Prioritize data enrichment activities. You can’t fix everything all at once. Having a good plan for determining which is the most critical data and how to clean them up will help you do a better job on forms and getting the data cleaner into Pardot. 
• Measure your progress. It’s better to start a baseline and monitor insights as to what movement you have shown.

Conclusion

There are three critical aspects that can help us use Pardot B2BMA as an Data Audit Tool including data completeness, data hygiene, and data completeness KPIs, all of which are important to making important business decisions and achieving their goals.

Check out the full original video by Dominique Beaudin here. Or, click here to learn about this year’s MarDreamin’ conference. 

Further reading:

• Pardot B2B Marketing Analytics Implementation Guide
• Recipe for success: Pardot B2BMA columns to rows
• B2B Marketing Analytics Datasets
• Pardot Marketing Data Sharing

Original article: Using Pardot B2BMA as a Data Audit Tool

©2022 The Spot. All Rights Reserved.

The post Using Pardot B2BMA as a Data Audit Tool appeared first on The Spot.

I have a rather embarrassing story from my pre-Einstein campaign reporting days. 

When I started out as a Salesforce admin (i.e. I got told I was the new admin and that I’d “figure it out.” It was a very small company.) I was also in charge of doing the end-of-quarter reporting on sales and campaigns. 

For attribution, I would manually review every single Closed Won campaign, try to determine the Contacts from the Opportunity notes, tasks, etc., and manually make associations. Primary Campaign Source and Contact Roles were in Salesforce at the time, but no one filled them out. 

So, I just had to go on a fact finding mission. Then I exported all the data into excel and did multi-touch attribution manually. 

In Excel. Ugh.

Use Einstein to report on Marketing Cloud Account Engagement campaigns

Without the team actively and frequently using Contact Roles, reporting on Campaign Performance was no better. 

I could view who responded to a call to action (CTA) or registered for an event, but reporting on Account Engagement (Pardot) assets + Salesforce campaigns wasn’t really a capability. So, it was also a lot of manual work. 

As much as thinking about these old processes makes me cringe, I’ve heard similar stories from a lot of MCAE admins and marketers. 

Campaign reporting and attribution has come a long way since then — especially since Connected Campaigns and Campaign Influence were first introduced. Now we can easily extend these capabilities with the power of Einstein Machine Learning. 

Note: The two Einstein solutions below are only available to Advanced and Premium editions of Marketing Cloud Account Engagement (a.k.a. MCAE/Pardot). 

Campaign reporting with Einstein Campaign Insights

Einstein Campaign Insights analyzes Prospects’ engagement with your Campaign assets to spot trends and outliers. 

You’ll see two types of insights:

1. Global Insights: These insights compare the performance of the campaign and assets to other campaigns/assets of the same type (i.e. comparing a single form’s performance to the performance of your other forms)
2. Segment Insights: These insights shed light on which audiences engage with your campaigns and assets (i.e. Directors opened this email less than other segments).

Einstein Campaign Insights looks for engagement levels that are either higher and lower than usual. 

You can also select the dropdown arrow to provide feedback on the Insights and help Einstein improve. 

What data do you need?

Nearly all data used in the Einstein Campaign Insights model originates from Pardot, so Connected Campaigns must be enabled. Salesforce also recommends having at least 50 Connected Campaigns.

How to enable Einstein Campaign Insights

You’ll enable Einstein Campaign Insights by going to Setup > Einstein Pardot > Einstein Campaign Insights. 

Once enabled, it will take about 24 hours for your initial insights to appear. Make sure you add the Einstein Insights component to your Lightning record page. 

Analyze campaign performance with Einstein Attribution

Einstein Attribution is Campaign Influence with the power of machine learning. This tool analyzes your campaigns to spot trends and then allocates campaign influence credit to multiple campaigns. 

Einstein Attribution has a few requirements before it can run:

1. Connected Campaign and Campaign Influence must be set up.
2. Your org has to be using the standard Opportunity object as well as the default “Close Date” and “Amount” fields.
3. This tool only looks at Campaign Members with a “Responded” status. Note: This means the “Responded” checkbox needs to be selected for the individual Campaign Member Statuses.

What data do you need?

Salesforce recommends you have at least 100 Opportunities with Contact Roles so Einstein Attribution can analyze which Campaign engagements influence Opportunities. 

Enabling Einstein Attribution

You’ll enable Einstein Attribution Insights by going to Setup > Einstein Pardot > Einstein Attribution. 

Once enabled, a new Campaign Influence Model called “Data-Driven Model” will be created. To set this as the default over what is specified within Campaign Influence, select the “Use this model as the Campaign Influence default” checkbox.

Set your Campaign Influence Time Frame

Next, set your Campaign Influence Time Frame (3 months to 2 years). This limits which campaigns are considered influential. 

For instance, you probably wouldn’t want a webinar from 5 years ago to get credit for an opportunity created today. I recommend this time frame be 2-3 times your typical sales cycle. 

If you plan on comparing the Data Driven model to the out-of-the-box Campaign Influence models (First Touch, Last Touch, and Even Distribution), make sure the “Set Campaign Influence Time Frame” setting here matches your Auto-Association “Campaign Influence Time Frame.” You can find this by going to Setup > Campaign Influence > Auto-Association Settings. If these two time frames are different, you will see a difference in the Total Attribution in your reports and dashboards. 

Select your Success Milestone

Finally, select your Success Milestone. This should be the Opportunity Stage that indicates an Opportunity is legitimate. 

Out-of-the-box Campaign Influence uses the Opportunity creation date as the Success Milestone, but in reality, a Salesperson may open an Opportunity before ever getting the Lead/Account involved. 

Note: Your Data Driven model and the out-of-the-box Campaign Influence models may also show a different Total Attribution number if your Milestone is an Opportunity Stage after campaign creation. 

In the example below, I’ve used my Proposal/Quote stage as the Success Milestone because this stage indicates the Lead/Account is involved and is considering making a purchase. 

Salesforce admins have it so good these days

If I had these Einstein campaign reporting tools back when I started my journey as an admin, I would have saved so much time! 

These tools still save me time today and I love not having to worry about if my reports and attribution have the most complete information. 

Are you using Einstein Campaign Insights and Attribution in your org? Or do you have an embarrassing admin story to share? Tell us in the comments!

Original article: Campaign Reporting with Einstein for Marketing Cloud Account Engagement

©2022 The Spot. All Rights Reserved.

The post Campaign Reporting with Einstein for Marketing Cloud Account Engagement appeared first on The Spot.