How to Measure the Effectiveness of your Digital Marketing Campaign

How many times have you wondered if all the effort and time invested in each marketing action was achieving the desired results? Paid campaigns, content optimization, social publications, organic positioning, emailing, form acquisition: these are many, many different ways to collect data. The sources are so different that it's difficult to gather all the data in a single spreadsheet (without Salesforce, of course) and have a global view of each marketing action to achieve the coveted ROI.

We'll see how to implement a good strategy to track campaigns in order to highlight each action, preferably within the same tool, like Salesforce and its cloud system can do.

URL parameters, the 'breadcrumb' of marketing and analytics

Every piece of content you publish must have good traceability, defined in agreement with the rest of the teams. For example, for Google Ads campaigns, if at the time of publication the UTMs have been included within the different URLs, you will already have 99% of the information that will be used within the CRM.

URL Parameters: Gathering "Hidden" fields in a form.

So, how do you collect the different parameters that will accompany the content within a form, for example? It’s necessary to have a structure that accommodates different data, such as ‘add hidden fields’ in forms, a function that will allow the data to be collected in ways other than what we are explicitly requesting in the form, as well as the use of cookies on some platforms.

Parameters and cookies, the perfect analytics combination

If we add the use of cookies from platforms from our CRM to the classic tracking obtained from UTMs, like with Pardot (you can read more about it here), Salesforce Marketing Cloud, or Google 360°, we will have an added value from these integrations at strategic points in our campaigns, such as at moments of conversion where platform cookies do not arrive or only record one moment in the customer journey.

The order changes the product

It's important to consider that once you've entered the user's data via a form submission into a CRM like Salesforce, you should always create a campaign to understand which leads you want to reach at any given time. Once the form is filled out, the user is already considered a top-level conversion (MQL), but not yet ready to sell to. For this reason, they enter Salesforce as a Lead with 'New' status and can then be contacted by the sales team or be included in any nurturing flow for subsequent qualification.

And this is where the magic begins, the core of lead qualification. At this stage, the sales team can define the lead quality that we are generating thanks to factors like lead source, data quality, etc.

Due to these flows, the status of the lead can go from 'New' to 'Converted'; the definition of each status is customizable within the settings of each CRM.

The importance of GCLID (Google Click IDentifier)

If we want to excel in this field, we need to consider offline conversion tracking (SF-Google Ads). Through the GCLID (Google Click IDentifier) parameter and the connection of Google Ads accounts with Salesforce, we can report, with automatic imports, the status of each prospect and the opportunity stage to optimize Google Ads campaigns and thus get real conversion data that will allow us to see the origin of the most valuable leads in our funnel. 

Don't forget about ROI and SQL

As we were saying, the second major conversion after filling out forms is the conversion from Lead to Contact in Salesforce, which associates the person with the corresponding Business Opportunity. It is at this stage where you can start talking about Return On Investment (ROI) or Salesforce Qualified Lead (SQL).  By doing this, we will further define our Buyer Persona; in addition, we can complete standard fields in Salesforce such as 'Contact Role', which can be leveraged within the platform. 

Let's use two different scenarios to highlight how important these two pieces of data are. Imagine two campaigns. Campaign A consists of 10,000 leads;  1,300 of these convert into contacts, of which 30 opportunities in Salesforce, totalling 45 million, are won. Campaign B, on the other hand, generates 3,500 leads, of which 1,100 are converted to contacts. From this, 450 opportunities are created, for a return of 370 million. 

Campaign B would seem to be more profitable numerically; let's briefly see why.

The conversion rate from lead to contact in campaign A is 13%, while in campaign B it is around 31.43%. If we consider opportunities, however, campaign A generates far fewer, but has an average value of 1.5M, while the value of each opportunity in campaign B is around 0.82M. 

By winning every opportunity, campaign B performed better, in terms of the number of opportunities won. From the perspective of the value of each opportunity, however,  campaign A was more attractive. Lead-to-contact conversion is a key point in establishing a valuable connection; in these terms, B was once again more satisfying. However, we should not ignore the large number of leads generated by campaign A (+285.7% compared to campaign B), which, with a good nurturing process, can lead to further satisfaction in the future.

With that said, let's take a quick look at how marketing works with Salesforce and how, thanks to tracking every lead movement from the start, we can get a 360° view of them within the platform.

All these concepts are easier to understand if you have a centralized management system. For this and any other concerns, we can help you; we've been experts in the Salesforce field for more than 15 years and we understand the world of analytics.

If we don't track our progress, we won't have the data and we won't be able to see it, leading to "incomplete" analytics that will entail poor decision making