The Complete

Guide to Campaigns
Updated August 2020
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 Intended Audience
This guide helps marketers design and execute campaign strategy.
It is written for Pardot and Salesforce administrators who are familiar with
Pardot and Salesforce basics and who have the permissions needed to
implement functionality covered in this guide.

Table of Contents
Introduction....................................................................................................2

Salesforce Campaign Object.........................................................................4

Planning Your Campaign......................................................................4

Building Your Campaign.......................................................................5

Campaign Hierarchies...........................................................................8

Campaign Members and Statuses.....................................................12

Snippets.................................................................................................15

Reporting on Campaigns..............................................................................16

Connected Campaigns..................................................................................19

Resources................................................................................................….….22

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 Introduction
As marketers, we use the word campaign to mean different things. It could be as
narrow as a one-time email or as broad as an effort to increase market share. Until
2018, even Pardot had a different definition for campaigns than the rest of
Salesforce.

So what is the correct definition? Here’s the definition we at Salesforce typically

have in mind when we use the word campaign.

A campaign is a specific marketing activity or series of activities that seeks to

promote a product or service.

The Campaign Object in Salesforce lets you track prospect engagement with
those activities.

Let's explore campaigns and learn how to use them strategically to accomplish
your reporting and marketing goals.

History of Campaigns in Pardot and Salesforce

Pardot and Salesforce campaigns used to be separate entities with different

functions.

Before 2018, Pardot campaigns were primarily used for grouping related assets
together.
Then and now, the Pardot campaign field tracks a prospect’s first ever interaction
with your brand, similar to a source field. Everything in Pardot is associated with a
first-touch campaign, whether it’s a prospect, or an asset like a form or email
template. One shortcoming of that model was that it didn’t allow for tracking
additional touchpoints in a prospect’s marketing journey.

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 In Salesforce, campaigns allow for multi-touch reporting, allowing you to track
how your prospects interact with marketing activities whether it’s their first
touchpoint or not. Salesforce campaigns house campaign members — prospects
who have engaged at least once with your marketing initiatives.

After Salesforce acquired Pardot in 2013, the disparate campaign definitions and
functionality led to confusion. To clarify the purpose of campaigns and to continue
alignment with the Salesforce platform, Pardot adopted the Salesforce Campaign
model in 2018.

Future Campaigns: A Holistic Approach

When Pardot and Salesforce are used together, you can track your prospects'
progression through your marketing funnel. In Pardot, you focus on lead
generation and nurturing through the use of marketing assets like emails and
forms. In Salesforce, you focus on moving a lead to making a purchase and track
how your marketing efforts impacted the end result.

If you’re not already on the new Salesforce campaign model, streamline your
campaign and prospect management by connecting your Pardot and Salesforce
campaigns*. We will take a closer look at what this change will mean for your team
and give you all the tools you need to better understand campaigns and how they
operate.

Before we can fully leverage campaign functionality, we need to understand how

Pardot and Salesforce work together to create a complete picture, from prospect
to lead to contact. We’ll start by taking a closer look at the Salesforce Campaigns
object, paying special attention to features like Campaign Hierarchies, Campaign
Members and Member statuses. Then, we’ll dive into campaign reporting options
and wrap up by showing how Pardot and Salesforce campaign functionality works
together.

*Pardot accounts provisioned on or after March 22, 2019 have Connected Campaigns partially
enabled by default.
Not you? Enable Connected Campaigns to set up a 1:1 relationship between Salesforce
Campaigns and Pardot.

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 Salesforce Campaign Object
Remember that a campaign is a specific marketing activity or series of activities
that seeks to promote a product or service. Salesforce campaigns allow you to fully
manage and track your marketing initiatives.
You can create campaign record types to use as templates for similar campaigns,
group campaigns into hierarchies for more detailed reporting, or use customizable
campaign influence to understanding how marketing efforts contributed to
revenue.
Campaigns help you align your internal teams and give your marketing
infrastructure a huge boost! Ready to get started?

Planning Your Campaign

As with any significant project, implementing campaigns in your ecosystem will

require some planning, followed by some building.

In the planning stage, consider these three key areas.

Goals: What is your overarching purpose?

Defining the goals of your marketing strategy is vital to planning campaigns. For
example, if you are a new business, your goal may be to increase brand awareness.
Once established, your focus may shift to claiming a higher percentage of market
share. Your marketing goals may change year to year, which will inform the
campaigns you build.

Metrics: What are the milestones you expect to hit?

Define clear metrics to track your progress toward your goals. For example, if you
are working to increase brand awareness, your metrics may include target
numbers for website visits, conversions, and lead scores.

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 Parameters: What type of campaign is this — email, event, ads? How much will it
cost? What naming conventions will we use?
Parameters help you outline the details of your campaigns. For example, if your
goal is brand awareness, campaign types could include paid ads on social media
and emails with promotional offers. Depending on your audience segment, one
campaign type may be more valuable than the other, in which case your cost
should be adjusted accordingly.

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GOAL METRICS PARAMETERS

Campaign Type: Promo Email
Lead Scores Cost: $200

Campaign Type: Video

Cost: $350
Increase
Brand
Awareness
Campaign Type: Paid Ad
Cost: $500
Site Visitors
and Conversions Campaign Type: Social
Cost: $100

Building Your Campaign

In the building stage, shift your focus to tangible components that need to be
created in your Salesforce org. Here are some tips.

Align campaigns with your marketing process to simplify reporting: To get the
most out of standard reports, think about how your marketing process plays out in
real life, and design you campaigns in a way that follows that flow. Keep your
campaign structure simple and your reporting will be simple to follow, too.

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 Use consistent naming conventions: Document your naming conventions so that
all your colleagues who use campaigns or other marketing assets will be
organizing content consistently. Keep them detailed and short.
For example, when applied to a specific campaign, this naming convention
Department | Name/Title Campaign Type | Audience | Date
becomes
Legal | GDPR Compliance Webinar | Clients | May 2018
Your taxonomy may include region, language, or industry, or other components.

Create campaign templates: Creating a campaign is easy, but your account can
get cluttered and confusing if multiple users are all creating their own campaigns
inconsistently. Streamline your campaign creation process by building common
record types to use as templates, and clone them as needed. For example, if you
send out monthly newsletters, you may have a Monthly Newsletter parent and
child campaign templates, with the budgeted cost and other relevant fields
pre-populated.
These templates can then be used multiple times by any user with the permission
to create campaigns.

Note: Optionally create parent and

child campaign record types. Child
campaign records will include
Budgeted Cost, Revenue, and Actual
Cost fields that roll up into your
campaign hierarchy.

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 Align Sales and Marketing team processes: Finally, secure end-to-end
accountability by building a clear connection between marketing and sales
processes. By using campaigns and campaign members, you will automatically
track lead engagement, but you also want to understand how that engagement
impacts purchasing decisions. For that to happen, your campaign members have
to become contact roles on opportunities. This allows you to to track campaign
influence.

Campaign Contact
Campaign Opportunity
Member Role

ROI

Defined by Defined by
Contains Cost Contains Value
Marketing Sales

You may also want to build a feedback loop with your sales team to confirm that
hot leads are contacted fast. For example, you may build an automation that
creates a task for the appropriate Sales rep when a campaign member status is
“Attended an Event.”

Now that we have a loose process for getting started with campaigns, let's take a
closer look at campaign hierarchies, campaign members and member statuses.

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 Campaign Hierarchies
Just like your marketing strategy, your campaigns are multi-faceted. You may have
long-term projects that encompass many smaller marketing initiatives. Campaign
hierarchies let you track both at the same time while gaining insight into how they
relate to each other.

Setting the Stage with Hierarchies

Campaign Hierarchy analyzes the health and performance of related campaigns,

grouped together by goal or initiative. A simple example is a parent campaign
record for “Monthly Newsletter, and child campaigns for “June Newsletter,” “July
Newsletter,” and so on. Budgeted Cost, Revenue, and Actual Cost fields in child
campaigns roll up into your campaign hierarchy for reporting.

Say you have a new business seeking to boost brand awareness through multiple
initiatives, and paid ads are the primary engagement channel. In Salesforce, you’d
create a new campaign called Paid Ads, with a budgeted cost of $1,000. “Paid
Ads” is ambiguous. Are you advertising on Facebook? LinkedIn? Maybe both?
These different channels could have different costs and yield different results. In
order to keep track of it all, the marketing team will create two additional
campaigns: Facebook Ads and LinkedIn Ads.

Hierarchies in Action

Now that the campaigns are created, how does the marketing team show the
relationship between them?

Using hierarchies, the “Paid Ads” campaign would be the Parent campaign, with
Child campaigns for “Facebook Ads” and “LinkedIn Ads” rolling up to it. In this
case, that $1,000 allocated to “Paid Ads” can be divided across the two child
campaigns.

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 When it's time to report on either or both of the Child campaigns, the Parent
report will include a roll-up performance summary.

While the Paid Ads example describes a hierarchy with two tiers, you can create
complex hierarchies up to five tiers. You will see Grandparent and even
Great-Grandparent campaign tiers mentioned in this guide. While those terms are
useful for clarifying as you learn, know that in Salesforce you will not see
grandparent terminology. You will only see 'Parent' and 'Child' campaigns. Here
are a few more sample use cases for hierarchies.

Sample #1: Group by Product/Service

Product / Service

Great-Grandparent

2019 2020
Grandparent Grandparent

AMER EMEA AMER EMEA

Parent Parent Parent Parent

Emails Forms Emails Forms Emails Forms Emails Forms

Child Child Child Child Child Child Child Child

Each blue box in this visual represents a separate campaign record.

In this case, the hierarchy divides marketing efforts by product or service. This is
helpful if you span multiple regions and would like to track the different products
or services that you offer. Under this structure all of your individual marketing
assets and efforts appear under their region, then year, and finally the product or
service to which they relate. When reporting, you can isolate that product,
compare performance in AMER versus EMEA and note year-over-year trends.

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 Sample #2: Group by Event

2020

Grandparent

Trade Show Happy Hour

Parent Parent

Registration Registration
Promo Email Reminder Email
Landing Page Landing Page

Child Child Child Child

If your marketing efforts feature a large number of events, this simple three-tiered
hierarchy can work for you. Create campaigns for each year, then break your next
tier into specific event types, like webinars or trade shows. From there, get more
granular by building campaigns for each marketing effort that happens in support
of your events. Your reporting may yield insights into which events are most
successful and help you focus on marketing efforts with the most impact.

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 Sample #3: Group by Goal

Increase
Adoption
Grandparent

Nurture Educational
Program Resources
Parent Parent

Email #1 Email #2 White Paper Case Study

Child Child Child Child

Campaign hierarchies are also effective when you need to focus on broader
organizational goals. This hierarchy starts off with the specific goal of increasing
adoption, then dives into tactics, including an email journey and educational
content. Like the other samples, this hierarchy culminates in specific marketing
efforts, such as whitepapers or e-books. Reporting results for this campaign might
help pinpoint gaps or obstacles in your adoption journey and resources.

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 Campaign Members
Now you know how to begin creating and organizing your campaigns, but how do
we relate leads and contacts to those campaigns? By using a junction object called
Campaign Members!

Designating someone as a Campaign Member creates a relationship between a

campaign and the leads and contacts who interact with it.

When you add leads or contacts to a campaign, they’ll appear as campaign

members on the campaign record. If you navigate to a specific lead or contact
record, you will see a list of campaigns with which they are associated.

Campaign Member Statuses

Using Campaign members alone, you’ll know when a lead is associated with a
certain campaign, but not much more. That’s why you’ll want to define Campaign
Member Statuses. A status tells you exactly how a campaign member interacted
with your campaign.

Out of the box, every campaign in Salesforce only has two or three default
Campaign Member Statuses: Sent, Responded, and, for Pardot users on the
Salesforce Campaign model, a third status of Connected. Those default statuses
won’t make sense for every campaign, though.

Just like your sales team has different sales processes for different segments, so
should your marketing team outline a list of possible statuses for each campaign
type.

Let’s look at some examples.

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 For example, if you have campaigns where the goal is white paper downloads,
your statuses may look something like this:

As you add your leads, they would all start with the status of Not Sent. After
you've sent an email with a link to the downloadable resource, their campaign
member status will change to Sent. Finally, if they download the asset, their status
becomes Downloaded.

If you host in-person or virtual events, there are even more ways a prospect might
respond. Your custom campaign member statuses might include some of these:

In this example, campaign members start out with the same status of Not Sent.
When they receive their email invitation, they move to the Invited status.
If they choose to register for your event, their status will change to Registered.
Finally, after the event has occurred, they may go into the Attended or Did Not
Attend status. If they did not register or attend, their status would then be
Declined.'

In both examples, the default statuses of “Sent” and “Responded” don’t account
for all the possible way that leads and contacts might respond, so taking time to
brainstorm and create custom Campaign Member Statuses suited for every
campaign you create will help you see more specifics when preparing for and
reporting on your events.

Here are instructions for how to Create Custom Campaign Member Statuses.

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 Plan your campaign members statuses by using the steps below:

1. Consider the types of campaigns you most commonly utilize.

Campaign statuses will vary by campaign type. As seen in the examples, a
simple campaign to downloading a resource requires fewer steps by a lead
or contact, and thus needs fewer custom member statuses..

2. Outline every possible option.

Consider what could happen during this campaign. Is it a simple yes or no
proposition or are there more complex or varied outcomes? A prospect can
choose to either download or not, but in the event example, they may
register and attend, register and not attend, or simply decline.

3. Decide what “success” means for each campaign.

For each group of statuses, you have the option of designating Default and
Responded statuses. Every campaign member will start with the Default
status, such as Not Sent. The Responded status, on the other hand,
indicates a successful response for your campaign. What “success” means
will vary depending on the campaign. In the event campaign example, the
Responded status may be 'Attended' because attendance is the ultimate
goal of that campaign. The 'Responded' value rolls up to the 'Total
Responses' field on the Campaign object, allowing you to track overall
campaign success.

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 4. Stay consistent with naming conventions.
This is best practice for campaigns in general, but it is especially true for
statuses. Consider what naming conventions are already used in other
Campaign Member Statuses, and keep that terminology. Stay simple and
consistent. For example, don’t use “Invited” as a status in one campaign and
“Invite Sent” in another.

Recap: Why are Campaign Member Statuses important?

• Statuses tell you exactly what stage of your campaign a member is in.

• Statuses allow for better tracking of campaign performance and help you
spot stages where you may need to optimize your prospect experience.

• Statuses let you personalize communications. For example, if a campaign

member has a status of Registered, you’ll want to send them a different
message than the campaign members whose status is still Invited.

Snippets
As you plan for how to structure your campaigns, consider a feature on the
Salesforce Campaign Object that is just for Pardot users: Snippets.
Reuse your content with snippets to streamline how you create recurring
marketing assets for your campaigns and business as a whole. A snippet works
across assets related to a campaign, and can contain helpful strings like dates,
links, images, and logos. Snippets can be reused in emails, email templates, forms,
and landing pages.
Curious? Learn how to Reuse Content in Marketing Assets.

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 Reporting on Campaigns
One of the greatest benefits of using the Salesforce Campaigns object is the
increased reporting abilities you’ll unlock. Without campaigns, you report only on
the sales team’s accomplishments, not marketing.

That means you miss out on analyzing a huge factor in the buyer’s journey, and
your marketing team doesn’t get the recognition it deserves. Use campaigns to see
the full picture. You’ll improve alignment between sales and marketing, and you’ll
make smarter decisions about your marketing budget and overall strategy.

Here are a few ways that campaign reporting can increase productivity and drive
action.

Return on Investment (ROI)

Perhaps the most straightforward way to report on your overall campaign

performance is by looking at the percentage of return on investment. This
information is available via the Campaign ROI Analysis report. This report will
divide the total value of won opportunities by the total cost of your campaigns.

It’s important to indicate the cost for each campaign when you create the
campaign record. If the Actual Cost field is blank, the ROI report will be
incomplete and loses value as a benchmarking tool.

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 Customizable Campaign Influence and Attribution

Campaign ROI is helpful as an overview for campaign performance. Marketers

often want to see how campaigns affect revenue, too. Customizable Campaign
Influence allows your team to do just that.

Customizable Campaign Influence Reporting lets you design attribution models

that give credit to each campaign that helped bring in an opportunity. This gives
you a better idea of how each campaign affects revenue.

All Salesforce users who enable Campaign Influence reporting to get access to
more default campaign reports.

If you’re on a Plus or Advanced Edition of Pardot (formerly Pro or Ultimate), you

can also set up any of the three Pardot-specific Campaign Influence Attribution
Models: First Touch, Last Touch, and Even Distribution models.

For example, you may choose to distribute credit evenly across campaigns. In that
case, if a contact has interacted with five campaigns over the course of their
journey, the value of their won opportunity will be divided evenly by those five
campaigns. Let's say that value is $100K. With the Even Distribution model, each
campaign will be credited as influencing $20K of that total revenue.

Use those three out-of-the-box models as a starting point and then develop your
own models if your marketing goals require something more complex or
customized.

To learn more about Pardot's attribution models, check out the Pardot Campaign
Influence Models FAQ.

Note: Attribution models and Customizable Campaign Influence will only work if you are using
both Campaign Members and Contact Roles on your opportunities.

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 Engagement History

You may want to report on details of your campaigns, like how many people
registered through a form or how many times your new promotional email was
opened. Previously, you could only see those data points in Pardot or through a
view-only iframe in Salesforce; you couldn’t report on them in Salesforce.

With Engagement History, you can report on those details. You can also control
how and where your engagement metrics are shown and include engagement
metric fields on your Campaigns page layouts. You can add Engagement Related
lists right on the Lead and Contact pages, as well.

To learn about requirements and more, see the Help & Training article and check
out the Engagement History FAQ.

B2B Marketing Analytics (B2BMA)

Use B2B Marketing Analytics (B2BMA) to go beyond reporting and dive into
analytics. Included in Pardot Plus or Advanced Pardot editions or as an add-on,
B2BMA digs into multi-touch attribution using a pre-built dashboard.

The dashboard is populated by Pardot's attribution models and allows for deeper
exploration into how campaigns influence revenue, which channels are most
effective and how to learn and iterate on your successes in later campaigns.
Learn more about B2B Marketing Analytics.

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 Connected Campaigns
We have spent a lot of time talking about Salesforce campaigns. Where does
Pardot fit in? How do Connected Campaigns help you? If it’s not already set up in
your account, why should you enable it?

Quite simply, connecting campaigns between Salesforce and Pardot allows you to
have a continuous view of your prospects as they move from prospects in Pardot
to Salesforce leads, contacts, and opportunities. Ultimately, you can easily manage
and track your campaign performance from a single place — Salesforce.

What happens when you enable Connected Campaigns?

• Campaigns created in Salesforce will automatically sync to Pardot

• Campaign data will be available for use in reporting, including engagement

with marketing assets﹢

• Campaign Member Sync can sync campaign members to the appropriate

campaign with the status of Connected**

• Pardot will still capture the first-touch campaign for each prospect

• All the functionality of the Salesforce Campaign object is now at your

fingertips, including reporting, tracking status, understanding trends

* Connected Campaigns is enabled by default for customers whose accounts were provisioned
on or after March 22, 2019.

﹢
To use marketing asset data, enable Engagement History

** Note: The Connected status is default to all campaign members synced from Pardot based on
the prospects first-touch. You can keep those campaign member statuses up-to-date by using
automations to change the status as necessary. For example, use a Completion Action to change
status to Registered after a registration form has been completed.

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 Now that we understand the various functions of campaigns, let's look at how all
of it comes together with a sample use case.

Using the components of campaign management creates greater visibility into

performance every step of the way.

If many prospects attended the webinar in the example above, that’s an indication
that it’s a webinar worth repeating. If only a handful of prospects progressed to
the 'Downloaded' status for the white paper campaign, though, the document or
delivery format may need review.

Furthermore, your Sales team can now see which campaigns their leads and
contacts engaged with, and how that influenced revenue.

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 Running periodic reports on your campaigns helps inform future decisions.
Hierarchies can guide your reporting tactics and allow you to zoom in or out on
your data.

For example, if you divide campaigns by year, you can review overall campaign
performance year-over-year.

Alternatively, you can compare webinar performance to in-person events. If the

difference is minimal, you may opt to do fewer in-person events and more
webinars since they are less costly and require less planning.

Campaigns are a powerful, multi-faceted tool that can help you streamline and
clarify your marketing efforts. Share this guide to get your internal teams up to
speed, and start designing your campaign strategy!

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Resources
Recurring Webinar: How to Use Salesforce Campaigns

Connected Campaigns Implementation Guide

Pardot Campaign Influence Models FAQ

Things to Know About Campaigns

Snippets: Reuse Content in Marketing Assets