Attribution Habit #4

Track your offline campaign activities with a

similar mindset to your online activities.

Most of what we have been talking about up to this point has been focused on tracking online activity. However, offline marketing efforts are just as important to track. In fact, you could argue they are more important to track as offline campaigns often cost a bit more from both a financial and human time perspective.

Our discussions have also centered more on tracking the channels that drove the online activity. Our focus changes to tracking offers as we look at the best ways to track offline campaigns, which are essentially offer campaigns.

You know what? This part may be easier to explain verbally…

If you don’t feel like watching that, here are the cliff notes:

• Offline campaigns are essentially the offers (They are the “destinations” in the map analogy.)
• Are there channels that drive activity to these offline offers? Yes, of course. However, because these offers take place in the real world or on someone else’s digital property, you don’t really have the ability to track them.
• What about things like trade shows and webinars? Are those channels or offers? Technically offers. We’ll dive into that in another email or video.
• What about the emails that promote events? If your event registration takes place on your own website or landing pages, the touches are actually online touches. In that case, the offer is the registration page. The event, however, is something additional. A person still has to show up at the webinar or visit the tradeshow booth (pre-Covid and hopefully again soon). Those touches are equally, if not more important, than the registration touchpoint.

So how do you track offline campaigns?

Campaign type

Campaign type is directly related to Channel and similar to the values in UTM_medium. This is a broad grouping, such as Event, Webinar, Direct Mail.

Campaign sub-type [Optional] 

This would be a narrower definition of the Campaign. For webinars, it could be Hosted or Third-Party. For events, the values might be Tradeshow or Hosted Event. Campaign Sub-type is related to Sub-channel and similar to the values in UTM_source.

Campaign name

A consistent campaign naming convention is important when you are reviewing and analyzing your reports. One attribution hack is to name your offline campaigns with the same value that you use in the value UTM_campaign when you promote it online. For example, if you would promote a webinar with the UTM_campaign=FY22Q1_AttributionWebinar, then name the campaign storing the attendees “FY22Q1_AttributionWebinar”

Members

As a general rule, store only the members that have an intentional interaction with the campaign. For example, if you invite 100 people to a private event and only 35 attend, then you only need to add the 35 people.

Member Status [Optional]

In the example event above, it is possible to track all 100 people if you have a way to designate status after the event - 35 Attended, 65 Did not attend. This is possible with Salesforce Campaign Member Status and Marketo Program Status. If you track campaign activity manually using a spreadsheet, simply include a column for status.