What I have learned over the years is that it becomes really hard and un-scalable to make a new Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, or Google AdWords Program in Marketo for every instance of an advertisement of your content. Take for example EverString’s State of Predictive Marketing. I have that running in retargeting, search engine marketing, Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Nurturing, email list rentals, etc etc. That can quickly get out of control with the number of Programs you would need to build. Multiple that number against the number of new eBooks and reports and the volume of programs to build and keep track of quickly gets out of hand.
Instead I have built “bucket” programs for both the advertising channel and the piece of content. So for example the State of Predictive Marketing Report, if you download that report through an ad from Facebook you will belong to both the Content program AND the Facebook Master Program. To enable this method I created a Campaign Type in SFDC called “Content” and a Channel tag in Marketo called “Content”. Then whenever we publish a new report, ebook, case study, video, cheatsheet, etc, a program and corresponding SFDC campaign is built to track all the visits and downloads of that content.
Here is a screenshot of our folder for all our content pieces. All downloads across all channels are recorded in these programs. We can then easily run reports on total number downloads of a piece of content, pipeline sourced, pipeline influenced by the content. Previously, I had the content spread across 20+ different campaigns and I had a really hard time calculating how many times a piece had been viewed.
Then here is a screenshot of on of our the advertising bucket programs. The smart campaign to belong to this program listens for the URL of the landing page to contain Facebook in the query string. I just know that when I’m creating an ad on Facebook, the URL of the landing page needs to contain the UTM of “Facebook” and this smart campaign will react.
Here is a screenshot of my Google Adwords program. I clone these every quarter so that I can enter in new period costs based on how much we spent in that channel.
The UTM fields can get replaced time over time as a lead interacts with more content. The smart campaign inside the Marketo program listens for the different values in the UTM_campaign= xyz to give each piece of content and campaign credit.
So for example if the landing page is posted to facebook the value for UTM_campaign=Facebook. But if the landing page is posted to an external email campaign in MarketingProfs, the value will be “12-2-marketingprofs”. Examples of URLs I have in use:
http://pages.everstring.com/what-is-predictive-marketing.html?utm_campaign=12-2-marketingprofs
http://pages.everstring.com/what-is-predictive-marketing.html?utm_campaign=Facebook
The end result is that as a team we can track how content performs with multi-touch attribution and see if the content’s impact at different stages of our funnel.
How are you tracking content success across your channels and programs?