In a previous post, Report of the Day: Campaign Performance Summary, I showed you how to create a basic report to answer the question, “How are my campaigns performing?” Today, I want to show you how you can take that report and put it on steroids to look at campaign performance in different ways.

One way I like to look at campaign performance is by Campaign Type. I use Campaign Type as a logical grouping of different campaign tactics. You might have Campaign Type values of Contact Us, Direct Mail, Email, Inbound Inquiry, Online Advertising, Public Relations, Trade Show, Webinar, Web Site. You can think of these Campaign Types as relating directly to the Marketing lead source values that you’re using.
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One of the most basic questions most marketers have is: “How are my campaigns performing?” If you’re a Salesforce.com (SFDC) user, it’s really easy to create this report. The challenge for many organizations comes from not truly understanding campaign responses. In an earlier post, Leads vs. Responses 101, I discussed how to ensure that you are capturing all of your campaign responses in SFDC. Now that you feel confident that all of your campaign responses are recorded in SFDC, let’s turn to the report.
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In my work with clients, I’ll find marketers who are not familiar with the definition of a campaign response. A response is anyone who has responded to a campaign or accepted a call-to-action.

Examples include, someone who fills out a form on your web site, someone who visited your booth at a trade show, someone who registered for a webinar that you hosted with a third party vendor, someone who clicked on an ad and completed the registration form to access the content. A response is not someone who was sent an email or who opened an email, or someone who attended a conference, but did not visit your booth.
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Our sales guys stress the last 2 weeks of the quarter. My stress starts the first day after the end of the quarter. Ah the joys of marketing ROI reporting!

While I may weakly fuss about the work, I secretly enjoy it. Digging into program and web site data is one of my favorite things.

Over the last 5 quarters, we’ve really refined our marketing KPIs (key performance indicators) and use these ROI reports to make smart decisions about how we run our business. Case in point, while performing the 4Q08 analysis in January, I discovered that our white paper leads had dismal conversion into meetings/opportunities/deals compared to our webinar and web site leads.

We use a 2-tier direct sales model where nearly all leads get directed to an inside sales team for qualification. Their mission in life is to set appointments for the outside reps. We were just about to roll-out lead nurturing, so we decided to improve ISR productivity by funneling white paper leads straight to nurturing, bypassing the ISRs.
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