Search for “campaign effectiveness” in Google, and you’ll see that a lot of people are asking what campaign effectiveness means and how to measure it:
It’s a question many people ask because the default metrics alone aren’t enough.
Relevant Campaign Metrics
Before diving into campaign effectiveness measurement, let’s review key metrics:
1. Name Acquisition
The most rudimentary CRM setup typically accommodates new name acquisition or leads created from a campaign. The most accessible variation involves setting up a form in a marketing automation platform that passes the latest contact information through a program that associates the person record with a campaign record and updates the lead source to the campaign type.
Pro Tips:
- Preserve existing Lead Source values
- Make Lead Source selection mandatory to avoid blanks
- Include Partner, Inside Sales, Field Sales, and Customer Success as Lead Source options
Significance:
Name acquisition metrics help track:
- Sources generating more prospects
- Database growth and awareness building
- Effectiveness of list purchases and sales prospecting
High Name Acquisition Campaigns:
- Trade shows (pre-2020)
- In-person events
- Online events
- Gated content
Note: While demo requests may not yield high-name acquisition, they’re still valuable. This illustrates why name acquisition shouldn’t be the sole metric for campaign evaluation.
2. Lead/Account Funnel
B2B marketers face challenges in aggregating account-level data due to the person-centric nature of CRM and marketing automation platforms.
Critical Stages in the Funnel:
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Marketing Qualified Account (MQA): Utilize customer data platforms to assign universal IDs and leverage machine learning for early opportunity identification.
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Marketing Accepted Lead (MAL): Represents contacts in your database that haven’t progressed further in the funnel.
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Marketing Qualified Lead (MQL): Contacts meeting specific criteria indicating sales-readiness. Effective sources include webinars, events, and demo requests.
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Sales Accepted Lead (SAL): Indicates when sales acknowledge a lead’s potential, often marked by a “Working” status or conversion to an opportunity.
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Inside Sales Meeting Set: For organizations with SDR teams, this stage helps align inside and field sales efforts.
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Sales Qualified Opportunity (SQO): Represents leads that have officially progressed to opportunity status.
Pro Tips:
- Avoid using the Lead object in your CRM for anything other than form fills
- Implement automated processes for deduplication and account matching
- Use caution when applying ICP criteria to MQLs to avoid inadvertently gating potential fits
- Establish a clear “Disqualified” status for genuinely unsuitable leads
Insight: While these metrics help evaluate campaign effectiveness, they are valuable for identifying workflow issues and team misalignments. Monitor conversion rates between stages to uncover potential areas for improvement in your sales and marketing processes.
3. Campaign Engagement
Engagement scoring can be tricky to aggregate at the campaign level and snapshot for a given point in time. Our data experts have figured it out, and we use it to gauge campaign interaction without bias for revenue. Because the engagement score isn’t weighted by deal size–just the engagement quality–we can determine whether a campaign generated much activity across accounts.
While many of us want data to be revenue-biased, this isn’t appropriate in the days or weeks after kicking off a campaign. We need to use earlier measurements to determine effectiveness.
We can also flip the axis and look at campaign engagement by account. If we wanted to see the buyer journey for a promising opportunity, this would be a great way to figure out how to replicate the journey for look-alike accounts.
4. Primary Campaign
Primary campaign attribution can be calculated in several ways:
- Most common: Last campaign on primary contact before opportunity creation
- Automatic calculation: Some tools calculate the last touch across the account
- Manual selection: The salesperson selects a campaign if not automatically appended
Caution: Be wary of “active status” dependent campaign selection, as it can lead to lost data if not adequately managed.
Best practice: Use thoughtfully constructed data rules to calculate the primary campaign passively. Consider whether to include partner and sales activity in your rules.
Pro Tip:
Consider implementing a time limit on campaigns. Recent interactions are more likely to be meaningful in generating opportunities.
What It Means:
Primary campaign attribution helps determine a campaign’s effectiveness in encouraging prospects to commit to the buying process.
Opportunity Source
Opportunity Source aims to identify which department generated an opportunity:
- Basic form: Sales teams indicate the sourcing department
- Complex form: Model analyzes account activities within a specific time window
Note: Opportunities often result from multiple departments working together.
What It Means:
Opportunity Source helps businesses assess departmental contributions. Goals may vary:
- Partner programs: Often aim for ⅓ distribution across marketing, sales, and partners
- Other cases: May target 50/50 marketing and sales split
Pro Tip:
If using Opportunity Source for compensation, be cautious of its accuracy, especially when relying on user entry.
Campaign Attribution Models
Single-Touch Models
Assume one pivotal activity generates an opportunity:
- First Touch: First campaign inspiring prospect interaction
- Last Touch: Final campaign interaction before opportunity creation
Multi-Touch Models
Acknowledge multiple touchpoints and distribute credit across them:
- Linear: Even weight across all interactions
- Time Decay: More recent interactions carry more weight
- W-Shaped: Emphasizes three key touchpoints
- U-Shaped: Emphasizes two key touchpoints
- Chain-Based: Uses machine learning to analyze winning journeys
Pro Tip:
Consider including partner and sales activities in your attribution model for a more comprehensive view of pipeline/revenue contribution.
What It Means:
- Single-point attribution: 100% credit to one touchpoint
- Multi-touch attribution: Splits credit to show the value of each touchpoint in the buyer’s journey
Campaign Effectiveness
Ideally, businesses have the technology necessary for a robust multi-touch attribution model that can incorporate both marketing, sales, and partner activity to determine contribution. This makes budget exercises and determining campaign ROI possible.
Even if a company has multi-touch attribution, there are times when additional campaign metrics are not only useful but necessary. Attribution takes time to accumulate, especially when sales cycles are long. Many of us need to stay on top of campaign ad performance well before opportunities are converted.
We’ll look at how CaliberMind uses our own technology to evaluate its effectiveness, and then we’ll look at another company’s use case.
Real-World Example 1
CaliberMind regularly creates guides for marketers; some are more effective than others. Sometimes, we like to dive into the weeds on an interesting (to us) topic when people just want to know how to identify engaged accounts or how to design an ICP model.
In this case, we released a guide on Chain-Based Insights, the next step in marketing analytics after Chain-Based Attribution. It highlighted use cases beyond simple attribution where people find value in Chain-Based logic, such as likely lost opportunities or the removal effect (calculating the opportunity cost of not doing a campaign).
To determine early campaign performance, we looked at:
- LinkedIn Cost Per Click
- LinkedIn Result Volume
- Landing Page Conversion
- Marketing Qualified Accounts
- Engagement
We compared these statistics to past guide campaigns that followed a similar playbook. We discovered two things:
- LinkedIn has changed its algorithms and campaign types. We selected Website Visits, and although we got a high volume of visits, very few people filled out the form. We should have chosen the Website Conversion campaign type.
- The accounts downloading the guide weren’t continuing to engage with our site. We had very few demo requests generated from this campaign.
Based on a hunch that people would find our Marketing Qualified Account discovery useful, we released the MQA vs. Traditional Lead Scoring guide. We looked at the same metrics over the same period:
- LinkedIn Cost Per Click
- LinkedIn Result Volume
- Landing Page Conversion
- Marketing Qualified Accounts
- Engagement
Landing Page Metrics:
Looking at First Touch:
Looking at Engagement stats side-by-side:
While we’d love to say there was a giant improvement between the two campaigns, we can only say we generated the same number of engaged accounts in a shorter timeframe. Page conversions increased and the bounce rate marginally decreased. Anecdotal feedback from sales was more positive. We shall see how multi-touch attribution numbers progress.
Real-World Example 2
A technology startup in Seattle selling advanced network analytics capabilities had a problem. They were attending a large volume of in-person events, but they weren’t sure the spending was justified. At an aggregate level, in-person events didn’t generate the same conversion rates as digital, and the anecdotal feedback from the sales team was that a portion of the events were a waste of time (wrong audience).
Unfortunately, people couldn’t agree on which events were not worth doing. The finance team pulled together a list of stats that included:
- Name Acquisition
- Marketing Qualified Leads
- Inside Sales Meetings Set
- Opportunities Created (Last Touch)
- Pipeline Created (Last Touch)
- Revenue Won (Last Touch)
A couple of the trade shows most loved by sales were amongst the worst in terms of revenue return.
To make sense of the conflicting information, Anna Mowry, VP of Finance & Operations at Igneous, developed a more comprehensive campaign review (to be clear, the company we’re referencing is not Igneous). She added multi-touch attribution statistics and met with the marketing and sales leadership teams every quarter to review the campaigns that looked the worst on paper.
Her new spreadsheet included:
- Name Acquisition
- MQL
- Meetings Set
- Opportunities Created (Last Touch)
- Pipeline Created (Last Touch)
- Revenue Won (Last Touch)
- Pipeline Created (Multi-Touch)
- Revenue Won (Multi-Touch)
- Anecdotal feedback
“From a financial perspective, I want to see a campaign is generating revenue–either directly or by influencing opportunities–before we sign up for it again next year. When only looking at primary campaigns, we had quite a bit of conflict between the anecdotal feedback we received from sales management and the numbers. Adding in influence helped us be more confident in whether or not a campaign made sense, and we could point to the results when a single person had a contrasting opinion.” — Anna Mowry, VP of Finance & Operations at Igneous
Finance found that some campaigns did have a greater impact on late funnel momentum (user groups in particular) and were able to justify continuing some of the spending. They were also equipped to push back on campaigns that had abysmal results across the board.
On Measuring Campaign Effectiveness
It’s helpful to think about where your campaign is most likely to move the needle (which stage in the buyer journey) and compare similar campaigns to gauge effectiveness. For example:
- Gated content and content syndication are likely to be first-touch or awareness campaigns
- Demo requests and in-person meetings are likely to be last-touch campaigns
- Some online and in-person events (like user groups) will be more geared towards late funnel or in-flight opportunities
Accordingly, you would expect:
- Awareness campaigns to perform well in terms of name acquisition and early influence
- Demo Requests to perform well with marketing qualified account and pipeline creation
- Late funnel activities to show a reasonable contribution to pipeline and revenue influence using Multi-touch Attribution
Measuring campaigns according to what they are intended to do is the smartest way to gauge effectiveness.
Have questions or need help? We’re here to answer your questions.
