Are your trade shows starting to feel like a marketing guessing game?

In this video, Vidya Gordugula from Cloud Adoption Solutions pulls back the curtain on proving trade show ROI. Most organizations invest heavily in live events and capture plenty of leads, but because the actual opportunities are created weeks or even months later, they don’t know exactly how to attribute that revenue back to the event. Salesforce environments rarely stay static, and tracking a long, multi-touch customer journey across time can feel impossible without the right tools in place.

That delayed pipeline doesn’t have to stay hidden. Whether you are hitting a wall trying to prove your marketing spend or just want to ensure your platform is accurately capturing every touchpoint, this video provides the roadmap for configuring Salesforce Campaign Influence and auto-association rules to connect your events directly to closed revenue.

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Watch now to learn how to turn your trade shows from cost centers into measurable revenue drivers!

VIDEO TRANSCRIPT:

Hi, I’m Vidya, a Salesforce business analyst and administrator at Cloud Adoption Solutions. Today, I’m here to deep dive into Salesforce campaign influence and multi-touch attribution for events. Today, I’m going to show you how to configure and use campaign influence to ensure that your trade shows get credit for pipeline generated even weeks or months later.

Trade shows are one of the biggest investments for marketing and sales teams. We capture a lot of leads during the event, but the real challenge is that opportunities are often created weeks or even months later. Because of this delay, it becomes difficult to clearly attribute revenue back to the trade show. And that’s why there’s always a question about the ROI of these kinds of events.

This is where campaign influence in Salesforce comes in. Campaign influence allows us to attribute a percentage of revenue to campaigns that influenced an opportunity. It basically connects campaigns, contacts, and opportunities, thus giving us visibility into how marketing efforts contribute to pipeline and revenue.

In real-world scenarios, customers interact with multiple touchpoints before converting. Salesforce supports multi-touch attribution models to reflect this journey more accurately. For example, first touch assigns full credit to the initial interaction, last touch assigns credit to the final interaction, and even distribution spreads the credit across all campaigns. This gives a much more realistic view of how different campaigns contribute to revenue.

Now, looking at the configuration overview, let’s discuss how we can configure campaign influence. To properly use campaign influence, configuration is very critical. So first, we need to enable campaign influence in Salesforce and ensure the marketing user is enabled there. Then we select the attribution models, and we configure the association rules—and that’s how we finally associate it. I will be taking you into Salesforce to do a quick demo on how we can configure all these things.

The first thing we will be looking at is campaign influence settings. So, I’m in setup, then I just type “campaign,” and I am at campaign influence settings. We want to make sure that campaign influence is enabled over here. Then we hit the save button, and then let’s move on to the campaign influence models—the model settings.

So here we can see that we have the first touch model, the last touch model, and the default Salesforce model. These models basically help us determine how revenue is distributed across campaigns, whether it’s a first touch, last touch, or evenly distributed model. These models help us to rate a campaign and also assign a campaign influence.

The first touch basically focuses credit for the opportunity revenue on the campaign that acted as the touchpoint moving prospects through the awareness stage.

Moving on to the last touch—last touch focuses credit for the opportunity revenue on the campaign that moved prospects through the consideration and negotiation stages.

The even distribution model gives equal credit to all the campaigns that a prospect interacted with during the buying cycle.

So models are basically like first touch, last touch, and even distribution. Going a little bit more into detail on first touch: first touch assigns 100% of influence and revenue earned to the first campaign a prospect touches. Even if a prospect interacts with other marketing assets or activities, this model attributes all of the influence to the first touch. This model relies on the campaign member’s created date and is for Account Engagement users only.

Moving on to the last touch: this model assigns 100% of influence and revenue earned to the last campaign a prospect touches before a deal is closed. No matter what other campaigns the prospect has interacted with, this model attributes all influence to the final touchpoint.

Now moving on to even distribution: this model assigns an equal percentage of influence and revenue earned to every campaign a prospect touches. This model relies on the last modified date of the campaign member.

And let’s move on to looking at the auto-association settings, which is right here. Here is the place we actually define the auto-association settings or the rules, and here we define the attribution window. This is a very important step here, and this basically determines how far back Salesforce looks when associating campaigns to opportunities. This ensures the trade show gets credit even when the pipeline is generated weeks or months later.

We can look at a timeframe-based auto-association. Here, I have it set as 90 days, based on the time period that has passed between the influential marketing campaign and the won revenue. Campaign influence is really a subjective topic swayed by a number of factors, and time can be used as one of the determining factors here. Basically, if an opportunity is launched within the timeframe of a marketing campaign, we could reasonably assume that the campaign influenced the opportunity. For example, a campaign that the contact engaged with 30 days ago or less is influential, as opposed to one they engaged with over a year ago, as we can assume there would be other influences that pushed the deal over the line.

The tricky part comes when we have to set those time periods. How long after a campaign launch can marketing still influence new opportunities? With auto-association rules, on top of time-based association, you can filter it to only include campaigns with certain criteria. For example, you can set the value to be an event or a trade show. As a result, you can exclude certain campaigns that will not have auto-association rules applied as well.

Now, for all this to fall into place and for it to be visible on the opportunity, let me take you into an opportunity record here. But before that, we do want to make sure that we have campaign influence on the opportunity page layout. So, I’m going to go to the opportunity here and make sure that campaign influence is on the related list. Yes, I have campaign influence right over here, so we are good to go on that.

Now let’s look at the opportunity record. Here we have the opportunity name, the stage, the amount, and even the primary campaign source. This opportunity was basically created after the event, so it represents that delayed pipeline generation. A very important thing over here to note is the campaign influence related list right over here. If you look, this has the campaign name, the influence percentage, and also the revenue share. Here we see campaign influence in action. Salesforce has automatically associated the event campaign to this opportunity and assigned the influence.

The campaign influence that we see in action over here is how we directly connect the event to pipeline and revenue.

Finally, we want to be able to see all these things in our reports. We want all these numbers to be reflected so we can look at the ROI. So finally, just going on to the reports over here: using reports like “campaigns with influenced opportunities” or even a basic “campaigns with influences” report, we can visualize how much pipeline and revenue was driven by these trade shows by looking at these numbers here.

In summary, campaign influence and multi-touch attribution allow organizations to accurately measure the impact of trade shows. By properly configuring attribution models and auto-association rules, we can ensure that events receive credit for pipeline generated weeks or months later. This transforms trade shows from cost centers into measurable revenue drivers. And that is how we bring clarity to trade show ROI using Salesforce.

If you enjoyed this video, don’t forget to share and subscribe. And if you have any Salesforce needs or questions, feel free to reach out to us at Cloud Adoption Solutions. We’d love to connect with you. Thanks so much for watching!