I’m not an expert in Salesforce.com reporting, but my personal experience is that reporting around Campaigns is limited because custom fields are not available. I’m pretty sure you can get the reports you want with BI solutions like GoodData, but that may be an overkill for your needs.

Great post on a really hot topic… We all have embraced Marketing Automation, but now what? We need analytics to figure out the real ROI of it. Thanks for raising questions and bringing some nice idea to overcome them.

I have actually posted last week a challenge on my blog about fixing Salesforce reporting with Marketing Automation. I was asking how to be able to measure, on a per campaign basis teh different “level” of leads from inquiry to Sales-Ready Leads. I also asked about attribution, as you describe it, but based on responses I got so far, I guess I will stick to the first challenge and then look at attribution…
http://blog.apelletier.com/2010/02/fixing-salesforce-campaigns-reporting/

Thanks for your post, I’m always available to discuss it! ;-)

Daniel, I agree. A starting point is to come up with a hypothesis and finding the data to support it. Most people look at pre-built reports and are totally overwhelmed because they don’t know what they’re looking for.

What we sometimes fail to consider is that analytics and marketing automation can only give you raw data. The real tough job is interpreting that data and coming up with the action that needs to be taken.

So to add to your list of challenges, I would say is the effective analysis of the reports generated by the system you use. And in a lot of cases it requires some judgment calls and discussion with the sales folks as to what really happened during the sales cycle that facilitated the closing of the deal.

As for Google providing more of a Marketing Analytics package, I think that’s the direction they will inevitably take. Would love to have a robust yet free solution! :)

Also, many marketers would say, wait! Don’t tell me sales are down because my efforts were fruitless, it’s the economy! As a statistician I would reply, we’ll see about that and run some models of economic indicators against sales to see how much of a factor can the economy affect sales and how much are the marketing efforts.

Anyhow, you’re making very good points. Data collection with Google Analytics is indeed easy, but not yet so easy for marketing data. And if terms like “lead” and “opportunity” would be better defined, it would also be easier to have pre-built reports.

1)People don’t pay attention to their data. Capture the wrong data or worse still – don’t understand what your capturing. How can you measure things you don’t understand? How many times have you heard people say “we got 10,000 leads!” when they could answer the question “what is a lead?” Backo ffice terms like revenue, shipment, etc are well defined. Front office terms like “lead” “opportunity” “dead account” need to be equally well defined if they are to be measured.

2)Failing to apply Occam’s Razor. Sometimes marketing is complex. Sometime its simple. Either way, your measurement needs to reflect the inherent complexity of the problem – not overly simplistic nor more complex that needed.
3)Using measurement to sell the value of marketing rather than to gain insight into the process. Market has long been criticized as difficult to measure. Don’t take this to mean marketing is not appreciated – the simple fact that market exists in spite of good measurement would seem to refute this. Use measurement to drive insight into a complex process – not as a way to justify more marketing spend. The money will come when the impact is understood.

nice post interesting topic. My feeling is that the huge difference you’re talking about in marketing and Google Analytics is that GA is not only your analytics tool, it is also your data source. You don’t hook up Google Analytics to your web usage database, you don’t load your logfile into Google Analytics – you let them collect the data as part of the page laod themselfs. This is the huge difference that makes the product simple to use – they can take care of data quality and making sense of the data.

Thus, the game for the whole marketing field is “find data providers and integrate them as best as possible”. As Sam mentioned we at GoodData are working towards some of those integrations ourselves – and with time other companies & individuals will pick up the challenge, too.