Picture this:
Somewhere in corporate America, a marketing team within a large company in the life sciences research space had finally brought marketing automation on board.
And their brilliant Admin (Shawn Heuchan) had configured Closed Loop Reporting, so that the team's fearless leader could easily track and compare campaign efficacy across type, business unit and buyer journey stage to optimize and target campaign efforts.
But wait!
All was not well with the Campaign Revenue Analysis report... the Influenced and Attributed ROI columns were plagued by out-of-whack percentages that stole some of the shine away from the Total Influenced and Attributed Revenue results.
The culprit: campaigns with an Actual Cost of $1 or $0.
What to do?
The solution was clear to all: standardize and assign values to campaign elements, ensuring cost parity no matter what the campaign type or business unit might be.
Some values were easy to calculate: webinars always cost a certain amount; events always have a defined budget.
Less easy: the decision around whether to include campaign elements developed internally, and what values to assign.
Verdict: The marketing team sometimes outsources production of campaign elements (emails, landing pages) to sub-contracted vendors. The team also sometimes outsources production of campaign content (flyers, PPTs, brochures). Because vendor-produced campaign elements would be included in campaign cost, internally-produced campaign elements should also be included. Cost for internal elements was calculated based on a combination of typical time needed to produce each element, using a per-hour rate based on comparable vendor charges.
Result?
Closed Loop Reporting the way it was meant to be, with nary a 1,000,000% Attributed ROI value in sight.