How to Properly Attribute Drift Success and ROI

My fellow marketers: the hype around conversational marketing (at least for B2B) has finally reached a fever pitch.

Consumers of all types are continually spoiled rotten by delightful digital experiences across Netflix, Amazon, Apple, and more.

And, at the very least, it’s up to us now as B2B marketers to pick up where the B2C brands have left off…

By now, you’ve probably (well… hopefully) encountered a delightful B2B chatbot that’s helped you:
a) answer a question, or
b) get in touch with a human while you were browsing online.

As form fills become less and less appealing, you’ve likely started to become somewhat curious about bots and are starting to notice the (dare I say, annoying) number of chatbots popping up across the web.

Today, we’re not going to talk about B2B homepage or ABM chatbot strategy (we’ll save that for another time)

However: we are going to address the elephant(s) in the room:

What’s your ROI on Conversational Marketing thus far (and how can you prove it?)
&
Which marketing channels/programs are driving email submissions & deals via Drift thus far? (and how can you prove it)

Table of Contents (so you can jump around)

• Prerequisites
  • CRM Setup
  • Marketing Automation Setup (not required, but highly recommended)
  • Drift Setup
  • UTM Guidelines
  • Attribution Setup
• Standard Drift Reports
  • Drift’s “Overview” Report
  • Drift’s “Pipeline” Report
  • Drift’s “Closed Won” Report
  • Drift’s “Sales Cycle” Report
• Custom CRM Reports
  • Drift Email Captures
  • Drift Email Captures by Source/Medium
  • Drift Email Captures by Source/Medium & Lifecycle Stage
  • Drift Email Submissions by Converting Medium & Associated Deals
  • Bonus: Drift “Assisted” Conversions

Pop quiz: which one sounds most like your org?:

1. You and your marketing team are all in on Conversational Marketing. You’ve purchased a few seats in our favorite conversational marketing platform (Drift), developed a couple of bots for your website and are eagerly waiting for the deals to start pouring in.OR
2. Someone on the team suffers from shiny object syndrome, bought a couple of seats in Drift, hastily set up a chat experience for the entire website and now, you’re just sitting there, realizing that deals aren’t just going to start magically pouring in.

Bonus: today’s guide should be super helpful for people in either camp 1 or 2! Everybody wins!

(if you’re closer to #2, drop us a line, we’d love to chat 😉 )

Without further ado. Let’s get “into the weeds”

Prerequisites

CRM Setup

Before we can even dream about answering the types of questions that keep your CMO up at night, we’ll have to make sure our CRM is set up to successfully receive attribution data so you can track which digital channels specifically your form submissions/leads came from (Google, Linkedin, Email, etc.). See here for a comprehensive overview of attribution and why you need it).

If you use Salesforce it’s as easy as clicking 1 button and installing the managed package we offer/include with all of our digital marketing retainers.

The gist of what the package does is:

1. It “creates” some custom fields on the main objects in your Salesforce (i.e. the Leads, Contacts, Accounts & Opportunities objects) that will receive data from a nifty, lightweight piece of code that lives in your tag management system (Google Tag Manager or the comparable equivalent) across your entire website.
2. It “maps” said custom fields across all Objects so the data stays in place as leads become contacts become customers.

If you don’t use Salesforce and are still operating out of spreadsheets: please unplug your magic jack and come join us in 2020.

Jokes aside:

If you aren’t using Salesforce, you’ll just have to go through the process of creating a handful of fields (14) and mapping them between objects.

Any internal Marketing Ops person or consultant worth their weight should be able to set this up in an afternoon.

You’ll also want to set up a Campaign for each playbook in your Drift instance.

Marketing Automation Setup (not required, but highly recommended)

What’s that you say? You’re using Salesforce AND a marketing automation platform? (Hubspot, Marketo, Pardot, Autopilot, Eloqua). Well, congratulations. Count yourself lucky. You should be able to set up all of the reports in this guide. Including the “referral” style reports where we can answer how Drift is “assisting” conversions.

You or your team will need to set up 2 things in your MAP and answer 1 important question to further track Drift Playbook effectiveness.

Setup:

1. A Custom Field: An additional custom field within your MAP and your CRM that Drift will be “stamping” which specific bot (“Playbook” in Drift’s parlance) captured an email.
2. A Page Tracking Script: so you can see all the webpages a contact visits when they’re on your site. This should happen automatically when you install your marketing automation platform’s code sitewide via a tag manager (GTM etc.) However, there are some platforms that don’t. ClickDimensions, I’m looking directly at you.

Drop us a line via email or chat if you have any questions on how to set this up for yourself.

Lastly, the important question: If you have a MAP, you’ll want to determine the data flow of how a lead is handled once they submit their email via Drift chat.

Do you want the lead to go from Drift > MAP > CRM or straight to your CRM (Drift > CRM)?

There are legitimate use cases for both scenarios.

However: we often recommend going with the Drift > MAP > CRM route

Drift Setup

1. Custom Fields: You’ll need to re-create the 15 fields mentioned above in the CRM + MAP Setup sections within Drift.
   
   
2. The Native Drift <> Salesforce/Hubspot Integration: so you can automatically transmit newly-created contacts from Drift to your MAP/CRM
   1. Mapped Fields

UTM Guidelines

We’ll also be assuming your team or agency has broad guidelines for tagging ANY and all URLs related to digital marketing activities. Whether they’re from Email, Social Posts or Paid Search Campaigns.

Examples of properly tagged URLs:

PPC:

/?utm_source=google&utm_medium=cpc&utm_campaign=brand&utm_term=digital%20marketing%20agency&utm_content=ad1

Linkedin:

/?utm_source=linkedin&utm_medium=paid%20social&utm_campaign=weekly%20update

Email:

/?utm_source=mailchimp&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=fall%20newsletter

Attribution Script Setup

We won’t be covering attribution modeling strategy or the pros/cons of each approach in this piece.

However, we will assume you’re working with a team or agency that has at least set up first and last touch attribution across your entire site (via GTM or some other tag management solution). This type of attribution enables you to track form submissions (and chats – which we’ll be getting to in a minute) and which digital channels they came from.

AKA:

• Organic
• PPC
• Paid Social
• Email

And more.

Lastly: on top of strict UTM guidelines for tracking traffic from Social, Google, Email and the like, you’ll need to do a bit of custom coding between your attribution solution and Drift’s API via Google Tag Manager.

*please note the screenshot of this code is meant for illustrative purposes. This syntax may not work exactly as depicted with other attribution solutions

Side Note: Standard Drift Reports

Ok, so: your CRM, MAP, Drift and Attribution solution are properly set up and all of your links are UTM tagged.

You might be asking yourself:

Why do I need to do all of this?
Can’t I just use the stock reports that live within Drift to track success?

The short answer is: YES.

The standard reports that Drift offers after you’ve set up the SFDC integration are pretty powerful. They can show you things like:

• Pipeline influenced by Drift
  
  
  
• Closed won deals sourced from Drift
  
  
  
• Sales cycle (in days) of deals sourced from Drift
  

However, this only answers part of the question.

To really understand which marketing channels + programs ultimately lead to those deals (aka everything that happened before that prospect decided to enter their contact information into Drift), you’ll need to get your attribution ducks in a row.

Custom CRM/MAP Reports

You’ve made it this far! Give yourself a pat on the back. Your attribution ducks are in a row, and you’re ready to start setting up some custom reports in your CRM + MAP to answer some pretty critical questions about your marketing channels + programs

• Drift Email Submissions by Converting Medium
  • Questions you can answer with this report
    • Where are Drift leads coming from? Which digital channels lead to the most Drift conversions?

  
  
  

• Drift Email Submissions by Converting Medium & Lifecycle Stage
  • Questions you can answer with this report
    • How qualified are Drift leads? How have Drift leads progressed through the sales cycle?

  
  
  

• Drift Email Submissions by Converting Medium & Associated Deals
  • Questions you can answer with this report
    • Where did Drift-sourced opportunities come from? What’s my ROI on Drift

  
  
  

• Bonus: Drift “Assisted” Conversions
  • Questions you can answer with this report: if you’re using Drift to drive traffic to other parts of your website (gated content landing pages, webinar sign ups, pricing pages, etc.)
    • Where did Drift drive a form submission?

  
  
  

That’s it! If there’s a report or a chatbot-related question we didn’t include in this piece, drop us a line!

Happy Drifting!