Tracking Ongoing Spend for Campaigns in Salesforce

Most B2B marketing professionals have used the Salesforce Campaign object. But if you’ve tried to reliably track marketing spend in a finance-friendly way using Salesforce campaigns, you’ve run into some fundamental limitations. Tracking ongoing campaign spend in marketing automation platforms HubSpot, Marketo, and Pardot is not possible — sadly, that’s why most teams end up in spreadsheets.

This post covers:

• Why you probably use Salesforce campaigns
• Why you shouldn’t bother tracking spend using Salesforce campaigns
• An easier, more finance-friendly way to track campaign spend

Why you probably use Salesforce campaigns

If you are in marketing or sales operations and have used Salesforce.com, you’ve probably used the Salesforce Campaign object. It has been around for a long time and it has been a long time since Salesforce has made any changes to it.

Still, there are several good reasons why demand generation-focused marketers at B2B companies use the Salesforce campaign object:

• It’s an easy place to track interactions with a campaign for a lead or contact
• Marketing tools like Hubspot, Marketo, and Pardot integrate and synchronize results pretty seamlessly
• Sales teams live in Salesforce and they need visibility around leads’ interactions with marketing
• One-off SDR outreach efforts can be tracked by adding leads and contacts as campaign members
• If you’re using a solution like QFlow.ai, all campaign interactions are contextualized in a time series-based data format — the easiest way to achieve unbiased, account-based, multi-touch attribution

Tracking spend using Salesforce campaigns is hard

Tracking campaign spend in Salesforce is neither intuitive nor built for how digital campaign spend occurs; i.e., on an ongoing basis.

Why does this matter? Most marketing teams run ongoing campaigns — not just one-off webinars and tradeshows. Finance teams expect marketing expenses to be tracked on a monthly basis, according to when expenses were incurred. As a result, most marketing teams scramble to track spend after the fact in Google Docs.

So, while you should sync your campaigns with Salesforce, Salesforce is not the right place to track campaign spend.

Introducing QFlow.ai Campaign Spend Tracking

Today, we’re introducing Campaign Spend Tracking, which intelligently distinguishes between one-time and ongoing campaigns, alerts campaign managers when spend tracking is missing, and unlocks powerful comparisons of spend and associated revenue over time.

This means fewer spreadsheets and less administrative work for our customers. Plus, for those running Google Ads, our Google Ads connector can automatically import your spend by campaign.

Campaign Spend Tracking is available today for customers on our Marketing and Business plans.

There’s a lot more to QFlow.ai. Find a time on our team calendar or start a free trial.