One of the great features of Marketo Measure is its ability to measure the impact of events. As a matter of fact, that’s what attracted me to Marketo Measure when I saw the first demo back when it was still known as Bizible.
Years ago, I had been an Event Manager. During that time, I managed roughly 100 tradehsows per year, along with several events such as roadshows, customer appreciation events, and large summits. But, this was long before the invention of Marketo Measure, or other marketing attribution platforms. So, I never could tie my events back to any kind of opportunities or sales. So, when I saw Marketo Measure’s demo, and saw its ability to tie events back to opportunities and sales, I was hooked.
A couple years later, I was working with a client that had Marketo Engage and Cvent. And they wanted to be able to track their events with Marketo Measure. So, I had the opportunity to work through the process of outlining the best way to measure event performance with this particular tech stack. And now, we’re sharing those best practices with you.
Integrate Marketing Automation with Cvent
The first step is to integrate your marketing automation platform with Cvent. There is a native integration for both Marketo Engage and Hubspot to integrate with Cvent. I personally have experience with the Marketo Engage integration, but they should work similarly. Due to my familiarity and experience with the Marketo Engage integration, I’m going to focus on that one here, but the concepts should apply generally.
When you create this integration, there are two super important pieces that we have to enable.
- When a person registers through a Cvent form, that person’s record and registration information need to pass into the appropriate Marketo Engage Program with the appropriate Program Member Status
- When a person attends, no shows, or has some other type of status for that event, that person’s record and engagement need to pass into the appropriate Marketo Engage Program with the appropriate Program Member Status
With these two pieces in place, your next step is to sync these Program Members and their Program Member Statuses over to Salesforce Campaigns. This is the easy part, because you’re likely already doing this. This ensures that we can use the Salesforce Campaign Membership to create Marketo Measure Touchpoints.
Note: You can create Marketo Measure Touchpoints from the Marketo Program membership, but typically it’s better to create them from Salesforce Campaign Membership if possible
At this point, you’re now able to create Touchpoints in Marketo Measure based on how someone engages with the event… attends, attends a specific session, etc.
Enable the Marketo Measure Code Snippet in Cvent
This is the fun part. One thing that is super important to event managers is to understand where our event registrants come from. Are they coming from email? Social media? A paid ad? If your event manager wants to maximize attendance, they need to know where they get the most registrations from. So, when it comes to these events, we want to create a Marketo Measure Touchpoint when they fill out the registration form. In order to do that, we need to inject the Marketo Measure javascript into the Cvent environment. How you do that is through Code Snippets.
Code Snippets in Cvent are designed to allow you to inject tracking code into your registration pages for things like Google Analytics, Marketo Munchkin code, Facebook and LinkedIn tracking pixels, etc. The Marketo Measure javascript works the same as any of these other tracking scripts and can be loaded through the Code Snippet feature.
To do this, you first need to go into your Admin section inside Cvent. Inside your Admin section, you create your Code Snippet, and then add the Marketo Measure javascript to that Code Snippet. You can follow these instructions.
Once you’ve added the Code Snippet to the Admin section, you have the ability to load this onto your registration pages inside Cvent, but the work isn’t done yet.
Within Cvent, Code Snippets are not automatically applied to all registration pages. You have to manually apply them at the individual event level. So, when you create a new event in Cvent, and have a new registration page, you have to manually apply the Marketo Measure Code Snippet to that specific event. To do that, follow these instructions.
QA and Test
The last step here is the part where you validate that this is working properly. The best way to do this is to run a test registration through the registration page once you’ve enabled the Code Snippet. Once you run the test registration through the registration page, you’ll want to track down that record in Salesforce and check to see if you have the Touchpoint with the appropriate Channel, Subchannel and Form URL. If you see all of that correctly, then you have a successful test. If you don’t see all of that correctly, you may need to contact Cvent support to make sure that the Code Snippet is being loaded properly.
Note: When running tests, it’s important to note that Touchpoints are not created immediately… there can be a lag of an hour to a few hours before the Touchpoint resolves in Salesforce
Once you have a successful test, you’ll now be able to track everything from online registrations to offline attendance through as much automation as possible, and with the best tracking that is possible with Marketo Measure and Cvent.
A final quick note… this process above has been outlined for Cvent specifically, but other event platforms work in a very similar fashion. We’ve confirmed that both Rainfocus and Accelevents have similar functionality. While the specific details for how to enable this inside the platform are slightly different, the general concepts are the same. You have to inject the Marketo Measure javascript into the platform environment through a code snippet type of functionality.
