Quick Guide to Salesforce Reports and Dashboards for Campaigns

Reports and Dashboards are one of the first things that new Salesforce Admins (and users) learn to build – and they’re a relatively safe thing to practice with. As long as you’re not modifying someone else’s report or doing any record editing, you won’t actually be making changes to records. But in my years of working as a Salesforce Consultant, I’ve found there’s one area of reports and dashboards that people really struggle with: Campaigns and Campaign Member reports.

These reports can be really tricky to work with if you don’t know exactly what you’re doing. There are a lot of additional considerations to take into account that don’t happen with other report types. In this post, we’re going to talk about some of the most common issues that people have, outlining how to get started making reports and dashboards for Campaigns and Campaign Members.

Understanding the Objects

Before we can start building anything with Campaigns and Campaign Members, we have to understand what we’re working with. Campaigns and Campaign Members are two separate objects in Salesforce, and they’re also distinct from Leads and Contacts. 

Lead Record: A person record that houses information about an early stage prospect, like email, phone, company, source, and status

Contact Record: A person record that houses information about a qualified prospect or customer, like email, phone, company, source, and status. Typically related to an Account and/or an Opportunity.

Campaign Record: A record that houses information about a particular event, campaign, or other sales/marketing effort. Commonly tradeshows, list pulls, newsletter blasts, marketing forms, hosted marketing events, partner events, etc. 

Campaign Member: A record of a person’s activity within that given campaign. One Lead or Contact can be in multiple campaigns, with different statuses in each.

For Example: 

In this example, Purple Lead visited the booth at Dreamforce and filled out a form for a Whitepaper Download. Blue Contact did not attend Dreamforce but did fill out a form for the Whitepaper Download. 

The Lead/Contact records are independent and maintain their own Status and fields. But they are also linked under each campaign they participated in, and have a dedicated Status within that campaign.

Report Types

As there are four different objects we’re looking at here, there are a lot of report types we can work with. I’m going to go over the basic ones in this post:

1. Campaigns: Report on Campaign object and fields on the Campaign only.
2. Campaigns with Contacts: Only Campaigns with at least 1 Contact, fields from Campaign and Contact.
3. Campaigns with Leads: Only Campaigns that have at least 1 Lead, fields from Campaign and Lead,
4. Campaigns with Campaign Members: Only Campaigns that have at least 1 Campaign Member, fields from Campaign and Campaign Member.

#1 and #4 are the ones I use the most frequently and are all you need to start creating basic reports and dashboards.

Deciding What to Report On

Unfortunately, this is the hardest part of Campaign Reports. 

Nearly every person who has asked me to create these types of reports/dashboards has been unable to articulate exactly what they need. If a company pays money to have a booth at a tradeshow, they want to know if that investment was successful. 

The problem is – what exactly does success look like for that tradeshow booth? Is it the number of visitors? Is it the number of meetings generated? Is it the amount of pipeline generated in the months following that event? Also, which Campaign? A particular event or a group/type of campaign? 

When I pose these follow-up questions to marketing and sales leaders, the answer is usually, “Uhhh….. Yes, all of that.”

Whenever that happens, I start with a summary report that tells me:

• The name of the Campaign
• Total Number of Leads in that Campaign (unconverted)
• Total Number of converted Leads in that Campaign
• Total Number of Contacts in that Campaign
• Total Number of Opportunities in that Campaign
• Total Value of Opportunities in that Campaign
• Total Number of Won Opportunities in that Campaign
• Total Value of Won Opportunities in that Campaign

If that sounds like a lot of numbers, it is:

Just for you data lovers out there – for the most part, users hate this report, even though it shows exactly what they’re generally asking for. This is also another great example of a request that has been fulfilled, but the user is still unhappy. This report is not very interesting to look at, and it doesn’t tell us if any of these numbers met their plan or are “good” or not. 

It also does not tell us anything about the individual people within those campaigns. I see there are 21 people in the Dreamforce campaign, but how many of them actually signed up for a meeting? 

So let’s focus on just the Dreamforce event, and let’s use the other common report type: Campaigns with Campaign Members.

Now that we have two base reports prepared for this event, we can move on to the Dashboard using just these two source reports. You will need to find out what the goals were for this event. 

For example, the goal was to have 15 campaign members and at least 1 opportunity generated of at least $15K.

Using our first report, with just the raw numbers, we can create some numerical components:

We also want to include a component to display some details about what those campaign members did:

In addition, because most businesses have a goal of making money – not just potential money – we’re going to add a couple of components for actual Closed Won Revenue:

Finally, as there are plenty of people out there who do want that raw data, we add that information to the bottom of the dashboard as well:

The end result is a dashboard that will quickly answer most of the questions about whether a Campaign was successful or not.

Additional Components

This is by no means an exhaustive list of all the things you might need for a campaign dashboard, but these are just some of the most common additional items that I’ve had requested over the years:

• Campaign Members grouped by Lead Source
• Campaign Members grouped by Company Name
• Campaign Members grouped by Lead Status/Contact Status
• Details about the Opportunities generated (Stage, Close Date, Owner)
• Close/Win Rate for Opportunities
• All of this same data, but for multiple grouped campaigns, for example, all tradeshows for the entire year

Other Considerations

There are a couple of other things to keep in mind when you’re running Campaign reports. The most common question I get from new Admins is, “Why aren’t my Campaigns showing on this report?” The answer is almost always because they’re running a “Campaigns with Campaign Members” report type, and that particular Campaign doesn’t have any members. 

This is true for all Salesforce report types. Pay attention to that word “with” (Campaigns with Campaign Members, Campaigns with Leads, Accounts with Contacts). That word indicates that a record will only appear if it has at least one of the second objects, whatever that may be.

Another problem I see is over counting, especially if you run a report of multiple campaigns. Remember that people are capable of participating in more than one campaign/event. 

Here’s a good example: Let’s say my company did three tradeshows last year, and I want to report on how many people in total visited our booth at all three tradeshows. You might run a report like this:

Remember, though, that this is not taking into consideration people who may have attended more than one tradeshow. If we open up the details, we see this: 

Lauren Boyle and Josh Davis have both attended multiple tradeshows. In this situation, I prefer to do a unique count of email addresses to get the actual number of people.

Notice that the number of unique people is 20 – not 23. This might not be a big issue with actual tradeshows, but with things like email marketing campaigns and form fills, the numbers can become quite drastic.

Final Thoughts

Campaign Reports and Dashboards can be pretty confusing when you’re just getting started. There are so many small things that can easily go wrong or be forgotten or misunderstood. 

But by practicing and asking detailed questions about what the user needs to see, you will be able to give thorough and usable results to your Salesforce Users. I hope this post helped you get started with Campaign Reports and Dashboards!