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What channels move journeys through a given stage?

Camela Thompson Updated by Camela Thompson

What channels move journeys through a given stage?

Marketing Channels moving through journeys Calibermind
What are Marketing Channels?

This is an excellent question because the market has different answers depending on the product you are using. "Channel" is used interchangeably across marketing automation platforms and CRMs as a campaign type, program, or channel. See this article for more details about channels.

In CaliberMind, a "Channel" refers to the UTM Medium related to the campaign touch or event.

Whether you're using CaliberMind's web tracker or your marketing automation platform's means of capturing UTM parameters upon a form fill, registration, or some other digital interaction, CaliberMind uses the captured data to associate UTM snippets to the event in CM Event. This makes it possible to filter down to a Campaign Type like Drift, Chat, Form Fill, or Webinar and view what the person clicked on to arrive at that action in attribution reports.

Examples of Channels in CaliberMind

  • Direct-Influence
  • Direct
  • Email
  • Paid Social
  • Paid Advertising
  • Display
  • Organic Search
  • Organic Social
  • Programmatic

The scenario for this use case -

I'm a digital marketer and under more pressure than ever to prove that my advertising campaigns target the right audience and drive them through the funnel. The problem is, I know it can take up to a year(!) between the time someone first views an ad and commits to a purchase.

I can't wait that long to prove that my campaigns are having an impact!

Fortunately, I heard that I can use pressure and trigger dashboards in CaliberMind to see if advertising platforms are having an impact at each stage of the buyer journey - which means I can optimize my platform spend to align with what is converting now - without waiting a year for the final result.

Which Dashboard Should I Use?

CaliberMind's Pressure Events Dashboard looks at the activities that happen between stages and elevates the activities that have the most impact. Check out this article for the details on this dashboard, including definitions for a Start Stage, End Stage, and Success.

We're going to run thorugh the same process we outline below, and would recommend especially inspecting:

  • Which channels are the most effective at driving awareness with accounts that are likely to convert into a qualified account? (Start Stage = first stage of your funnel, End Stage = account qualification stage)
  • What is most effective at generating qualified leads that later turn into pipeline? (Start Stage = account qualification stage
If you choose a stage lower in the funnel as your end stage, keep in mind the average amount of time it takes to move from start to end. For example, if your normal sales cycle from opportunity creation to closed-won is 6-9 months, choose to evaluate the start stage with a selected time range of at least 7 months in the past if your End Stage is "Customer." This will allow your data to be considered "complete" and give you a larger success pool / better analysis.

In the example below, we will look at which channels were the most useful moving a prospect from stage 04: SQA (CaliberMind's stage for or Meeting Set stage) and 07: Customer (CaliberMind's stage when the opportunity is closed-won in Salesforce) in the last 180 days.

The following filter will be used in this use case:

Date Range Select: Past 180 days

Start Stage Filter: 04: Sales Qualified Account - End Stage Filter: 07: Customer Closed-Won

Stage start and end filter
Top Channel Types Results in CaliberMind
Top 3 Channels Pressure Events CaliberMind
What were my top channels in the "winning" population?

The top three channels that were associated with accounts that moved from SQA/Meeting Set (CaliberMind's stage 4) to Customer (CaliberMInd's Stage 7) in the last 180 days, according to CaliberMind's data were:

  1. Paid Social - When Paid Social is a channel, we are 4.7 times more likely to be successful, and on average, it takes about 118 days from the first Paid-Social driven page visit until the prospect is Closed-Won.
  2. Direct-Revisit - When Direct-Revisit is a channel, we are 3x more likely to be successful, and on average, it takes about 84 days from the first Direct-Revisit page visit until the prospect is Closed-Won.
  3. Orangic Search - When Organic Search is a channel, we are 3x more likely to be successful, and on average, it takes about 123 days from the first organic search page visit until the prospect is Closed-Won.
What is Paid Social?
Paid social is an ad that runs on a social media platform such as LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, etc.
What is a Direct-Revisit?
A Direct-revisit is when someone directly puts a company URL into the browser to go to the site because they know the website and are returning to continue their research or discovery of products and services.
What is an Organic Search?
Organic Search is activity on a website because a person selects an organic search result query, or an unpaid search result, aka not Paid Search.
A different view of channel success within the journey
Channels Bubble Visualization Chart
  1. Click a blue value within a pivot table on the Pressure event dashboard
  2. A new window will open to show the Channels Bubble Visualization Chart
  3. Scroll to the bottom of the chart
  4. View the dataset for the channel portion of the Pressure Dashboard

Were you looking to learn which campaigns help move a journey forward through each stage? You may try the trigger dashboard overview and the pressure dashboard overview documentation for ideas about how to answer, "What's my customer's ideal journey?"

How did we do?

Funnels - Start Here!

Funnel Stages Configuration and Stage Definitions

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