For an Online Advertising Channel, do you create one program for every ad campaign you are running?

HI Nate,

For Online Advertising, you would create a program for every bucket of campaigns that you want to see rolled up in RCE together for pipeline and revenue. 

You can certainly create a Marketo program for every campaign you do on Linkedin for example but depending on what that looks like, it may be too granular and you would end up with a list of programs and a few members in each.  You will also want to break them out by cost per campaign by month.

The goal in RCE is to understand what's making money.  I like to ask what the primary dimension of data is your CMO interested in from a business standpoint.  Is it industry, is it by product line, is it by company size? 

You can always get to some of the other data via smart lists and smart campaigns, but what do you want to see line by line in RCE with pipeline that a Marketo Program generated. 

For example if you wanted to understand how much pipeline the following programs generated by industry you would build

Linkedin Industry A

LinkedIn Industry B

LinkedIn Industry C

Say you are promoting two white papers, per industry.  Do you want to know that Industry A white paper A generated X dollars compared to Industry B white paper B?  Whatever you want to separate out on a differing line showing a measure, let's say pipeline generated, then you want to separate that out by a different program.

If you want a roll up, you will have to do that via tags (i.e. make a tag for all linkedin, or tag by industry) or collapse the overall channel (i.e. report just on online advertisement.  You'll soon realize that that amount of granularity may not be what you want.