How to choose appropriate qualification rule in scoring campaigns

It really depends one two thigns.

1. What it is you're tracking
2. Your experience with tracking that particular event

Some things are clear cut with respect to number one. If you're registering people for a webcast, then you probably only want to track that twice, as people might accidentally register more than once. However, if it is a visit to a particuarly web page, you might very well want to score that every time.

Ultimately, as number 2 indicates, there's going to be a lot of trial and error. If you find that people build up their lead scores quickly based on multiple clicks on an email and that those are not even worthy of being "Marketing Qualified Leads" then you need to turn back the frequency.

Okay - that was my concern. I don't want to set it to every time and then realize leads are getting more points than they should (opening the same email 5 times, Registering Multiple Times, etc).

However, for example, what if I set "Register for a webinar" to ONLY ONCE...how would that work if I wanted "Joe Smith" to get points for registering for the "apple webinar", the "banana webinar", the "orange webinar", etc... wouldn't he only get points for registering for the 1st webinar? And wouldn't get points for the other webinars? Or would he get points for each unique webinar? How does that work? I'm under the impression that if i set the rule to RUN ONCE, Joe would only get points 1 time, regardless of if he registered for 5 DIFFERENT webinars.

Yes, Joe would only get points 1 time in your scenario.

In general you want demographic scoring campaigns to have the qualification rule "run through flow only once" and behavioral scoring campaigns set as "run through flow every time".  This assumes you have global scoring rules: you have one scoring campaign that covers EVERY webinar for example.

For demographic scoring, you only want to score leads once on their attributes because a CEO can't be a double CEO (except for this guy.)  To set the campaign run multiple times would result in inaccurate and inflated lead scores.

For behavioral scoring, you want a lead to be scored everytime the lead takes an action. For example, as you mentioned, if a lead signs up for 5 webinars you want to score all 5 registrations since the lead is clearly expressing interest in your product/company 5 unique times. Similarly, if a lead downloads 5 whitepapers from your website, you'd want to award points for all 5 downloads.  

If the scoring rule for webinars is global, meaning it covers every webinar, then you should score them "every time" or at least "once per day".

The best way to validate your scores is to look at high scoring leads your Sales team rejects to see if there is anything that was scored too many times.  You can always make refinements to your scoring model, and you should do this regularly.

Steven -

Thank you for clearing up my confusion!

What if the demographic scoring campaign is a BATCH campaign and set to "run once" -- i'm assuming i would need to set a recurrence on this campaign or else any new contacts WOULD NOT get scored?

Right, the campaign would only run once per lead, but would be scheduled to run nightly ("run once" is used twice on this page to mean different things.)

Ok thank you for your help!