How to set up Salesforce campaigns to track event ROI?

TL;DR

If your Salesforce setup feels duct-taped together after every event - and your dashboard still shows 0 opps tied to a $60K booth - this guide is for you.

We’ll show you how to:

Works best for: RevOps, Demand Gen, Event Marketers, Marketing Ops leads, and AEs who are tired of guessing who they met at the booth.

The real cost of event chaos (and why campaigns matter)

You get back from an event. The team spent $70K on travel, booth, dinner sponsorship, speaking slot. Everyone says it was a “great event.” But now comes the real test:

• Where’s the attendee list?

• Did sales follow up?

• Did anything move to pipeline?

What you do have is:

• A badge scan spreadsheet buried in a shared drive

• AE notes scattered across Slack threads

• 3 different follow-up lists in Notion, HubSpot, and someone’s desktop

There’s no single source of truth. No opportunity links. And when the CFO asks what pipeline this drove, you’re stuck saying: "We had good conversations."

Events are expensive. If you can’t prove impact, they’ll be the first thing cut next quarter.

Salesforce campaigns are supposed to fix this - but most setups fail because they:

• Don’t tie campaigns to opps

• Don’t differentiate activations (e.g. booth vs. dinner)

• Don’t make it easy for sales to engage post-event

When set up right, campaigns:

• Capture every attendee interaction

• Attribute revenue accurately across stages

• Power dashboards that help you defend budget before anyone asks

Why Salesforce campaigns are essential for event ROI

After one major event, a Head of Marketing told us: "We spent $85K and followed up with only 40% of attendees. By the time we reached the rest, they’d gone cold."

Salesforce campaigns - when properly set up - can prevent this. They create a single structure to:

And if campaigns are visible to both Marketing and Sales, follow-up becomes coordinated instead of siloed.

How to configure Salesforce campaigns for event tracking

Before we talk setup, here’s why it matters:

Most AEs are flying blind after events. They don’t know who registered, who attended, or what happened. Your campaign structure should solve that.

1. Enable campaign record types and fields

Go to Setup > Object Manager > Campaign > Record Types > New Record Type

• Name it "Event"

• Separate it from "Email," "Webinar," etc.

Add custom fields:

• Event Date

• Event Location

• Total Event Cost

• Expected Attendees

These let you report on logistics, cost-per-lead, and ROI per event.

One Luminik customer used "Total Event Cost" to tie booth, travel, and dinner costs to opps - resulting in an exec-facing ROI dashboard they now review monthly.

2. Make sure the campaign object is visible to sales

Check permission sets. Ensure AEs can:

• View campaign records

• See member statuses

• View attribution on opps

Fix this once and your sales team won’t say: “Wait, they were at the event?” ever again.

Using campaign hierarchies to organize your events

If you lump everything under one campaign, you lose the ability to compare what worked.

Create a parent campaign for the full event (e.g. Money20/20 Europe 2025) and child campaigns for each activation:

This lets you:

• Compare performance by activation

• Track ROI per touchpoint

• Focus next year’s spend where it worked

A 2-day fintech event in Amsterdam? 80% of closed-won opps came from the dinner, not the booth. You don’t learn that without hierarchy.

Managing members and attendee statuses

Campaign members = anyone touched by the event
Statuses = how engaged they were

Don’t just track "attended." An AE needs to know if the person came to a dinner, a booth, or both - that affects how you follow up.

Importing leads and contacts into campaigns

This is where it breaks down for most teams.

Steps to do it right:

• Clean your data (remove duplicates, normalize job titles)

• Match leads to existing Salesforce records first

• Import as campaign members using Data Import Wizard

Tip: Domains like company.co vs company.com cause duplicate records and kill attribution. Use enrichment tools (like Clay, Apollo) to clean before upload.

Linking opportunities to measure pipeline impact

If opps aren’t linked to the campaign, there is no ROI - just a pile of "good convos."

Primary campaign source

• Set this when a campaign is the main driver of the opportunity

Campaign influence

• Captures every campaign that touched a contact tied to an opp

Real-world: A head of compliance attended your dinner and later filled a demo form. Primary source = demo campaign. But campaign influence shows the dinner contributed to the close. That insight saves future budget.

Building Salesforce reports that prove event ROI

You don’t need more “attendee numbers.” You need a report that lets you walk into the QBR and say: “This $50K event generated $480K in pipeline.”

Start with:

• Campaigns with Influenced Opportunities report type

Track:

• Campaign name

• Total cost

• Pipeline created

• Opportunities sourced

• Closed-won revenue

ROI formula:
(Pipeline - Cost) / Cost * 100

If you spent $40K and generated $400K in pipeline: 900% ROI. Now you’ve got a case to scale.

Key dashboard metrics:

Bonus: Add this dashboard to your leadership team’s Salesforce home screen.

Automating follow-up to avoid pipeline loss

Many teams collect clean data - then drop the ball in follow-up.

Set up flows or automation:

• When member status = "Attended," assign a follow-up task to AE within 24h

• Or enroll attendee into a tailored post-event Apollo/Outreach sequence

One Luminik customer used this method to book 9 meetings from a dinner list in 72 hours. Before, their average was 2–3.

Tools that help:

• Apollo: sequenced follow-up emails with event-specific hooks

• Outreach: multi-channel touchpoints with personalization

• HubSpot/Marketo: automated nurturing + Salesforce sync

Without automation, the AE who had a great dinner chat forgets to follow up… and you lose the deal to someone faster.

Where to go from here

If you:

• Run multiple events per year

• Spend more than $25K per event

• Have AEs doing post-event follow-up manually

...then a proper campaign structure is non-negotiable.

Checklist:

• Event record type + custom fields

• Campaign hierarchies by activation

• Member statuses defined and visible to Sales

• Tasks auto-assigned on key triggers (e.g. "Attended")

• Influence + primary source tracking in place

• Dashboards built to report pipeline + ROI

And if you're tired of doing this manually across Slack, Sheets, and your CRM - we built Luminik to help.

We take:

• Raw attendee lists

• Enrich + clean them

• Auto-match to your ICP

• Generate sequences + dashboards

So Sales follows up. And you can finally prove what worked.

Explore how Luminik helps

Frequently asked questions

What’s the difference between primary campaign source and campaign influence?

• Primary campaign source = the main campaign that created the opp

• Campaign influence = all campaigns that touched contacts on that opp

Use both. Execs care about multi-touch.

How long should I wait to measure event ROI?

• Week 1: track meetings + pipeline created

• Month 1–3: track revenue from closed-won

Start early or you’ll forget who came from where.

What’s the fastest way to track event ROI in Salesforce?

1. Create an Event campaign with cost + structure

2. Upload attendees with member statuses

3. Track opps with influence or primary source

4. Build a dashboard that tracks cost per opp

What’s a good follow-up sequence post-event?

• Email via Apollo/Outreach (mention the session or dinner)

• LinkedIn DM if they accepted your connection pre-event

• AE calls within 48h to warm leads

More here: Why slow event follow-ups kill conversions

Related reads

• How to calculate and communicate event ROI

• Why your event ROI falls short & how to fix it

• The real cost of bad event attribution

• How to prove event ROI to your CFO