James R Sullivan

This post is technical in nature and may be unreadable by non-Salesforce.com-admin people.

Salesforce.com campaigns get a bad reputation regarding their functionality. I think it’s partly to blame on how the reports don’t allow enough joins (campaign-lead-opportunity) reporting and partly to blame on how the CampaignMember record is not available for inclusion in customization and workflow.

One of my regular blog reads, Gokubi, has a post about how difficult it is to use the Campaign object. Here are a couple tips that we compiled for making your experience with Salesforce.com Campaigns more bearable:

1. Look at campaign member details from within the campaign using a report:

Create this report:
Type: Campaigns > Campaigns with Leads (or contacts)
Filter: All Campaigns, and CampaignId equals “abcd”

Save the report in a folder that everyone can see (or at least marketing). You can override the report filters via the query-string. Here is my report URL:
https://na1.salesforce.com/00O60000001BzAf

Now, if you want to override a value in the filters, append this to the URL:

https://na1.salesforce.com/00O60000001BzAf?pv0={Campaign.Id}

The value to the right of “?pv0=” will be inserted into the first filter. If you take the URL you just made and use it as a custom link on a Campaign, you automatically have a campaign-specific report where you can drill into some information directly from the campaign detail screen.