What is a campaign?

A Campaign in Salesforce represents a marketing initiative — a trade show, a webinar, an email blast, a paid ad campaign, a direct mail drop, or any other coordinated effort to generate interest. Campaigns are how Salesforce tracks which Leads and Contacts came from which marketing activity, attributes pipeline back to those activities, and measures ROI. Campaign membership is many-to-many: a person can be in many Campaigns, and a Campaign can include many people.

What’s on a Campaign record

The result fields (NumResponses, NumWonOpportunities, etc.) are automatically rolled up by Salesforce from Campaign Members and the linked Opportunities.

Campaign Members — the heart of the model

A Campaign Member (CampaignMember object) is the junction record linking a Lead or a Contact to a Campaign. Each row carries:

• CampaignId
• LeadId or ContactId (one of the two, not both)
• Status — picklist customizable per campaign (e.g., “Sent,” “Opened,” “Responded”)
• HasResponded — checkbox that defines what counts as a “response”
• FirstRespondedDate
• Custom fields per org

A Lead converted to a Contact has its Campaign Member rows migrated — the marketing attribution survives conversion.

Campaign hierarchy

Campaigns support a parent-child hierarchy (Campaign.ParentId is a self-lookup). This lets you group related campaigns:

2026 Annual Marketing Plan (parent)
├── Q1 Webinar Series
│   ├── Webinar 1
│   ├── Webinar 2
│   └── Webinar 3
├── Spring Trade Show Circuit
│   ├── Booth 1
│   └── Booth 2
└── Email Nurture
    ├── Welcome Drip
    └── Re-engagement

Roll-up fields on the parent campaign show totals across the whole hierarchy:

• HierarchyNumTotal, HierarchyAmountAllOpportunities, etc.

This is one of the few places in Salesforce with built-in hierarchy roll-ups (others use master-detail or DLRS).

Campaign Influence

Campaign Influence is the feature that attributes Opportunity revenue back to campaigns. There are two models:

1. Customizable Campaign Influence (modern) — allows multiple campaigns to influence one opportunity, each with a configurable influence percentage. Models can be created (first-touch, last-touch, even-split, custom).
2. Primary Campaign Source (older) — single field on Opportunity (Opportunity.CampaignId) for the primary campaign.

Most modern orgs use Customizable Campaign Influence for multi-touch attribution.

How marketing automations integrate

• Pardot / Marketing Cloud Account Engagement syncs prospects as Campaign Members
• Marketing Cloud maps email sends to Campaigns
• HubSpot, Marketo, Eloqua integrations all push Campaign Members in
• Salesforce Engage, High Velocity Sales, Cadence tools tie outreach to Campaigns

Permissions to use Campaigns

By default, Marketing User permission is required to create/edit Campaigns. Standard users can view Campaigns and add/edit Campaign Members but not modify the Campaign itself.

To give a user marketing permissions, check “Marketing User” on their User record AND ensure the profile has the corresponding access.

Common use cases

Reporting on Campaigns

Standard reports cover:

• Campaign ROI — Cost vs. won amount, returns
• Campaign Members — by Status across all leads/contacts in a campaign
• Campaigns with Influenced Opportunities — multi-touch attribution
• Campaigns by Type — performance by channel

Dashboards typically show pipeline-by-campaign, cost-per-lead, conversion rate.

Bottom line

Campaigns are the marketing-attribution backbone of Sales Cloud — they tag every Lead and Contact with the activity that produced them, support hierarchical groupings, roll up response and pipeline metrics automatically, and let you measure ROI across channels.

Verified against: Salesforce Help — Campaigns. Last reviewed 2026-05-17.