Campaign hierarchy
A campaign hierarchy is the structure that lets spend and response roll up consistently, programme to campaign to tactic to asset, so reporting aggregates without manual mapping.
Without a hierarchy, campaigns are a flat list of names invented by whoever created them, and every roll-up requires a spreadsheet that maps names to categories. That spreadsheet is where reporting goes to die: it is maintained by one person, it is never complete, and it silently changes the shape of history each time it is edited.
A working hierarchy fixes the levels, mandates a naming convention enforced at creation rather than audited later, and requires cost at the level where cost is actually incurred. Those three constraints are what make channel efficiency comparable across quarters.
Where it breaks
Campaign names are free text, so channel-level spend efficiency is reconstructed by hand every quarter and never matches the last version.
Related terms
- Attribution
- Attribution is the rule set that assigns credit for revenue to prior touchpoints, a definitional choice, not a measurement you can discover.
- UTM governance
- UTM governance is the enforced convention for tagging inbound links so that traffic source resolves to one value rather than to a family of near-duplicates.
- Metric definition
- A metric definition is the governed specification of a measure, its formula, source fields, filters, grain, owner and known limitations.
- Sourced vs. influenced pipeline
- Sourced pipeline credits the origin of an opportunity to a single first cause; influenced pipeline credits every qualifying touch, so the two must never be summed.
Field notes on this
- The MQL debate needs an acceptance record
A recorded acceptance decision makes lead-quality disputes inspectable. It is a signal, not a complete diagnosis of demand performance.