What Exactly is 'Source,' Anyway?

Part 2 of a series about marketing attribution and analytics
Link to Part 1: Thinking Critically About Lead Source

Introduction

Part 1 discussed some of the basics behind using a ‘lead source’ field to get useful information: that it shouldn’t change, how to define and track conversion metrics, and distinguishing between the source of a person and the source of an opportunity.

This second installment covers different ways to categorize ‘source.’

‘Source’ By Any Other Name

There are a variety of ways that source can be tracked; here are some distinctions that we think are worth paying attention to.

Person vs Account

The value of account-level metrics differs from organization to organization, but we think looking at Account source as well as person source is useful for many of our clients. Specifically, it provides a reporting mechanism for determining the original point of awareness/engagement for the entity making a purchasing decision (the single account).

Example:

If a paid digital campaign brings in a net new account, it’s common for the person sources at that account to look something like (in chronological order):

1. Paid digital campaign - first person who engaged at the prospect account is linked to the ad campaign
   
   
2. Inbound ‘contact us’ request - a different colleague who reached out to follow up with a question
   
   
3. Outbound - another person included on email thread & added to database manually

Looking at person acquisition it looks as though three channels each sourced one potential client; the real story is a digital campaign creating interest at the Account which drives internal interest across multiple subsequent channels. Capturing source per person can still be a useful standalone metric and is a requirement for capturing Account source consistently (which is determined based on the first contact associated with the Account). That said, tracking first touch at the Account level will provide better reporting on how marketing efforts (paid digital ad) create pipeline than strictly using a per-person reporting strategy.

Channel & Campaign

The simplest way to track source is via the biggest useful bucket you have—marketing channels. These might include:

• Inbound/Unknown
• Organic Social Media
• Digital Ad
• Event
• Referral/Word of Mouth
• ...Etc

These channels don’t change month-to-month or year-to-year, and Salesforce supplies a list of default ‘Lead Source’ values that correspond with various marketing channels.

The next level of detail is the specific Campaign source. This is generally (although not always) timebound, and best thought of as a specific initiative. These Campaigns look like:

• A specific event
• A digital ad campaign on a specific platform
• A referral program with a specific partner

Note that these examples are channel-specific; while you might use a parent Campaign to aggregate multi-channel initiatives, we recommend breaking these down into more specific child Campaigns for improved reporting.

We also generally recommend setting up Campaign(s) for something like a newsletter signup form or contact us form: your offerings that people can choose to engage with, tracked as part of your inbound channel if not otherwise attributed. Thinking about these points of engagement as campaigns will then let you start to look at conversion rates and other useful metrics: do people who first engaged via the newsletter signup convert later down the road?

“How Did You Hear About Us?”

The usefulness of this question starts to break down for organizations with long, multi-touch relationships with their clients—i.e., the kind of organization we typically work with! It assumes anyone filling out the form has not interacted with you before and causes reporting issues by either overwriting existing source data or creating discrepancies between what you’re tracking and what they said. That said, asking people what drove them to your organization is sometimes the only way to track something that’s important—earned media such as a feature in a prominent national publication, for example.

The two-pronged approach we suggest for this dilemma:

1. When asking ‘How did you hear about us’, be careful to only do so in the context that is limited to new prospects, such as a newsletter signup. A better question on something like a donation form (mix of new & returning donors) is “What inspired you to give today?”
   
   
2. Store answers in a separate, dedicated field such as “Self-reported source” to avoid corrupting existing data. Use automation and/or periodic manual review to determine how you’d like to categorize responses that match your standard source reporting strategy. This leaves the door open to collecting useful data while storing it in a separate place to keep source data quality consistent.

UTM Source Confusion

UTM Parameters are used by Google Analytics and other marketing tools to tie website visitors to specific marketing efforts using the following parameters:

• Medium
• Source
• Campaign
• Term
• Content

Both Google Analytics and marketing automation platforms such as Pardot or Marketo are able to parse these values and capture them in your database for engagement and attribution reporting. The issue is that utm_source is intended to be the specific website or origin of the traffic (Google, Facebook, Newsletter), while utm_medium more closely aligns to Salesforce’s default Lead Source values i.e., marketing channels.

Depending on how tightly your website tracking & CRM systems are integrated will determine how critical it is to worry about this distinction, but it’s important for anyone looking at reports in both places to understand the difference between the two. In general, we recommend ‘utm_source’-specific CRM Campaigns—for example: “2021 Paid Facebook New Prospect Acquisition”. This reduces the value of capturing ‘utm_source’ as a separate data point, although a future blog post might cover how and why to effectively capture utm values for robust reporting within a CRM...

Putting It All Together

You aren’t limited to a single ‘source’ datapoint; it’s certainly possible to capture all UTM fields, self-reported source, and other custom app-specific values. That said, we recommend starting with the two-tiered approach of channel & Campaign. Once you’ve nailed these two, you’ll be well-positioned to decide if and how to incorporate additional data points.

In this sample report below, we can see which marketing channels brought in the greatest number of leads (Purchase List) as well as how each specific Campaign within that channel performed using a stacked bar chart. Adding additional variables is certainly possible, but makes the reporting multi-dimensional and harder to view at a glance what’s performing well.