This is the second in a two part series regarding how to accurately measure the success of inbound marketing in Salesforce. If you missed part 1, you can check it out here.

So, it’s time to unveil our recommended approach for accurately capturing detailed source information for all of your inbound leads. We’ve developed this approach to effectively measure the initial lead source for all new leads, however the approach I’m about to share is not designed to capture multi-touch attribution either before or after conversion…that’s a topic for another day. This approach though will allow you to optimize your investment between and within your inbound marketing tactics to invest your dollars in the specific media placements that are driving your best leads.

What Data to Collect

For accurate lead sourcing, we recommend using 6 custom fields within your Marketing Automation Platform and within Salesforce. These 6 fields break out into two groups:

Source Fields: we follow the Google Analytics convention for capturing detailed source information. This includes using UTM_Medium, UTM_Source, UTM_Campaign, UTM_Content and UTM_Term. These 5 fields allow you to drill-up and drill-down in your data to get an incredible level of detail. Most marketers are already using Google Analytics so tagging your URLs with these values is pretty commonplace. If you aren’t familiar with UTMs, check this out.

Conversion Type Field: we distinguish this from Source for a reason. And, unfortunately many marketers we’ve found typically collapse the conversion type with the source data. So, some of their sources are paid search or banners and others are whitepaper or webinars. We consider the source to be the path the person used to get to the website or where the lead was captured (including organic, direct type in, and referral in addition to paid media sources or off-line sources like tradeshows). Conversion type is what got the person to convert on your website. Conversion type should be the call-to-action that they responded to that made them fill-out a form. These include things like a whitepaper, webinar, request a demo or even a phone call or chat.

How to Capture Accurate Data

As we discussed in Part 1, many of the marketing automation platforms recommend hard-coding values into your forms or writing logic that assigns leads from a particular form to a Lead Source and Salesforce Campaign. We’ve found that this works when capturing “Conversion Type”, but not for capturing the detailed source fields.

Every form should be connected to only one conversion type, like a whitepaper or request a demo. So, it makes sense for that value to be directly linked to what form they filled out. When capturing the conversion type you don’t really care what source they came from, you just want to know what asset was it that made them get over the hump and give you their contact info. This can be used to optimize which offers/CTAs are driving the highest engagement, and also to measure which types of leads convert through the sales funnel the best.

Capturing detailed source information is a bit trickier. The goal here is to capture what source brought the visitor to the website on their first visit, and this isn’t always the visit that they end up filling-out a form. With some customization both Pardot and Marketo have the ability to capture the UTM values of a visitor if they fill-out a form on their first visit on the page they land on, unfortunately for most companies that happens less-often than the person coming back for multiple visits or converting on a page other than what they landed on. Natively Eloqua doesn’t do even this level of source capture. Pardot does use a cookie and can store source information on a visitor even if they navigate around the site much like Google Analytics. Marketo unfortunately only can capture these UTM values if the person never leaves the landing page.

For reference we’ve built our own custom JavaScript tag that allows us to store these values regardless of which marketing automation platform is in use. And, we can apply other logic to assign proper source credit. If you are interested in licensing our JavaScript tag, please contact us here.

The ideal scenario is that the 5 UTM fields along with the conversion type information are captured in hidden form fields on the website. Then those hidden field values get pushed into Salesforce along with the leads personal information. This then ensures that whatever happens to the lead in Salesforce the detailed source and conversion type information is present.

Some Additional Recommendations

Once the detailed source and conversion type info are stored on the lead, we recommend a few things to make sure the values are present in all of your Salesforce reporting.

1.) Make sure to convert Leads into Opportunities. Salesforce will maintain the lead information on the Opportunity only if the lead is actually converted into the Opportunity. If your process includes converting leads to Contacts, then later creating Opportunities from the Contact or Account that attribution will be lost.

2.) Create field mapping in Salesforce pulling the Source and Conversion Type information from the Lead Record to the Opportunity Record. This is helpful, so that when you pull Opportunity Reports in Salesforce these values are present in your report. Otherwise you’ll have to only pull Leads with Converted Opportunities reports.

We also recommend using the UTM fields for all list uploads. So, if you go to a trade show or buy a list make sure to include values in these fields with all of the details from the show or list. This will help make sure that all leads that get into Salesforce have a value. Also, work with your sales and channel team to get them to use Lead Source and/or your UTM values to capture the details of the leads they source as well. Null Source values for leads are a bad thing. Try to get a source on everything, otherwise you can’t be sure if something is broken.

The Benefits of This Type of Reporting

Having the originating source for every lead gives you the insights you need to properly optimize your marketing investment. And, having granular source details means that you can optimize those activities both at the Tactic (or Medium) level, but also down to specific placements/keywords within those tactics. This insight can make your marketing investment much more effective and produce huge improvements in results from your inbound marketing.

Let us know what you think, and/or if you have any questions in the comments. Thanks for reading!