"Use the Source"

Of all lead fields, the lead source value gets the most amount of attention. As marketers we are trained to look to the lead source as the source of truth for ROI. However, this often gets overly complicated and at times philosophical. After all, leads are often associated to several campaigns prior to conversion and depending on who was involved in the campaigns, each party is looking to claim the credit for the converting source.

  

Depending on the final analysis, telling the full story isn't always so clear. I remember a marketing manager vehemently defending that most leads that converted were because of demos since converted leads had campaigns with the word demo showed up most often. Hmm...we do know that interested buyers tend to go to a demo as the last step before they are converted into an opportunity. Does that mean we should spend all our money on demos and that this is the source of all leads?

So here are my SFDC lead source values. Although it's only single source attribution, what I do give credit for is the originating source or the click from the place prior to the person being cookies on my site. Perhaps we will never truly know the origin of any source, however, it's a good start because it's the first time I've cookied this user. Even if this person leaves the site and comes back at a later point, the original referrer source does not change. For the form conversion, I use the campaign name. I've also tried multiple source fields (lead and web source), but the campaign seems to do the job for now.

If you are using SFGA (Salesforce for Google Adwords) there are a few lead sources that come with the package. The SFGA application will assign a majority of these values by cookie'ing the user on the initial visit to your website. It does a very good job in assigning the lead sources and you'll see these activities entered by the "License Manager" user. The only caveat is that it doesn't work in all cases. For instance, if you decide to send an email and use "Campaign" as a lead source, SFGA will look at referrer and select "Website Referral" as the source since the source was from your email blast source. This also happens for trade show lists. 

In Marketo, I add a rule to Change Data Value for the lead source in the flow preceded by a 5 minute wait step. This ensures license manager will give it the source, then the flow rule will come in after and change it vs. having it the other way around.