Are you receiving leads through Cognito Forms but lacking visibility into their traffic sources?
Similarly, when a lead becomes a customer, you’re left without insights into their originating channel.
Without clear tracking mechanisms, identifying your top-performing channels and measuring their contribution to leads, sales, and revenue becomes unclear. As a result, your marketing spend may be misallocated with no visibility on actual outcomes.
Fortunately, it’s simple to connect each lead and sale to the specific channel, campaign, keyword, and ad that brought them in.
Let’s break it into simple steps!
How to track the source of leads in Cognito Forms
Step 1: Add Leadsources in your website
Leadsources is a simple yet powerful tool for understanding the source of your leads. Once added to your website, it gathers up to 7 essential lead source data points for every new lead:
- Channel
- Source
- Campaign
- Term
- Content
- Landing page
- Landing page subfolder
➡️ Sign up to Leadsources.io for free
➡️ Add the Leadsources tracking code to your site
Step 2: Add the hidden fields in Cognito Forms
Hidden fields are invisible to users but store important details that are included when the form is submitted.
Leadsources employs hidden fields to store lead source information. As soon as the form is submitted, these fields are automatically filled with the lead source data.
Step 3: Send lead source data to your CRM (optional)
Your form builder can transfer lead source data directly into your CRM.
Track the origin of leads, sales, and revenue directly from your CRM system.
You can now connect marketing performance to actual sales success.
How does Leadsources work?
When someone visits your site, Leadsources retrieves the lead source data and fills it in the hidden fields in your Cognito Forms. After the form is submitted, this data, including the lead’s name and email, is transferred to Cognito Forms.
Leadsources gathers and tracks the source information for every lead:
| Lead source data | Fetched automatically |
| Channel | ✅ |
| Source | ✅ |
| Campaign | ✅ OR use UTM_campaign |
| Content | UTM_content parameter is required |
| Term | UTM_term parameter is required |
| Landing page | ✅ |
| Landing page subfolder | ✅ |
In instances where UTM parameters are not employed—such as with organic traffic from search engines like Google or when your website is mentioned in an article—Leadsources still captures essential lead source data, ensuring accurate lead tracking:
✅Channel
✅Source
✅Campaign
✅Landing page
✅Landing page subfolder
Unlike other platforms, Leadsources tracks lead sources across all marketing activities, both paid and organic.
Select a channel to check out the lead source data that Leadsources inserts into the fields of your form.
Performance reports: Lead, sales, and revenue by source
With lead source data in your CRM, you can create reports that reflect performance, such as:
- Leads, sales, and revenue by channel
- Leads, sales, and revenue by source
- Leads, sales, and revenue by campaign
- Leads, sales, and revenue by term (e.g. keyword or adset)
- Leads, sales, and revenue by content (e.g. ad)
- Leads, sales, and revenue by landing page
- Leads, sales, and revenue by landing page subfolder
This lets you reassign your marketing budget to focus on the channels, sources, campaigns, terms, content, etc., that generate the most leads, sales, and revenue.
Let’s discuss some of the reports you can create.
1. Lead source reports
Generate performance reports to measure the leads sourced from:
- Channel
- Source
- Campaign
- Term (e.g. keyword or adset)
- Content (e.g. ad)
- Landing page
- Landing page subfolder
Example #1: Leads by channel
This report illustrates which marketing channel produces the highest leads.
Example #2: Leads by campaign
Now, you can narrow your view to a particular lead source (e.g., Facebook ads) and track lead generation by campaign using the campaign’s UTM tracking information.
Example #3: Leads by keyword and ad
After identifying the campaign that delivers the most leads, you can analyze the exact keyword or ad responsible using the term or content UTM parameters.
2. Sales source reports
Once we’ve identified the lead sources—whether it’s a specific channel, campaign, term, or content—the next step is to analyze if these leads are converting into sales and revenue.
To proceed, direct your leads to your CRM. This allows you to identify where your sales and revenue are originating from, including the channels, sources, campaigns, terms, content, landing pages, and subfolders.
By reviewing this data, you can shift your marketing strategy to concentrate on the channels, sources, campaigns, keywords, and ads that bring in the most sales and revenue.
Different types of sales and revenue performance reports can be generated, such as:
- Sales and revenue by channel
- Sales and revenue by source
- Sales and revenue by campaign
- Sales and revenue by term (e.g. Keywords)
- Sales and revenue by content (e.g. Ads)
- Sales and revenue by landing page
- Sales and revenue by landing page subfolder
Here’s a useful example:
| Channels | Search Paid | Social Paid |
| Leads | 50 | 75 |
| Sales | 5 | 6 |
| Average order value | $150 | $100 |
| Revenue | $750 | $600 |
Following the launch of paid ads on Google Ads and Facebook Ads Manager, the initial “Leads by Channel” report showed that Facebook ads generated a higher number of leads than Google’s paid search ads.
After reviewing the sales and revenue data in your CRM, you discovered that the Search Paid channel delivered higher revenue with fewer leads than the Social Paid channel. This information has caused you to adjust your marketing budget, directing more funds to the Search Paid channel.