You collect leads and forward them to Salesforce, but identifying the original source for each lead is not possible.
When a lead converts into a customer, there’s no way to trace them back to their originating channel or advertisement.
This lack of tracking prevents you from evaluating your marketing performance, making it difficult to identify which sources contribute to leads, sales, and revenue. As a result, you invest in marketing channels without fully understanding their impact on your overall profitability.
Fortunately, there’s a simple solution to connect each lead and sale to the exact channel that brought it in.
Let’s break it down step by step!
How to track the source of leads in Salesforce
Step 1: Add Leadsources in your website
Leadsources is a simple tool designed to track the origin of your leads. When integrated into your website, it collects up to 7 lead source data points for every 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 your form
Hidden fields are invisible form elements that store data submitted alongside the form without the user seeing them.
Leadsources stores lead source data in hidden fields, and when a visitor submits your form, Leadsources automatically fills those fields with the relevant information.
Step 3: Send lead source data to Salesforce
The lead source data can be transferred from your form builder to Salesforce.
You can easily track the source of your leads, sales, and revenue directly within Salesforce.
This helps you connect your marketing activities to your sales results.
How does Leadsources work?
When a visitor comes to your site, Leadsources captures the lead source data and fills the hidden fields in your form. Once the form is submitted, this data, along with lead information such as name and email, is transferred to Salesforce.
Leadsources monitors the lead source data for every lead generated:
| 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 situations where UTM parameters aren’t available—such as with organic traffic from Google search or when your website is mentioned in an article—Leadsources still captures the lead source data:
✅Channel
✅Source
✅Campaign
✅Landing page
✅Landing page subfolder
Unlike other tools, Leadsources monitors the lead source across both organic and paid marketing channels.
Choose a channel to view the lead source data that Leadsources adds to your form.
Performance reports: Lead, sales, and revenue by source
By monitoring lead source data in Salesforce, you can generate performance reports like:
- 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 enables you to adjust your marketing budget according to the channels, sources, campaigns, terms, and content that bring in the most leads, sales, and revenue.
Let’s take a closer look at some of the reports you can generate.
1. Lead source reports
Create performance reports that display the number of leads generated by:
- 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 allows you to identify the channel that generates the most leads.
Example #2: Leads by campaign
Now, you can concentrate on a particular lead source (e.g., Google Ads) and monitor the number of leads generated by each campaign.
Example #3: Leads by keyword and ad
Once you’ve identified the campaign driving the most leads, you can examine which specific keyword ad is responsible for generating those leads.
2. Sales and revenue source reports
Now that we have identified which channel, source, campaign, term, and content are generating leads, it’s time to analyze whether these leads are converting into sales and revenue.
To accomplish this, send your leads to Salesforce. This enables you to monitor sales and revenue across various channels, sources, campaigns, terms, content, landing pages, and subfolders.
With this information, you can refine your marketing strategy to prioritize the channels, sources, campaigns, keywords, and ads that drive the most sales and revenue.
You can generate different types of sales and revenue reports, including:
- 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
For illustration purposes, let’s examine the following scenario:
| Channels | Search Paid | Social Paid |
|---|---|---|
| Leads | 50 | 75 |
| Sales | 5 | 6 |
| Avg. Order Value | $150 | $100 |
| Revenue | $750 | $600 |
Following the launch of ads on Google Ads and Facebook Ads Manager, the initial “Leads by Channel” report revealed that Social Paid ads (Facebook) were responsible for more leads than Search Paid ads (Google).
However, after analyzing the sales and revenue data in Salesforce, it became clear that the Search Paid channel generated more revenue with fewer leads than the Social Paid channel. Based on this insight, the budget was adjusted to prioritize the Search Paid channel.