Lead Source and Source Campaign are two mechanisms that underpin the most basic level of marketing attribution in Salesforce.
This is a topic that can often confuse people – but don’t be derailed when deciding between the two. This guide is where you can understand their purpose, the differences between them, and their limitations to be aware of when planning out how you want to report on marketing’s influence on the pipeline.
Salesforce Lead Source: Recap
Lead Source is a field that states where leads came from, indicating which channels produced the greatest number of new leads and, down the line, which generated the most revenue (won opportunities). Lead Source is a picklist field: in other words, a field that can only contain a value from a set list of options.
This field comes out of the box with default values. Use the default values, or add your own custom values and/or deactivate any standard ones you don’t need.
When a lead is converted, the newly created contact record will inherit the lead’s Lead Source value. Plus, if an account (and optionally, an opportunity) is newly created, these records will also inherit that value. If the contact is related to an existing account, it will not update the Account Source value.
Salesforce Source Campaign: Overview
Campaigns are designed to track marketing and sales initiatives – in other words, anything your organization invests budget into to attract prospects into your sales pipeline.
Each campaign record represents an activity distributed via a particular channel. For example, a webinar you will or have hosted.
Where the landscape gets more complex is when you have multiple activities that drive engagement with the ‘main event’. For example, you may launch an advertising campaign and an email campaign to drive registrations to that webinar.
These campaign records will be arranged into a campaign hierarchy, like a ‘tree’, so you can see engagement with any of the ‘branches’, that all makes up the impact the ‘tree’ has had.
The point we’re making here is that campaigns are more granular than the simple Lead Source field.
When leads convert (and an opportunity is created at the time of conversion), the first campaign that a lead ‘touches’ gets inserted into the primary campaign source field – essentially, connecting the opportunity to the campaign.
“Campaign” Field on Leads
Be aware that a field exists on the lead object named “Campaign” that has a special behavior. This field, while visible from Setup and on reports, is only visible in the user interface when users are adding new lead records. Once saved, this field cannot be edited.
Having said this, when the lead is converted into an opportunity, this field can be changed in the user interface (as shown in the previous section).
Attribution Models
Attribution models are how you calculate the amount of revenue generated as a result of specific marketing campaigns. Like placing weights on different ends of a weighing scale, you determine which marketing activity has the most ‘weight’ in influencing that revenue coming into the business.
In the default attribution model “Campaign Influence 1.0 (AKA Salesforce Influence Model)” – the “Primary Campaign Source Field” will receive 100% of the ‘weight’.
Salesforce Lead Source vs. Campaign Source: Decision Guide
Using the Lead Source Field
Pros:
- Clean reporting: Keep values ‘clean’ (mostly) with those specified in the picklist values, which gives you easy ‘at-a-glance’ source reporting.
Cons:
- Broad: Set values are broad in nature (i.e. categories), and so can’t give marketers much direction on which activities are driving value.
- Misinterpretation: When leads (or contacts) are manually added, it is down to the internal user to select a value from the list. You could very well end up with inaccurate data, based on that user’s point of view, or skewed data as it’s human nature to select the first value to get a task done faster.
- Self-reported: It’s common to ask a prospect’s source of interest on a form – “Where did you hear about us?”, or similar. Again, you could very well end up with skewed data when prospects select the first value in the list.
- By-passing: Lead source field values can be bypassed because the field’s behavior is not restricted to the set values – therefore, you could end up with an array of additional values that confuse reporting. Attention Account Engagement (Pardot) users: this can occur when new prospects sync to Salesforce, adopting lead source values that could have been determined by Account Engagement by UTM parameters. Note that other marketing automation tools could have the same behavior.
Using the Campaign Source
Pros:
- Insight: Gain more insight into which marketing activity (i.e. campaign) that attracted the prospective customer (lead) to your organization, and resulted in pipeline (i.e. opportunity).
Cons:
- Lead conversion: The lead would need to be converted with an opportunity being created directly, in order for the ‘primary campaign source’ on opportunities to be populated. This is frequently not the case – if opportunities are created from existing accounts or contacts.
- Campaign granularity: In a given marketing campaign, you could have multiple activities that drive engagement with the ‘main event’. Occurring on multiple channels, you may decide to use UTM parameters to distinguish traffic from one source to another. If your campaign hierarchy does not mirror this granularity, and furthermore, if you are not capturing these at the lead and/or campaign level, your source campaign data will remain vague despite putting the effort into tracking.
- First-touch vs. multi-touch: The first ‘touch’ may very well not be the most influential campaign in moving a prospect into a paying customer – in reality, it may be the third, fourth, fifth, or even tenth touchpoint that aided the conversion into real revenue. Why should the first ‘touch’ get all the credit? Why shouldn’t the last, or all, touchpoints be recognized, too? That’s where campaign influence comes in. To not distract from the core conversation here, you can read more about campaign influence in these guides:
Summary
In this guide, you’ve learned about the differences between lead source (the field) and source campaign (the related campaign record). There are pros and cons to be aware of with both methods when planning how you want to report on marketing’s influence on the pipeline.
Remember though, that the first ‘touch’ may very well not be the most influential campaign in moving a prospect into a paying customer – in reality, it may be the third, fourth, fifth, or tenth touchpoint that aided the conversion into real revenue. Get clued up on campaign influence to add more insight into your prospects’ journeys to customers, thanks to marketing activities.
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