What is Lead Source?

Source information for all lead conversions is recorded in RD Station Marketing. This way, you can work with the channels that attract the most leads and generate the most conversions.

The source of a lead's first conversion is called Lead Source, while all subsequent ones are called Conversion Source. Lead Source can be found in the timeline of each contact, on the left sidebar, in Lead Details. Conversion source relates to all conversions recorded in the timeline, as shown in the image below:

The conversion source and, hence, the Lead source, are defined by up to four different properties:

• Channel/Media: This is the means by which the Lead accessed your site (email, social network, etc.);
• Source/Site: Represents the site/app/source used by the Lead to access to your site (RD Station, Facebook, globo.com, etc.);
• Campaign: Represents the publicity campaign which contains the link that the Lead clicked to access your site (example: Black Friday campaign);
• Term/Keyword: Refers to the keyword (usually used in a search) that the Lead used to find your site (example: digital marketing).

How does it work in practice?

See below for some examples of how all these properties combine together to make up the complete Lead Source:

• A Lead that converts after clicking on the link of an RD Station Marketing email campaign with the name Black Friday Campaign, will have the following source for this conversion: Channel = Email, Source = RD Station, Campaign = Black Friday Campaign;
• A Lead that converts after clicking on a Google Ads campaign with the name Notebook X Campaign, in which the keyword Home computer was purchased, will have the following source: Channel = Paid Media, Source = Google, Campaign = Notebook X Campaign, Term = Home computer;
• A Lead that converts after clicking on a link to your site, made available on the site of a partner of yours, will have the following conversion source: Channel = Referral, Source = partnersite.com.

You can use all this information to create specific reports in order to find out, for example, the number of leads that converted via each email campaign, the number of sales generated by a particular keyword purchased on Google, or even the amount of opportunities brought by a co-marketing campaign.

The use of UTM parameters to promote links is a very important detail for RD Station Marketing to be able to identify conversion and Lead sources in such a detailed way. To better understand how to set up your campaigns so that RD Station Marketing can capture the source information of your Leads, please see this article.