Last Updated on December 11, 2022 by Rakesh Gupta
Lead source is a vital piece of data you need to assess the value of your marketing campaigns and the lead generation process. Understanding your lead sources and tracking is essential to expanding your business and getting the most out of your digital marketing efforts.
Building out buyer personas, tracking buyer behavior, moving customers through your sales and marketing funnels, and segmenting your prospects to personalize messaging are all keys to digital marketing success.
In this blog, we will focus on learning more about a lead source by looking at different lead sources.
What is a Lead Source?
The lead source is an important data point that tells you where a prospect came from. It also helps you determine which marketing channels and campaigns produce the best prospects. Keeping track of your lead source in Pardot is not as difficult as you think.
When you identify the prospects coming through different sources, you can quickly determine the most valuable to your lead generation efforts by looking at the lead source.
When you know which lead source brings in the most prospects, you can invest more time, energy, and money into ensuring that the lead source is successful.
Types of Lead Sources
A lead source is any touchpoint that brings in prospects. For many businesses, that means there are common digital lead sources that should be very familiar. These can include:
- Yahoo!
- MSN
- Bing
- PRweb
- Business.com
- Wikipedia
- Quora
- Marketwire
- MarketWatch
- TechCrunch
- StumbleUpon
- Baidu
- Craigslist
- Ask.com
- Indeed.com
- Feedburner
- Monster
- Scribd
- Eventbrite
- Google Plus
How a Prospect’s Source is Populated
The referring URL determines the prospect’s source field. The referring URL is the page the visitor was on before visiting a page with the Pardot tracking code for the first time.
For example, if a prospect’s referring URL is Twitter Profile, and no UTM parameters exist, Pardot populates the prospect’s source field as Twitter.
Add a Custom Source
Pardot comes with a set of common lead sources to get you started, but you can also add your values. To add custom lead sources in Pardot, you need to use utm_source in your landing page link.
For example:
http://www3.lenoxsoft.com/l/209271/2020-12-22/gxzkj?utm_source=AutomationChampion will set source = AutomationChampion
Manually Assign a Source to a Prospect
Pardot provides various ways to set the lead source using imports, automation rules, page actions, custom redirects, completion actions, engagement programs, and segmentation rules.
Formative Assessment
I want to hear from you!
What is one thing you learned from this post? How do you envision applying this new knowledge in the real world? Feel free to share in the comments below.
