New Changes to Website Lead Tracking
Jan 16, 2007If you logged in this week after the latest release of Winter '07, you may have spotted a few new changes to Salesforce for Google AdWords. Among them was a noticable change to website lead tracking and reporting:
Lead Source and Lead Source Details Activity Record
When Salesforce for Google AdWords correlates website traffic with inbound leads, it automatically determines where that lead originated, and populates the Lead Source field accordingly. For example, if that lead originally came to your site from a Google AdWords ad click, the Lead Source will say "PPC-Google," or if the converted website visitor orginally was searching on Yahoo, the lead source will say "Organic-Yahoo"
Here's an example of what a Lead will now look like:
Lead Source:
The following is a list of values that will populate the Lead Source field automatically. These values apply to leads that have been generated from web-to-lead forms containing the salesforce javascript snippet. With respect to organic search, Salesforce will report clicks from the following major search engines: Google, Yahoo, MSN, Altavista, AOL, A9, Ask.com, Lycos, Mamma, Netscape, and Earthlink.
| When the following happens... | Lead Source will be... |
|
| The Lead originated from a click on a Google AdWords ad | Google AdWords |
|
| The Lead originated from a click on an unpaid search listing |
Organic-SearchEngine |
|
| The Lead originated from another website, such as a partner | Web Referral | |
| The lead resulted from a user who typed your URL in directly | Web Direct |
Lead Source Details:
At the same time as the Lead Source is populated, Salesforce for Google AdWords creates an activity record containing the details of that lead source. For added clarity in the connection between these 2 fields, the activity record has been renamed Lead Source Details. The Lead Source Details activity record is populated with the following information:
| If Lead Source value is... | Expect Lead Source Details to contain... | |
| Google AdWords |
Campaign, Ad Group, Creative, Keyword Phrase, Keyword | |
| Organic-SearchEngine |
Referring URL, search engine, keyword phrase | |
| Web Referral | Referring URL | |
| Web Direct | No data |
We are always looking to attach the most relevant and meaningful website information to the Lead object. Got ideas? Comment here or post them to IdeaExchange.


Thanks for this. Suggestions:
1. In the post above, for Organic say "Organic + search engine name" (or just change the feature to just insert the search engine name - Yahoo, Google etc. "Organic" doesn't help much for most Salesforce users.)
2. "Referral" is a very generic term - to our sales people it usually means a personal referral not a web link. Better would be "web link"
3. Similarly "direct" doesn't say much for the average SF user. How about "direct URL"? Not fabulous but better.
4. Since the Lead Source Details page is so far removed from the page that shows Lead Source, it would be helpful on the details page to repeat "Direct URL" rather than leaving it blank.
5. We've had problems at times with fields being blank by mistake. So, when your system DOES function and actually has no data, it would be good to explicitly say "No web details available." Sorta like saying "This space intentionally left blank."
Thanks for this continuing development!
Posted by: Dave deBronkart | January 19, 2007 at 08:05 AM
Dave - couldn't agree more. Here are our thoughts wrt your comments:
1. Done!
2. How about "Web referral"?
3. How about "Web Direct"?
4. Agreed, we will add this.
5. Agreed, we will add this.
We welcome additional feedback from the community on these ideas. Comment here or email sfga@salesforce.com
Posted by: Kraig | January 19, 2007 at 09:43 AM
re #2 & #3 - I moderately prefer my original wording, but I could live with your suggestions.
Thanks for being open to suggestions.
Posted by: Dave deBronkart | January 24, 2007 at 01:26 PM
These lead source details records are really great - we're finally getting a handle on which keywords produce results, and which ones produce quality leads vs garbage leads.
Can you can include whether we hit via exact match, phrase match, or broad (expanded) match?
Posted by: Dave deBronkart | January 24, 2007 at 03:26 PM
Oops, forget the previous question - I just found an entry where Lead Source Details does show exact match (the keyword is in [brackets]. Cool!
Posted by: Dave deBronkart | January 25, 2007 at 06:18 AM
In response to Dave's last comment, it looks like you found it!
The inclusion of exact, phrase, and broad matching kerywords are now posted to the keyword reports, google adwords dashboard components, and the Lead Source Details entry. They will display as follows:
broad match: supersonic slushies
phrase match: "supersonic slushies"
exact match: [supersonic slushies]
Posted by: Kraig | January 25, 2007 at 12:54 PM
This is an excellent article - its great to see how the adwords tracking has improved. This will be extremely helpful.
Its just too bad the Yahoo is not included.
For now I have been using javascript to code Yahoo campaigns information in salesforce. You can see how to here.
http://www.skatterbox.com/2007/03/easy-landing-pages-for-salesforcecom.html
Hope this helps you - its been great for me.
Posted by: Luke Newton | March 27, 2007 at 06:20 PM
We are in the process of installing Google Adwords for Salesforce but also spend some of our advertising budget on Yahoo and MSN. Is there not a way to get the same keyword-level information about leads from Y! and MSN into Salesforce as we can with Google?
Posted by: Online Education User | May 01, 2009 at 01:47 PM
Unfortunately, Salesforce for Google AdWords only provides keyword-level information for leads and opportunities for Google AdWords paid ad placements
However, SFGA also provides:
Search Engine,
Referring URL,
and Keyword Phrase
for leads and opportunities resulting from organic search.
Posted by: sean whiteley | May 01, 2009 at 02:10 PM
For all of this functionality to work do you have to use web-to-lead for lead capture or can you be creating leads via sfdc api?
Posted by: Patricia Abi Samra | June 24, 2009 at 03:12 PM
How does the tracking of organic leads happen? Here is an example,
I sell red cars A searcher searches "red cars", and clicks on my link and lands on my blog page. The searcher then proceeds to my pricing page, my services page and then my products page. The searcher than finally lands on my buy now page and converts. Is SFDC capable of tracking this as an organic search? And if so, does it show the entire search path he took to conversion?
Posted by: Mike McKinnon | July 01, 2009 at 02:41 PM
I don't want the SFGA to overwrite the lead source and would rather have them place that in a diffrent lead source field. Here is an example,
Again I sell red cars:)
A search clicks on my PPC ad and comes to a landing page. On that landing page he signs up for a free trial. I want the lead source to say "Free Trial" and the traffic referrer (or whatever we want to call it) to say Google Adwords. Is this possible? Is it as easy as setting up a new field and changing the mapping of the adwords plug-in. If so, how does one change it?
Posted by: Mike McKinnon | July 01, 2009 at 02:56 PM
So in the last example from Mike, how would a paid search ad from Bing be labeled? We are also advertising in multiple engines.
Also, what happens if we have multiple lead source java script pointing to the same "lead source" field? We're about to implement Genius, which also populates the lead source field (in the example above we would create three genius campaigns for PPC Google, PPC Yahoo, PPC BIng) and we are wondering which lead source Google Adwords or Genius would take priority in the field.
To make matters worse, we have built a custom pickklist for the "lead source" so we are wondering how that will impact our ability to implement either the Google Adwords or Genius java script in relation to the Lead Source.
Thanks.
Posted by: Cheryl Moody | May 24, 2010 at 07:47 AM
Is there a way to place the information on referrer,search phrase, keyword, and all other google info into different fields within a lead. I need to do reports on won opportunities based on referrer and more info. If all the google info is stored in different fields, then we would be able to do more powerfull reporting.
Thanks
Posted by: Auren Lopez | September 29, 2010 at 10:01 PM