Lead Source to LeadSourceX

Hi, this is Jeff King with rampmetrics. Today, we’re introducing a new concept, a multidimensional data structure. That’s quite a mouthful. We call it LeadSourceX. What I’m going to do today is draw a line between Lead Source, and our new offering, called LeadSourceX.

For context, we’ve been doing marketing analytics consulting for over five years, and typically in most engagements we’re cleaning up lead source as part of the overall project that we’re working on. One thing that we’ve learned about lead sources is that it’s great because it’s simple. The idea is that you have to pick one value, which is nice for comparing things, but in practice, there’s commonly a mix of concepts, that in-depth kind of getting in there on the lead source.

I wanted to break this down and show some of the challenges that we’ve seen as a company who’s been working with us. This is a pretty typical set of lead source values.

Even with companies that are really trying hard it can be tricky. You’ve got things like a CPC. Pay-per-click, CPC, which is a medium, so it’s a traffic-driving technique to drive a lead, some people call it a channel. You’ve got Google, which is a source. Google is actually a subset of a medium, so it can be a lot of different things nowadays. Google could be CPC. It could be paid display. It could organic search. A variety of different things, but it’s something very specific. You’ve got document, which is really a content category, which would be similar to say like events. Documents or events, which ones are driving pipeline? White paper is a content type. Other content types would be reports, eBooks, webinars, events, those kind of things. Top 10 reasons is a really specific thing, so a specific piece of content, or webinar offering, or eBook, or a name of a new report. RainKing is actually a list source, not a lead source. It’s a database provider. You get some names, so it’s really a name, not a lead, but it ends up a lot of times getting in the lead source upon import. Advertising is a medium category, so it can be a lot of different things. It’s one of the default values, but is it digital advertising?, or it’s offline … magazine advertising?. It can be a variety of different things. The challenge with lead source is if it’s not consistent, it can be relatively useless in terms of making comparisons, or doing marketing analytics.

The other side of it is, is lead source is only the first touch for a specific person. It’s not all the touches along the way, so that’s another challenge. Now, one of the common hacks that we see is a custom field called lead source detail, where people will try to pack in a lot of information into the lead source detail. The problem with lead source detail is in practice it seems to break down, because it’s human power, the marketing ops team is really busy, and it’s also an inherently limited idea anyway. We’ve found that lead source detail is not necessarily the silver bullet for some of the challenges here.

One thing you can do to improve your lead source approach is to pick a consistent naming convention, or naming approach.

With lead source, what we tend to recommend one of two options.

One is to use content type, so that’d be like white paper, reports, webinars, those kind of things, and stick with that.

The other is to use medium, so medium would be things like CPC, display, email, content syndication.

Picking one or the other can make your lead source more useful for comparing and we highly recommend doing that. Unfortunately, even if you do a good job with that, it doesn’t necessarily solve the questions that come right after that.

“Which white paper?
“Was it CPC, or organic?”
“Google or LinkedIn?”

Honestly, these are not advanced questions. We see these questions as the 101 of marketing analytics, but the current way to get to the data can be tricky and when you have a very limited approach.

To help out, we’re introducing as a new way to do lead source and what we call, LeadSourceX. LeadSourceX is Lead Source on steroids. The idea is that you have a really rich picture, so for every touch, not just the first touch, but first, second, third, all the way through five to 15 touches, however many that may be, you’ve got a very granular picture. If you kind of peel this back and you say, “What are the details that we have?” You’ve got the medium of CPC, the category of paid media, the source of Google, UTM level details, click-IDs, CRM metadata, the content type, the content category, the name of the content, and the landing page, whether it’s A, B, or C.

There’s a lot of information that’s packed into every single touch, and the other great part about it is, the marketing operation’s team does not have to set it up. This very dense, detailed, lead source information happens on every touch and there’s no one-time setup. It’s automatically generated the data structures generated by your application. One, you have the granularity. Two, you didn’t have to set it up. That’s the big idea. Now when you combine multidimensional data structure with things like multi-touch attribution, it can get really interesting.

Let’s say we’ve got a deal in our pipeline with Pied Piper, a $50,000 deal. They’re just down the road here in Palo Alto. It’s got nine marketing touches on it.

Imagine, on every single one of these touches having a very granular picture from a lot of different dimensions on what happened on those touches. What it allows us to do, is to roll up this data in very powerful analytics and it gives you lots of different ways to slice and dice the information and to get a very rich picture, a wide-angle view of marketing’s impact on pipeline.

So that’s my quick overview. Let me know if you have any questions. I’d be happy to give you a demo, answer any questions you may have. Also, if you have ideas around this concept of lead source, some of the challenges you guys are having, please let me know. My name’s Jeff King and email’s Jeff@Rampmetrics.com. Have a good day.