Automatically attributing your leads

RightMessage can automatically synchronize attribution data to the contact records associated with your visitors in your email platform or CRM.

Here's how it works.

First: what do we mean by attribution?

It often makes sense to be able to synchronize information about UTM parameters or referring URLs up to your email platform.

This allows you to then use this information to segment people and develop more meaningful reports.

For example, if your company sponsored a conference, you might include a specific utm_campaign parameter within the links that the conference organizers use to promote your website.

This information can be used within RightMessage's segmentation engine to personalize the experience those people have, but you're also able to store that data in someone's contact record if and when they opt-in.

How our attribution engine works

You're able to map each of the available UTM parameters to a specific custom field or property in your email marketing platform or CRM.

When someone visits your website, we'll remember the last used UTM parameter they used.

And should they become a lead, we'll synchronize this information up to their newly created contact record.

Because we persist this data in their browser, this means that even if they spend some time moving around your website (and, thus, lose the UTM parameters that existed when they first arrived), we still have this context about them, and will sync it up when they opt-in to your list.

This is totally automatic. As long as you're using RightMessage forms or following our best practices for your integration to identify visitors as known contacts in your email platform, the attribution should be automatic.

Overwriting existing data

The default behavior of our attribution engine is to not replace data that's already there. This effectively sets up RightMessage to honor "first touch attribution" – i.e. if an existing lead ends up coming to your website again in the future via a different channel, the original data we set won't get overwritten.

However, you do have the option to overwrite existing data.

This could allow you to do something like the following in your email platform:

1. First, have RightMessage set a "last_used" custom field – for example "utm_source_last_used"

2. In your email platform, set up a new automation that's triggered by the updating of this field

3. In this automation, check to see if the "utm_source_original" custom field is blank. If it is, set its value to be the value of "utm_source_last_used"

This would then allow you to track both the original UTM source and the last used UTM source.

Not everyone will need to do this, but this might be useful, especially if you have complex reporting needs.