Attribution: where a lead came from

Every lead carries a record of the visits that led up to it — this is how to read that history and what it can and can’t tell you.

The visit history

Open a lead and scroll to “Attribution journey.” Each row is one visit, in order, with when it happened, the channel it came through, and a campaign name where one exists. A row with more detail behind it — a click ID, a landing page, referrer, or UTM values — gets a small expand control; a plain visit with nothing further to add doesn’t, since there’d be nothing to show.

If a homeowner answered “How did you hear about us?” on the contact form, that self-reported answer appears here too, above the visit table. It’s a separate thing from the automatic tracking below it — one is what they told you, the other is what your website actually recorded.

First touch vs last touch

At the top of the journey is a summary: first visit, last visit, and how many in total. The order is the entire point. The first touch is what opened the relationship — the ad or search that got them curious in the first place, maybe weeks earlier. The last touch is what closed it — whatever brought them back the day they actually filled out the form. A single ad campaign can be responsible for one, both, or neither, and the two questions (“what made them aware of you” and “what made them convert today”) often have different answers. That’s why this is a list, not one flattened source field.

Reading the channel labels

Each visit gets one channel: Google Ads, Meta, Microsoft Ads, Direct mail, Organic, Campaign, Referral, or Direct. A visit that arrived through an actual ad click is labeled by that platform — that’s stronger evidence than a hand-typed tracking tag, so it takes priority when both are present. A visit tagged only with your own campaign parameters, matching no specific platform, is labeled “Campaign.” A visit with nothing attached at all — someone who typed your address in directly, or came back from a bookmark — is “Direct.”

If your estimator asks for cookie consent (Settings → Legal), nothing is recorded about a visit until the homeowner accepts the banner — and the banner is the first thing they see. That means the very first visit in a relationship often can’t be tracked at all on a consent-mode estimator, even when it genuinely arrived from an ad. It tends to show up as a same-day “Direct” first touch instead. This isn’t a bug or a sign that tracking is broken; it’s the direct cost of asking permission before anything loads. See Legal pages & cookie consent for the trade-off in full. This is a different consent than the one on the contact form itself — that one is about you being allowed to contact the homeowner, not about tracking their visit.

When there’s nothing here

Some leads show no visit history at all, with a note that the visitor either declined consent or the lead predates tracking. Neither means the lead itself is any less real — it means there’s no journey to show for it.

Where this feeds

The “Conversion reported” section on a lead shows the close rate that was applied and the estimated dollar value that was made available to your own tag manager to forward to your ad platforms, so you can judge whether your ad spend is pulling its weight. That’s as far as it goes — figuring out whether your tag manager is actually wired up to send it is its own topic.

What to watch out for

This value is an estimate calculated from your quote and your configured close rate — not a report of what a job actually sold for, and not proof that anything was actually delivered to Google or Meta. There’s no automatic reporting of closed jobs back to your ad platforms at all: when you mark a lead Won and enter its job value on the lead detail screen, that’s for your own records only. It doesn’t get sent anywhere.