Tracking Accounts
Tracking Accounts are accounts that have been created to track the source of a lead. However, the account doesn't represent a legal entity (such as a company). These accounts are often created to represent different websites or landing pages. They are displayed as Affiliates in your account, just like regular Accounts.
Campaign Fields
Another alternative to using a tracking account, is creating an additional field in your campaign used to track the source of the lead. For example, you can create a campaign field called "site." Within this field parameter, you can pass the name of the site where the lead was captured. If the lead was generated on "mywebsite.com", you would pass "site=mywebsite.com".
Tracking Account versus Campaign Field
The advantage of using a Tracking Account is that you can see the leads broken out by Affiliate in the Statistics screen. The disadvantage of using a Tracking Account, is that you must use the unique NodeId representing the entity when posting leads from the entity. Each tracking account must be created by ActiveProspect Support. In addition, when you export the leads, you can't export the name of the entity that generated the lead. This solution is recommended if you need to track a few sources.
The advantage of using a Campaign Field is that they are more flexible. You can pass whatever value you want in a campaign field. You don't need to submit a request to ActiveProspect Support to add a campaign field. When you export leads, you can export the source info with all of the other campaign fields. The disadvantage is that you can't see the leads broken out by a particular campaign field in the Statistics screen. This solution is recommended if you need to track many sources.
Tracking the source of web traffic
In addition to tracking the website that generated the lead, Clients often want to track the source of the web traffic that we used to generate the lead on the website. For example, a client may want to capture that the lead was generated using traffic from Google with a particular keyword.