Marketing attribution: know which channel sent the customer.

How do you know where a lead came from?

Most attribution rests on tags. An analytics or ad platform's script sets a cookie when the visitor lands, and a second script fires when the form is sent. Block the cookie, let it expire, switch devices, or lose the second script, and the credit is lost or misfiled. The platform still reports a number as if nothing went wrong.

A site built with three-bucket capture records the source at the moment the form is submitted. The site's own script notes the page that sent the visitor and any click ids or campaign tags on the link they clicked, and keeps them for the whole visit. When the form goes in, the form handler reads those signals, names the channel and writes it to the lead row in the same server-side append as the name, phone and message. A click carrying a Google, Meta or Bing click id, or a paid medium tag, is named Paid, with the network and the campaign or creative that earned it. A visit referred by an answer engine is named AI Search, with the engine. Everything else is Organic. Ordinary referrals and direct visits fold in there on purpose: they are earned rather than bought, and a large share of direct is organic with the referrer stripped. The raw click ids, campaign tags and referrer are written in the next column, so a label that looks wrong can be audited back to what the browser sent. The Leads view reads that sheet newest first, and on a site built this way the row carries the named channel, so the credit sits on the record your own site writes before any tag has a chance to fail.

Why do GA4, Google Ads and your lead count disagree?

Each one records a different event. Google Analytics 4 counts sessions by source and the key events its tag saw, hours behind. Google Ads counts the conversions its own tag reported, also hours behind. The lead ledger counts forms actually submitted, live. What GA4 counts and what Ads counts has a page of its own. On the instance whose forms feed the sheet today, a lead watch runs daily at 7:20am ET and compares the three. It raises five conditions: the tag no longer loads, leads landing with zero GA4 form events, paid leads landing with zero Ads conversions, a campaign that reliably spent going to zero, and traffic continuing with no leads at all.

The watch exists because of one account we manage. A tag change silently stopped every conversion for six weeks. Twenty-one real leads landed while Ads reported zero. The owner paused the campaign that carried every counted lead and cut its budget by ninety percent. Attribution built on tags alone said the opposite of the truth.

What does a wrong number cost a local service business?

One customer. In this kind of business one new customer is worth three thousand dollars or more, and there is no marketing department to catch a bad number before it becomes a bad decision. A channel cut because a report said it produced nothing is a quiet loss: nothing breaks, the phone simply rings less. Attribution that starts from your own forms and your own CRM, and admits what it cannot see, is the difference between reading a report and knowing what happened. The owner's version of that question has its own page.