In today's data-driven landscape, aligning sales and marketing platforms is no longer a luxury—it's a necessity for growth. Yet, many organizations struggle with data discrepancies, broken attribution, and an incomplete view of the customer journey. These challenges often stem from complex integrations between CRMs like Salesforce, marketing automation platforms like HubSpot or Marketo, and advertising channels like LinkedIn. This article provides practical, in-depth answers to the most common questions about marketing data integration, helping you create a single source of truth, improve lead management, and accurately measure the revenue impact of your campaigns.
Data discrepancies between your marketing automation platform (like HubSpot or Marketo) and Salesforce are common and typically stem from several core issues. These often include:
To resolve these issues, start by auditing your field mappings and sync rules. Regularly review sync error logs in both platforms, which provide detailed reasons for failures. Establishing a clear data governance policy and performing routine data cleansing are crucial for long-term sync health.
Creating a single, unified view of the customer journey requires a strategic combination of technology, data discipline, and process alignment. The goal is to connect every touchpoint—from the first ad impression to a closed-won deal—into a cohesive narrative. Here’s how to approach it:
By integrating these systems, you can build reports and dashboards in your CRM that show the complete sequence of interactions a lead had before converting, providing a truly unified view of their journey.
Effectively passing lead source information from LinkedIn Lead Gen Forms into your CRM (like Salesforce) is crucial for accurate campaign tracking and ROI analysis. The most robust method involves using a combination of direct integration and hidden fields.
Here is a best-practice approach:
This method ensures that every lead generated from a specific LinkedIn ad is automatically created in your CRM with detailed source information, allowing you to build accurate reports on which campaigns are driving the most valuable leads. Without hidden fields, all leads might simply be attributed with a generic 'LinkedIn' source, obscuring deeper performance insights.
Losing leads from a 'Contact Us' form is a critical issue that can often be traced back to integration problems, form configuration, or data validation errors. Here’s a breakdown of potential causes and how to investigate them:
To diagnose the issue, submit a test lead using your form and trace its journey. Check the activity log in your marketing platform to see if the submission was recorded. Then, check the CRM integration's sync error dashboard to see if it reports a failure. This will usually provide a specific error message that points directly to the cause, such as a 'FIELD_CUSTOM_VALIDATION_EXCEPTION'.
Setting up offline conversion tracking allows you to connect your digital advertising efforts directly to tangible sales outcomes, like qualified opportunities or closed-won deals in your CRM. This process involves capturing a unique click identifier from your ads and using it to attribute offline events back to the original click.
Here is a step-by-step guide primarily for Google Ads and Salesforce, though the principle applies to other platforms:
By completing this loop, you can see directly within your Google Ads dashboard which campaigns, ad groups, and keywords are generating not just leads, but actual pipeline and revenue, enabling true ROI-based optimization.
Yes, you can and absolutely should connect your 6sense intent data to ad platforms like LinkedIn and Google Ads for significantly more precise and effective targeting. This integration allows you to move beyond broad demographic or firmographic targeting and focus your ad spend on accounts that are actively demonstrating purchase intent.
6sense offers a deep integration with LinkedIn Campaign Manager. The process involves syncing dynamic 6sense Segments directly to LinkedIn, which can then be used as targeting audiences. Here’s how it works:
The integration with Google Ads works similarly, typically by passing 6sense data into Google Analytics (GA4) and then creating audiences to be used in Google Ads.
By connecting 6sense to your ad platforms, you transform your advertising from a broad-net approach to a precision-based strategy focused on revenue outcomes.
Connecting Salesforce to LinkedIn is essential for B2B marketers who want to measure the true revenue impact of their LinkedIn campaigns. This integration allows you to see which ads and campaigns are influencing pipeline and closed-won deals, moving beyond metrics like clicks and impressions.
LinkedIn's Revenue Attribution Report is the primary tool for this, and setting it up involves linking your CRM directly. Here is the general process:
For even more advanced analysis, third-party attribution platforms can also be used. These tools connect to both LinkedIn and Salesforce to offer more flexible multi-touch attribution models (e.g., W-shaped, linear) that can provide a more nuanced view of the entire customer journey.
Whether a re-engaging lead updates an existing record or creates a duplicate in your CRM depends entirely on your system's configuration, specifically its duplicate detection rules and the logic of the integration with your marketing platforms.
Most modern CRMs like Salesforce are designed to prevent duplicates by using a unique identifier. The most common unique identifier for leads and contacts is the email address.
To ensure leads are updated rather than duplicated, you should:
Ensuring UTM parameters are captured correctly across your entire marketing and sales stack is foundational for accurate campaign tracking and attribution. This requires a combination of a strict governance policy, technical setup, and regular auditing.
Consistency is the most critical element. Before you do anything else, create and document a strict naming convention for all UTM parameters. This document should be shared across all teams involved in creating links.
Don't 'set it and forget it'. Regularly test your setup by clicking your own UTM-tagged links, filling out a form, and tracing the data to ensure it populates correctly in your analytics platform, marketing automation tool, and finally, the CRM. This end-to-end check will confirm that your UTM data is flowing through the entire customer journey.
Yes, automating the movement of leads between stages like 'in-progress' and 'nurture' is a core function of modern marketing automation platforms and CRMs like HubSpot and Salesforce. This process, often called lifecycle management, relies on building workflows or automation rules that trigger status changes based on lead behavior and time delays.
In HubSpot, this is typically built using the Workflows tool. You can set enrollment criteria based on CRM properties and use 'if/then' branches and delays to manage the logic.
In Salesforce, this can be accomplished using Process Builder or Flow. These tools can be configured to monitor records and automatically update fields based on time-based rules and related object data (like email engagement tracked in an integrated sales engagement tool).
This automation ensures that no lead is left behind, maintains a clean sales pipeline, and allows sales to focus on currently engaged prospects while marketing handles the long-term nurturing.
Yes, data gaps in the Terminus-to-LinkedIn audience sync are common. While platform-specific bugs can occasionally occur, these gaps almost always trace back to a core set of issues related to API connections, audience matching, or data processing delays.
If you are experiencing data gaps, here are the most likely causes and the steps to troubleshoot them.
Managing different lead scoring models between a marketing automation platform (MAP) like HubSpot/Marketo and a CRM like Salesforce is a common challenge that requires a clear strategy for alignment and a defined handoff process. The goal is not necessarily to have identical models, but to ensure they work together seamlessly to identify and prioritize the best leads for sales.
A 'view-through conversion' (VTC) is a conversion event that is recorded when a user sees an ad (an impression), does not click on it, but later navigates to the advertiser's website and converts. This metric is primarily used for display and video advertising, where ads contribute significantly to brand awareness and recall, influencing future actions even without a direct click.
Ad platforms like Google Ads and LinkedIn track VTCs using pixels or tags. Here’s the typical sequence:
It is important to distinguish this from a click-through conversion, which occurs only after a user clicks on an ad.
Directly tracking a true view-through conversion within a CRM like Salesforce is extremely difficult, if not impossible. The primary challenge is the lack of a click to connect the ad impression to the user's session. The GCLID (Google Click ID) or other URL parameters that are essential for offline conversion tracking are only passed during a click.
Because there is no click, there is no unique identifier passed to your website and, therefore, nothing to capture in a hidden form field and send to your CRM. The tracking and attribution for VTCs happen almost entirely within the ad platform itself.
However, you can get a proxy for this data in your CRM. For instance, in HubSpot, you could create a workflow where if a contact's original source was 'Paid Social' and they convert on a form without a recent ad click, you could tag them with a custom property like 'Likely VTC'. While not a perfect science, this can help you analyze the behavior of contacts who were likely influenced by your display and video ads. The most accurate data for VTCs, however, will remain within the reporting dashboards of your ad platforms (Google Ads, LinkedIn, etc.).
