Lead sources & attribution
Every lead in salon360 arrives through one of a handful of sources, carries a marketing channel that says what actually drove it, and is matched against the people you already know so the same person never becomes two half-records. This page explains those three ideas — they underpin everything in the Lead Manager and the Marketing Health dashboard.
Sources — how a lead reaches you
A source is the system that captured the inquiry:
- Meta lead ads — Facebook / Instagram lead forms, arriving in real time.
- Website form fills — forms on your site, arriving in real time.
- Tracked phone calls — brought in automatically from your call-tracking service (CallRail or WhatConverts) on a regular schedule. Both show as Phone Call wherever a lead's source is displayed. Form fills that WhatConverts also records aren't counted twice — they already arrive as website form fills.
All of them arrive automatically — there's no manual entry, and nothing to configure.
Online bookings are not a lead source. An appointment a guest books themselves on your online booking site has its own Online bookings view in the Lead Manager, kept apart from every lead number.
Only forms submitted on your live website count. Test submissions from a website's staging or preview copy don't appear in your Lead Manager.
Marketing reporting starts 1 January 2026. CallRail and WhatConverts leads, and Google and Meta ad spend, all begin there — earlier history isn't reported.
Meta leads have a second, tighter limit: 90 days from your connection date. Meta only provides the most recent 90 days of leads when your account is first connected, so if you linked Meta recently, your Meta lead history may start well after January 2026 even though your other sources reach back to it.
Channel — what actually drove the lead
The channel is the marketing attribution behind the inquiry, and it's deliberately separate from the source. A website form fill (source) might have been driven by a Google ad, your free Google Business listing, or someone typing in your URL — three very different marketing outcomes that the source alone would lump together as "web form."
Channels include Google Paid Search, Google Business Profile, Facebook / Instagram, Bing Ads, Organic, and Direct / Website. The channel is captured automatically from the ad or landing page at the moment the lead arrives, along with the specific campaign and ad where available — so you can tell which marketing is actually producing prospects, and which deserves more of your budget.
One complete record per person
People rarely hand over everything the first time — someone might submit a Facebook lead with just their email, then fill out a website form a week later with their phone number. salon360:
- Recognizes them as the same person across every source, matched by phone or email.
- Keeps their fullest details together — the phone number from the second inquiry fills in what the first was missing.
- Remembers every email and phone they've ever given, so nothing a prospect shared gets lost.
Your front desk sees one clean, complete lead to work. The individual inquiries are still all there in the Lead Manager (one row per inquiry, labelled New / Repeat), so reporting never loses the trail.
Conversions credit the original inquiry
When a prospect completes a visit and checks out, salon360 matches the client on the sale against your leads by phone number and email. When they match, the visit marks the person's earliest inquiry as converted — the lead that started the journey.
The path in between doesn't change the credit. Someone might submit a Meta lead form, go quiet for a month, then look up your salon's phone number and book over a call — the original Meta lead still earns the conversion, because it's what first put your salon in front of them. Any later inquiries by the same person are labelled Repeat in the Lead Manager and never earn a second conversion.
If a specific lead looks like it should have converted but hasn't, the usual cause is that the phone number and email on the sale don't match anything the lead provided. Let DART support know which lead, and we can look into it.
Existing clients are kept honest
If someone who was already a client reaches out through a lead source — a returning regular who calls a tracked number, say — they're recognized and labelled Existing client. They're recorded for reporting but kept out of the follow-up pipeline and out of conversion and ROAS numbers, so your marketing is only ever credited for genuinely new business. A former client who lapsed (no visit in 6+ months) and reaches back out is labelled Win-back instead.
First touch, last touch, and every step in between are recorded for each person, so questions like "which channel actually brought in the booking" start from recorded history instead of guesswork.