Track inbound leads (Adwords, Instagram, referrals)

LeadHunter was built around outbound prospecting: you search, you find, you reach out. But once a company gets going, leads start showing up from other places too — someone clicks a Google Ads form, replies to a story on Instagram, gets introduced by a customer.

This guide shows how to log those inbound leads with proper channel attribution, so you can answer questions like “how many customers came from Adwords last quarter?” and so the conversation history starts in the right state from day one.

The acquisition channel field

Every Account carries an acquisition channel — the marketing channel that produced the lead. The default is outbound (you found them). The other values describe how the lead reached you:

Channel	When to use
outbound	Default. You cold-prospected the account.
adwords	Click on a Google Ads result → form fill.
meta_ads	Facebook or Instagram paid ad → lead form.
linkedin_ads	LinkedIn Ads → form fill.
organic_search	Found you in Google search → form fill on your site.
organic_social	DM on Instagram, reply on X, organic LinkedIn message.
referral	Existing customer or partner introduced them.
event	Trade show, conference, meetup — exchanged details in person.
partner	Co-marketing partner sent them over.
cold_inbound	Someone emailed you cold, or filled a generic contact form.
other	Doesn’t fit any of the above.

The channel feeds into:

• Initial status. Inbound channels (everything except outbound and other) auto-promote the account from prospect to contacted on creation. The account has already reached out — it would be misleading to call them a “prospect” still untouched.
• Filtering and segmentation. You can build saved filters and slice the dashboard by channel.
• The audit trail. The status change carries source: inbound_acquisition so it’s clear why the account opened in contacted state.

Setting the channel from the dashboard

The most common path — log a lead by hand and pick the channel from a dropdown.

When creating a new account

From Accounts → New account, fill the standard fields (name, email, phone, website, …) and pick the channel from the Acquisition channel dropdown. Each option shows its icon plus a short hint of when to use it, and inbound channels are tagged with a green inbound badge.

When you pick an inbound channel, a green note appears: “Inbound channel — new accounts start at status ‘Contacted’ instead of ‘Prospect’.” That’s a heads-up that your save will skip the usual prospect step. Save, and the account opens on its detail page already at Contacted with the audit-trail entry visible in the status history.

Changing the channel on an existing account

Open the account detail page. The right column has an Acquisition card under Relationship Type with the same dropdown — change the channel and the value saves immediately. Below the dropdown you’ll see the acquired-at date and a collapsible Metadata block listing whatever channel-specific data the row carries (UTM parameters from the original submit, the Instagram thread URL, the referrer’s email, etc.).

Changing the channel on an existing account doesn’t retroactively re-promote the status — the audit trail is forward-only.

Filtering and searching by channel

On the accounts list, the Channel column shows a compact chip for any inbound channel (outbound is hidden so the column stays quiet for the cold-prospecting majority).

To slice by channel for reporting, build a saved filter (Accounts → Filter builder → field “Acquisition channel”). Combine with status, country, custom fields, and date ranges to build views like “Adwords leads from last quarter that haven’t responded yet.”

Storing channel-specific data

Each channel comes with its own bag of metadata — UTM parameters from an ads click, the Instagram thread URL, the referrer’s name, a form id. There’s a free-form acquisition metadata field for that.

The dashboard shows the metadata as a collapsible block on the account detail page. It’s most useful as a permanent attribution record — you fill it once when the lead comes in, then refer to it later (for filtering, reporting, threading to the original ad).

The shape is up to you. Useful conventions:

• Adwords → utm_source, utm_medium, utm_campaign, gclid, ad_id, form_id.
• Meta Ads → utm_source, utm_campaign, fbclid, ad_id, form_id.
• Instagram DM → network, handle, thread_url.
• Referral → referrer_account_id, referrer_email, referrer_note.
• Event → event_name, booth, date.

Anything you store is available afterwards for filtering, reporting, and threading through to the conversation history.

Worked example 1 — A lead from a Google Ads form

Someone clicks one of your Google Ads, fills the form on the landing page, and lands in your inbox as a notification. Here’s the LeadHunter-side flow.

1. Accounts → New account. Paste their company website or the email’s domain into the lookup box; pick Quick mode. LeadHunter auto-extracts the business name, sector, location.
2. Set Acquisition channel to Google Ads. The form shows the green “Inbound — starts at Contacted” hint.
3. In Acquisition metadata, paste whatever the form submission gave you — UTM parameters, the gclid, the ad campaign id, the form id. Conventions are above; the field is free-form, so the keys are whatever fits.
4. (Optional) Set Acquired at to the submission timestamp from your form-builder. Otherwise the default of “now” is fine.
5. Save.

The account opens at status: contacted, with an inbound_acquisition entry in its status history naming the channel. The funnel will count this account as initiated the moment your first outbound message goes out via the conversation log.

Worked example 2 — An Instagram DM

Someone slides into your DMs asking about your product. You want to track the account properly and keep the conversation log threaded.

1. Accounts → New account. Type the company name or the IG handle into the form (LeadHunter can’t auto-discover from an Instagram URL the way it can from a website — you’ll fill the fields by hand).
2. Set Acquisition channel to Organic social.
3. Fill Acquisition metadata with the IG handle, the thread URL, and a short note about what they asked.
4. Save.
5. Open the account and click into its Conversation tab. Paste their first message as an Inbound paste to start the thread.

The account is now at status: contacted with the IG thread URL one click away in the account’s right-column metadata, and the conversation log carries the back-and-forth — auto-translated into your reading language if they wrote in a different one.

Worked example 3 — A referral from a customer

A current customer sends a contact your way. You want to track both the new account and the referrer.

1. Accounts → New account. Fill the new account’s details (or paste the company website into the lookup).
2. Set Acquisition channel to Referral.
3. In Acquisition metadata, record who sent them: the referring customer’s name, email, and a short note about what they’re after.
4. Save.

The account starts at contacted, the referrer trail lives on the account permanently, and a quarter from now you can build a saved filter for “every account acquired via referral that became a customer” to see which existing customers send you the most business.

Filtering by channel

Once you start tagging accounts with their channel, slice your database however you want — the filter-builder on the Accounts list has Acquisition channel in its field picker. Combine with status, date, and custom fields to build views like “Adwords leads from last quarter that haven’t responded yet.” Save the filter to re-use it across campaigns.

See Build a saved filter for the field/operator surface in detail.

What about leads that came from multiple places?

You can only set one acquisition channel per account — pick the one that first introduced you. If the same account later showed up at an event, log that as a regular conversation event rather than overwriting the original channel. The channel is “where they came from”, not “every place we’ve crossed paths.”

If LeadHunter detects the new account is a duplicate of one you already had, the dedupe stack kicks in and the channel of the original (older) account wins. See Merge duplicates.

Read next

• Account — the broader concept this field lives on.
• Log a conversation — once the inbound account exists, capture the back-and-forth.
• Build a saved filter — segment by channel for reporting and campaign targeting.