The traffic analytics out of the box are quite powerful. But the lifecycle stage automations cause problems for me, as a new contact associated via the same email domain to an existing customer gets the lifecycle stage customer and appears in the reporting as a new customer.
We have multinational corps and universities as customers, if someone from a department which is not related to our current contract with the institution finds us via Google Ads, they get reported as a new customer with the source google.
To the best of my knowledge there is no way to achieve that.
I would add, that in the scenario you describe these contacts are in fact not customers, but other interested prospects at a company that is already a customer. My approach would be to not make their lifecycle stage customer, this automation is optional and from my experience makes sense in only a small number of use cases.
@CKol Hello! In this case, how do you want the new contacts to come in? As Leads or something else? Are they just additional contacts not necessarily Customers? What’s is your expected result?
Talking this out more…you have a Company record with a domain and 1-to-many associated Contacts. At the Company level, do you list the Company Record Lifecycle as a “Customer”? This could perhaps be the issue. While the Company is technically a Customer, if you say the Company is a Subscriber or Sales Qualified Lead, then new Contacts should come in at that level. Perhaps you need to save the “Customer” designation for the Contact level exclusively.
In reporting you could reports on Companies with Associated Customer Contacts in order to say how many “Customer” Companies you have. It is something you’d have to define and acknowledge with your team, but that could be a workaround.
Another thought, if you’re using Deals and associate a Contact to the Deal, use a Workflow to reset a Contact’s Lifecycle stage to SQL if they have an Open Deal. When the Deal closes they’ll go back to being a Customer.
Thank you for the answers, those are some interesting suggestions. I think a rethink on how to use lifecycle stages and what our main reporting object will be is a good first step.