Track leads & customers from AI in ActiveCampaign
Learn how to track how many leads & customers AI tools like ChatGPT are generating in ActiveCampaign
Use Attributer to capture AI referral data (like the fact a lead arrived from ChatGPT) with every form submission, pass it into ActiveCampaign, and then run reports showing how many leads and customers AI chatbots are actually generating for your business.
When a new contact lands in ActiveCampaign, do you actually know where they came from? Did they click through from a Google Ads campaign, or did ChatGPT point them to your site?
More and more buyers now start their research inside AI tools (and that share is only going to grow over time too). The problem is that most AI tracking tools only really track how many times you're mentioned in AI conversations. They don't tell you how many leads you got, how many became paying customers, or how much revenue they've generated for your business.
Thankfully, there's a straightforward fix for this.
In this guide, we'll show you how to use Attributer to capture AI referral data with every new lead that comes into ActiveCampaign. We'll also cover a handful of reports you can build to see exactly what ChatGPT, Claude and Gemini are contributing to your pipeline.
4 steps to track leads & customers from AI in ActiveCampaign
Using Attributer with ActiveCampaign makes it easy to see which leads came from an AI referral. Here's how it works:
1. Install Attributer and add hidden fields
Sign up for a 14-day free trial of Attributer and you'll get a little snippet of code to add to your site. Instructions for adding it are here.
Once the code is live, you then need to add four hidden fields to the forms on your site that capture new contacts:
- Channel
- Channel Drilldown 1
- Channel Drilldown 2
- Channel Drilldown 3
Most form tools make this easy. Depending on what you use, it will either give you a purpose-built 'Hidden' field type you can drag and drop, or you'll need to add a regular text field and set it as hidden in the settings panel. Step-by-step guides for ActiveCampaign Forms, Gravity Forms, Wix Forms, Webflow Forms, and plenty more are here.
2. Attributer writes AI data into the hidden fields
When a visitor lands on your site, Attributer looks at a bunch of technical signals (the same oneS analytics tools like Google Analytics look at) to work out where the visitor has come from.
From there, it assigns the visitor a channel, such as AI Referral, Organic Search, Paid Search or Paid Social, and keeps that result stored in their browser.
Then when that visitor fills in a form on your site, whether it's a 'Get a Demo' or 'Request A Quote' form, Attributer writes the data about where they came from into the hidden fields.
3. AI data is captured with each lead
Once the form is submitted, whatever data Attributer wrote into those hidden fields gets captured by your form tool alongside the lead's name, email, phone, etc.
Attributer works with more than 50 form builders, scheduling tools, and chat products, including ActiveCampaign forms, Gravity Forms, Contact Form 7, Wix Forms, Webflow Forms, Typeform, Jotform, Calendly, and more.
4. AI data is sent to ActiveCampaign
From there, the data needs to be sent from your form tool into ActiveCampaign.
If you are using ActiveCampaign forms on your website to capture new leads, this happens automatically as any new form submission automatically creates a new contact in ActiveCampaign (complete with all the information that was captured with the form submission).
If you are using a third-party form builder (like Gravity Forms, Typeform, etc), then you'll need to configure to send the data over to ActiveCampaign with each new lead. Plenty of form builders have a native ActiveCampaign integration built in, and for the ones that don't, Zapier can connect the two.
Once the data is in ActiveCampaign, it will sit on the contact record next to the lead's name, email, phone number and everything else, ready to use for reporting. ActiveCampaign's own reporting can get you started, and if you want to dig deeper you can use ActiveCampaign's MCP connector to connect tools like Claude or Codex and have them build reports for you.
What data gets captured
Attributer passes through two kinds of information about each contact. There's how they arrived at your site (the channel) and what content brought them there (the landing page).
Let's say you handle marketing for a recruitment agency. If someone asked ChatGPT to recommend a recruiter for a hard-to-fill role, then clicked through and submitted an enquiry, here's what Attributer would capture:
- Channel = AI Referral
- Channel Drilldown 1 = ChatGPT (whichever AI tool sent them)
- Channel Drilldown 2 = chatgpt.com (the domain they arrived from)
- Channel Drilldown 3 = None (there is no deeper level of detail to capture for an AI referral, so this comes through as None)
You'd also get the page they first landed on. Continuing the example, that might be:
- Landing Page = meridiantalent.com/specialties/engineering-recruitment
- Landing Page Group = /specialties
The landing page tells you which pages the AI tools are actually citing, and therefore which topics are worth writing more content around.
4 example reports you can run when you capture AI data in ActiveCampaign
I've been in marketing for over 15 years, and I've built more reports than I can count trying to figure out which channels are actually driving results (and what to do to grow). Here are 4 that have consistently been useful:
1. Leads by Channel
This report breaks down how many leads you're getting each month by channel, so it shows AI Referral right next to Organic Search, Paid Search, Paid Social, etc.
It's a great way to see where AI Referral ranks against everything else you are doing when it comes to lead generation.
2. Customers by AI tool
This one shows how many new customers came from AI tools, split out by which tool sent them. You'll be able to tell, for instance, whether ChatGPT is getting you more customers than Claude and Gemini.
Knowing which tool converts into paying customers, rather than just sending traffic or racking up mentions, tells you where to put your energy. If almost all of your AI customers arrive via one tool, that's the one worth tracking and optimising for.
3. Close rate by channel
This report shows your lead-to-customer conversion rate, broken down by channel.
It's interesting because the channel a lead came from often has a pretty significant impact on the conversion rate. For example, you might discover that 35% of your AI Referral leads become customers, compared with 10% from Organic Search and 7% from Paid Search.
This would mean that an AI lead is worth several times more than one from paid search, and that can shift where your next dollar of budget goes (this tends to happen because someone coming from an AI tool has already had their basic questions answered before they ever reach your site, so they are much more qualified).
4. Revenue from AI by landing page
This report shows how many customers, and how much revenue, each page on your site has generated from AI referrals.
It's the clearest way to see which pages the AI tools are actually sending buyers to. If most of your revenue traces back to a small handful of pages, you've got a pretty clear brief for what to write next.
Wrap Up
If you've been wondering how many of your leads and customers are actually coming from AI tools, then using Attributer with ActiveCampaign is a simple way to find out.
Best of all, Attributer is free to get started with and setup usually takes less than 10 minutes. Start your 14-day free trial today!
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About the Author
Aaron Beashel is the founder of Attributer and has over 15 years of experience in marketing & analytics. He is a recognized expert in the subject and has written articles for leading websites such as Hubspot, Zapier, Search Engine Journal, Buffer, Unbounce & more. Learn more about Aaron here.