Channels
How to make use of channels
Channels refer to the source of leads. Next to leads, they can also refer to the sources of service and support requests, store locations, or reviews.
Channels can be managed through the configuration menu in the top right corner.
Here you can find an overview of all channels. There are a few channels that have been setup by MaxLead; these refer to online lead channels, such as Google Ads, Google Search, Bing Search, Bing Ads, Facebook, and LinkedIn.
For store locations, MLM defines channels such as Google My Business or Facebook.
For online leads, MLM uses Google Analytics information such as medium and source to determine where the lead comes from. You can also define channels to use when entering a lead by hand.
To create your own channel, click on “New Channel”.
Fill in the name for the channel, for example “Via existing customer”.
The “Channel group” defines the group the channel is a part of. For example, when you indicate a channel to a Lead, you can pick from the channels that are assigned to the channel group “Leads”. Other examples are Store locations or Tickets.
The ‘medium’ is not relevant for channels that are filled in by hand. It is important for online channels, such as Google Ads, because it categorizes the channels even more. For example, it indicates if the lead came through an organic search, an advertisement, etc. This is useful for reports and overviews.
You can use a category in custom implementations to apply your own categorizations to your channels, for example for filtering or reports. This is not required.
“Display CSS Style” is not necessary: it is used to give a channel its own HTML style, to have leads show up in bold or red, for example.
The “Custom Text” fields are only used for custom applications of MLM when you want to register additional information to a channel.
The “Score or weight” can be useful but is not required. For example, this can give leads that directly visited your website a “heavier” weight than leads that visited through an ad. This is part of the lead score model.
The index order determines the order in which the channels show up in lists.
The “Custom Int” fields are only used for custom implementations.
You can set a channel as “Active” or “Inactive” when necessary. Only active channels will show up in lists.
“Is selectable” indicates whether or not a user can select this channel when creating or editing a lead by hand. This is done because there are channels that should only be used by the predefined rules.
“Arguments” and “remarks” are extra fields that are used for custom implementations, and can be left blank.
When you are done, click on “Save”. The channel will now show up in the overview.
The order in the overview is automatically organized with steps of 10. This makes reordering the channels easier.
This is a pre-existing “Google Ads” channel as an example of how these are set up.
Expressions and rules, generally with the use of Google Analytics, determine if a lead will be connected to this channel.
There are a set of standard channels, but it is possible to create extra online channels which can then be connected to leads with the use of these rules. For example, if leads often come from a specific website, a channel can be set up with its own conditions linked to this website.
Channels are shown in the overview of leads. When filtering through your leads, you can select the channel as a filter so you can see all the leads that are connected to that specific channel.
When creating a lead, you can also of course select all channels that are defined as selectable.
There are also dashboards available that show the number of leads and information about the number of appointments and orders.