Published March 25, 2025 by David Hecht
First published Sep 7, 2017, overhauled 2025
Assigning Leads to Salesforce campaigns is essential to measuring your marketing effectiveness, and comparing the response rates and ROI of your different channels and marketing efforts.
The Bad News
Like other messy data in Salesforce, duplicate leads and out of date opportunities, most of us use Campaigns inconsistently, or not at all.
(Not you, of course, you are amazing and your Salesforce processes are perfect 🙂)
When we forget to create Campaigns for every marketing effort, for example using Campaigns just for events (which is quite common), there is an incomplete picture of marketing effectiveness in Salesforce.
If you are using Pardot (Marketing Cloud Account Engagement) in addition to Salesforce, you have some automation options, but you also have some new challenges (sync anyone?)
Good News?
There are a number of tools which can automatically assign (and some even automatically create) Campaigns in Salesforce, to keep your Campaign data more organized and complete.
Read on for 5 options on how Salesforce Leads can be automatically assigned to Salesforce Campaigns, and the pros and cons of each.​
The CloudAmp Campaign Tracker app for Salesforce helps capture source, keyword and campaign information in your leads. New leads in Salesforce can be automatically assigned to up to 2 different Salesforce Campaigns, based on the First and Last touch utm_campaign values in each lead.
Just enter a utm_campaign value in a single field on each Salesforce Campaign you create, and if a new lead has a matching value in one of its CloudAmp utm_campaign fields, it will be auto-assigned to that Campaign.Â
You can also have Campaigns automatically created, if a lead comes in where no Campaign exists that has a matching utm_campaign value (optional feature that can be toggled on or off).
By making sure that Campaigns are automatically created based on new leads with utm_campaign values, you can more easily ensure a complete picture of your online marketing efforts is represented in Salesforce.
All you need to do is view the reports / dashboards to see which Salesforce Campaigns were auto-created by CloudAmp, and update their information as needed. Any leads coming in from that Campaign will already be members of that Campaign.
Pros
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Cons
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Salesforce’s Web-to-Lead functionality is a great way to get leads directly into Salesforce. And Salesforce Campaigns provide useful data on what happened to the leads and contacts produced from various marketing activities.
Besides making sure inquiries don’t fall through the cracks by using web-to-lead functionality with Salesforce, any additional data you can add to your website forms can help your business. Source and keyword data can be added in through an app like our Campaign Tracker, and one easy addition is to hard-code a particular Salesforce Campaign value in your web-to-lead forms.
By including the ‘Campaign record ID‘ from Salesforce in a hidden form field, incoming Leads are automatically linked to the desired Campaign upon submission.
This is mainly useful if you have many landing pages that are specific to certain advertising campaigns, but you can do it with your standard “Contact Us” form. Here’s how:
<input type="hidden" name="Campaign_ID" value="701Hu000002VAdkIAG">
These instructions assume you are using the HTML Salesforce provides in its Web-to-Lead form builder, but it should work (with some modifications) on any form that posts leads into Salesforce.
For more information, see the Campaign ID section in our guide Which Form or Web Page did a Salesforce lead come from?
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When importing Leads or Contacts into Salesforce using the Data Import Wizard, you can specify a Campaign to associate the imported records with. This allows for bulk addition of records to a Campaign during the import process.Â
While this is not technically an automated process, it does update records in bulk, and is how most marketing people using Salesforce add leads and contacts to Campaigns today.
To use the Salesforce Data Import Wizard to add Leads or Contacts to a Campaign:
If you develop a process and a CSV template, then the Data Import Wizard can be used effectively on a regular basis to keep Salesforce records up to date with their Salesforce Campaign membership.
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Salesforce provides a way to add all the records in a Salesforce report or list view to a Campaign.Â
While this is not technically an automated process again, it does give you the ability to add Leads or Contacts to a Salesforce Campaign in bulk. Simply click on the “Add to Campaign” button on a lead or contact report or list view, and complete your member status selections.
To use the Salesforce “Add to Campaign” action button to add Leads or Contacts to a Campaign:
List views are how most of us view records in Salesforce, so this can be a useful place to add Campaign members from. With Salesforce reporting however there is even more flexibility. So adding Campaign members from a Salesforce report means you can do more complex filtering, including using related object fields.
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Salesforce administrators with expertise using the Flow feature can create flows that will automatically assign Leads to certain Salesforce Campaigns when they meet specific criteria.
While Salesforce Flow is a powerful tool for automation in Salesforce, it does require advanced Salesforce knowledge less experienced administrators may not have. Flows also need to be carefully tested to make sure that they do not interfere with other Salesforce automations or data.
Depending on your use case, Flow may be the best option, as they can handle the automation of many things in Salesforce, not just Campaign assignment. But for your initial implementation, as well as any future changes that need to be made, you will most likely be relying on IT or Salesforce consultants.
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If you want to have your leads automatically assigned to Salesforce Campaigns based on their source and campaign information, then check out the CloudAmp Campaign Tracker.
CloudAmp also provides hands-on setup and Salesforce assistance, included with our app subscription. And we are always happy to answer questions free of charge, so don’t hesitate to reach out.
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David Hecht Founder, CloudAmp |
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CloudAmp Apps for Salesforce |