Which Ad or Form Brought This Enquiry? Tag Every Festive Lead by Source Before Dussehra

Today is 7 October 2026. Dussehra falls on 20 October and Diwali on 8 November (Government of India holiday list for 2026), and many Indian SMEs are already spending on the season: social ads, search ads, a festive form on the website, a banner at the shop, a referral offer for existing customers. All of it is meant to bring enquiries, and much of it runs at the same time.

Then the enquiries start arriving, and nobody writes down where each one came from. One person types "FB", another "Facebook", a third "Meta ad", and a fourth leaves the field blank. By mid-November the owner wants to know which festive spend was worth it, and the honest answer is a guess. This piece is about fixing that before the peak, while it still takes little effort.

Answer "where did this come from?" at intake, not later

The source of an enquiry is easy to know at the moment it arrives and hard to recover afterwards. The person filling in a form came from a specific link. The buyer at the counter can tell you they saw the hoarding. A week later, after three conversations and a quote, nobody remembers, and the record says whatever the busiest person had time to type.

Reconstructing sources after the season usually means matching phone numbers against ad reports and chat histories, which is slow and still leaves gaps. Recording the source at intake takes a moment per enquiry. The festive weeks are when that trade-off counts, because volume is high and several campaigns overlap.

Keep a short source list and a short tag list

Much of the mess comes from mixing two different questions into one field. Keep them apart:

• Source answers "how did this person reach us?" Pick a small, fixed set, for example: website form, social ad link, search ad link, referral, walk-in or counter, phone, and "Unknown, to check".
• Tags describe the enquiry itself: the offer they asked about, the product line, the branch or city, and the festive campaign name, such as "Dussehra 2026".

Write both lists down and share them with everyone who handles enquiries. Agree on exact spellings, because "Website Form", "web form" and "site enquiry" will be counted as three different sources. Use "Unknown, to check" rather than a blank, so an unlabelled enquiry is visible as something to fix rather than silently dropped from the count. Keep the lists short enough that staff can remember them without looking.

If an enquiry could fit two sources (someone clicked an ad, then walked in), agree on a rule in advance, such as "first contact wins", and apply it the same way all season. The rule matters less than using it consistently.

Put the source on the link itself

For anything digital, a dependable way to keep the source is to attach it to the link the person clicks, rather than asking staff to guess. Meta's Business Help Centre explains how to add URL parameters to your Meta ads, so the website address in each ad carries details such as the campaign and the ad that sent the visitor. Search ads, email newsletters and QR codes on printed material can carry the same kind of parameters.

Web analytics tools then read those details. The Matomo acquisition and marketing channels guide describes how it "groups visits by Channel Type to give you a high-level view of traffic sources, and uses Referrer information to attribute visits and conversions to specific campaigns or sites." Whichever analytics tool you use, the principle is the same: a consistently named campaign on the link means the label travels with the visitor instead of being typed in later.

A few habits keep this tidy:

• Use lower-case, hyphenated campaign names and reuse them exactly, for example dussehra-2026.
• Give each festive offer its own campaign value, so you can tell the offers apart afterwards.
• Test each ad link once before it goes live and check that the parameters survive to the form page.

Google advertisers have a related reporting change this year, which we covered in Google Finally Shows Where Performance Max Spends Your Money. Ad-platform reports tell you about clicks and spend; your own enquiry records tell you which of those clicks became real conversations. You need both to judge a campaign.

Offline and conversational enquiries need a habit, not a link

Walk-ins, phone enquiries, referrals and chats forwarded from a staff member's phone don't carry URL parameters. For these, the source has to be asked and recorded by a person. Make it part of the first conversation: "How did you hear about us?" takes a moment and is a normal question for a buyer. Record the answer using the agreed list, not free text.

It also helps to decide who owns each enquiry from the start, so the source and the next step sit with one named person. We wrote about that in Festive Season WhatsApp Enquiries: Give Every Chat an Owner. If you plan to send festive offers to these contacts later, record their permission at the same time; see WhatsApp Opt-In Before Festive Offers.

A short weekly check through the festive weeks

Labels drift unless someone looks at them. Once a week between now and Diwali, have one named person run a short review:

• Count new enquiries by source and by festive campaign tag.
• Look for any marked "Unknown, to check" or with no source at all, and fix them while the details are still fresh.
• Spot new spellings or labels that have crept in, merge them into the agreed list, and remind the team.
• Compare your counts with the ad platforms' own click and spend reports, and note anything that doesn't line up, such as a campaign with plenty of clicks and no enquiries.

The "which spend worked" decision is yours to make from these counts and the ad reports together. The point of the weekly check is that, by mid-November, the counts are clean enough to trust.

Where Flo fits

In Flo, a lead that comes in through your website form is saved with the source it came from, tagged by rule, and added to your pipeline with a note for the team, so you can see where enquiries are coming from in one place.

The source list, the tag names and the weekly check are still decisions your team makes and keeps up. Enquiries that staff enter by hand need the source recorded by whoever enters them, using the same agreed list.

Set it up before the peak

Agree the lists this week, tag the festive ad links before they go live, and name the person who runs the weekly check. If you'd like a walkthrough of Flo, book a short demo.

Sources: Government of India (DoPT) holiday list for 2026, via ICAR; Meta Business Help Centre, Add URL parameters to your Meta ads; Matomo, Acquisition and Marketing Channels User Guide.