A New Zealand digital marketing agency has released a free WordPress plugin aimed at one of online advertising’s most persistent headaches, working out which campaign actually produced a lead when every ad platform claims the credit for itself.
The tool, LeadSource, was built by New Zealand agency Forge Creative and published on the official WordPress plugin directory, where it can be downloaded for free. It is designed to record where a website enquiry came from, the campaign, channel and ad click behind it, and attach that information to every form submission a site receives.
It also makes for an unusual entrant in a category otherwise dominated by overseas software firms, with the locally built tool offered free against a field of mostly subscription-based products from the United States and Australia.
The problem it targets is familiar to anyone who buys digital advertising. Google, Meta, LinkedIn, Microsoft and TikTok each report conversions inside their own dashboards, and because those systems count view-through and modelled conversions independently of one another, their numbers routinely overlap and add up to more leads than a business actually received. When a client asks which channel is genuinely working, agencies are often left reconciling reports that disagree.
“Every ad platform marks its own homework,” the company says of the problem it set out to solve, describing years of opening client form entries that showed a name and an email but no indication of whether the lead came from a paid click or a free search result.
LeadSource attempts to provide a single, verifiable answer by capturing tracking data on the website itself rather than relying on the advertising platforms. According to the company, the plugin records UTM campaign tags and the click identifiers that Google, Meta, Microsoft, LinkedIn and TikTok attach to paid clicks, along with the visitor’s referring site and landing page, then stores that data against the resulting form submission.
The plugin works with the major WordPress form tools, including Contact Form 7, WPForms, Gravity Forms, Ninja Forms, Formidable Forms, Fluent Forms and Elementor Pro, and the company says it requires no changes to existing forms. Captured data is stored in the website’s own database rather than sent to a third-party service.
Web forms remain one of the most common ways New Zealand businesses generate enquiries, and attribution, knowing which marketing activity produced a sale or a lead, has become harder rather than easier as browsers tighten privacy controls and advertising platforms lean more heavily on estimated data.
Forge Creative says it built the tool for its own agency work before deciding to release it publicly. “Whether you’re an agency managing campaigns for multiple clients or a business owner running your own ads, it gives you the same ground-truth attribution data we rely on every day,” said Roger McSaveney, General Manager of Forge Creative.
LeadSource is available now at no cost from the WordPress plugin directory at wordpress.org/plugins/leadsource. More information is available at leadsourcepro.net.
Disclosure. Forge Creative is a related party of Newswire.
Have you struggled to work out which of your ads actually bring in the leads? Tell us in the comments below.
This article was written by AI, briefed to report the facts, hopefully without some of the bias people bring to the job π
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