Lead channels: how sources are classified

What a "channel" is

Every lead arrives with a source, whatever text described where it came from: "referral from Joe," "Google," "Angi," "repeat customer," a CRM export column, or a name a caller gave over the phone. That text is free-form and different for every operator. A channel is what Verinode turns it into: one of eight fixed categories that means the same thing across every operator on the platform, so a "referral" from your business and a "referral" from someone else's are the same bucket for benchmarking.

The channel is what powers Referral Share on the Getting Leads tab, the channel label on every row in your lead pipeline, and the per-channel close-rate comparisons behind the scenes that let Verinode tell you how referral leads convert against paid leads, for operators like you. Verinode does not ask you to pick a channel from a dropdown when a lead comes in. It reads the source text you already have, wherever it came from, an inbox forward, a CRM export, a manual entry, and classifies it. You never see a raw enum value; you see the plain label.

The eight lead channels

| Channel | Label you see | |---|---| | referral | Referral | | repeat | Repeat customer | | paid_search | Paid search | | paid_social | Paid social | | lsa | Local Service Ads | | organic | Organic / web | | direct | Direct | | carrier_program | Carrier program |

These eight are fixed. Every lead in Verinode, no matter how it arrived, resolves to exactly one of them. Here is what each one is meant to capture:

• Referral, word of mouth: referred by a plumber, agent, adjuster, friend, neighbor, realtor, or property manager, or a referral marketplace like Angi, HomeAdvisor, Thumbtack, Yelp, or Nextdoor.
• Repeat customer, someone who has worked with your company before and came back.
• Paid search, Google or Bing search ads: pay-per-click, AdWords, search engine marketing.
• Paid social, paid Facebook, Instagram, Meta, TikTok, or LinkedIn ads.
• Local Service Ads, Google's Local Services Ads product, sometimes tagged Google Guaranteed or Google Screened.
• Organic / web, unpaid discovery: SEO, your company website, a web contact form, Google Maps or your Google Business Profile listing.
• Direct, a phone call, walk-in, drive-by, yard sign, or truck wrap: someone who contacted you directly with no referrer and no ad campaign behind it. It is also the fallback when Verinode genuinely cannot tell.
• Carrier program, an insurance carrier or third-party administrator (TPA) program assignment: Contractor Connection, Alacrity, Sedgwick, Code Blue, Blue Ribbon, a managed-repair program, or a first notice of loss (FNOL) claim assignment.

Where you see the channel label

On the pipeline list, at /growth/leads, every row's second line reads the channel label first: "Referral," "Repeat customer," "Carrier program," and so on, followed by the source name if one was captured (for example "Referral · Joe the plumber") and how quickly you responded.

Inside a lead's detail overlay, tap any row to open it. The overlay's eyebrow, just above the contact name, is the channel label. Lower down, under a Source group, two rows spell it out plainly: Channel (the label) and Source (the specific name, if one exists, for example "Sedgwick DRP" or "Front Street sign").

On the Getting Leads benchmark tab, reached from the Sales & Marketing home (/growth) by tapping the Cost / Job, Return on Marketing $, Marketing % of Revenue, or Referral Share tile, Referral Share is built directly from the channel: it's the percentage of your logged leads whose channel is Referral or Repeat customer, rather than a paid or organic one. See the Getting Leads tab for how that metric reads against your peers.

In the peer benchmarks behind the scenes, Verinode also tracks close rate broken out by channel; how referral leads convert compared with paid-search leads, compared with carrier-program leads, and so on, each read against anonymized operators like you. That per-channel comparison is what lets a decision surface something like "your referral leads close well above peer, your paid-social leads lag." You won't see a raw channel key anywhere in the product; every surface renders the humanized label above.

How Verinode classifies a source

Classification runs the moment a lead is written, whether it arrived by:

• a forwarded email or document run through Verinode's extraction pipeline,
• a CSV import at /growth/leads (the importer matches columns named source, lead source, referral source, marketing source, opportunity source, how did you hear, how did you hear about us, channel, lead type, or campaign),
• or a lead you add manually through the Add lead form, in the Source field (placeholder text: "Referral, Google, Angi…").

Whichever way the source text arrives, the same resolver runs on it, in order:

1. 1Deterministic keyword match. The source text is lowercased and checked against an ordered list of keyword rules, described below. If a rule matches, that's the channel. No cost, no delay, no ambiguity.
2. 2A fast-model fallback, only when nothing deterministic matched and there is source text to work with. A lightweight classifier reads the source text alone (never your contact details or job data) and returns one of the eight channels with a confidence score.
3. 3Direct, as the safe default. If neither step produces a channel, the lead is filed as Direct. Direct is the deliberate fallback because it's the honest "we don't know how they found you" bucket. Verinode will never silently guess a paid channel just because the source was blank or unreadable.

A lead coming through document extraction can also carry a channel hint straight from the extraction itself (the model's own read of the document). That hint is only used as a tie-breaker: if the source text resolves to Direct on its own, but a valid channel hint came along with it, the hint wins over the bare Direct default. A hint never overrides a real match already found in steps 1 or 2.

The deterministic classifier, in priority order

The keyword rules run in a fixed order, and the first rule that matches wins, even if a later rule would also have matched. This matters for a source like "repeat customer, referred by a neighbor": Repeat customer wins, because that rule is checked before Referral. The order, with a sample of the phrasings each rule looks for:

1. Repeat customer, checked first: "repeat," "returning customer," "past customer," "previous customer," "existing customer."
2. Carrier program: "carrier," "program," "tpa," "contractor connection," "alacrity," "sedgwick," "crawford," "code blue," "blue ribbon," "claim assignment," "fnol," "first notice of loss," "preferred contractor," "managed repair."
3. Local Service Ads: "lsa," "local service ad," "local services ad," "google guaranteed," "google screened."
4. Paid search: "google ads," "adwords," "ppc," "bing ads," "sem," "paid search," "search ad."
5. Paid social: "facebook ad," "fb ad," "instagram ad," "meta ad," "tiktok," "linkedin ad," "paid social," "social ad."
6. Referral: "referral," "referred," "word of mouth," "recommended by," "recommendation," "plumber," "agent," "adjuster referral," "friend," "neighbor," "realtor," "property manager," "angi," "angie," "homeadvisor," "home advisor," "thumbtack," "yelp lead," "nextdoor."
7. Organic / web: "google," "search," "seo," "organic," "website," "web form," "web inquiry," "online," "found us," "google maps," "gmb," "google business."
8. Direct: "walk-in," "walk in," "phone," "called in," "called us," "direct," "drive-by," "sign," "truck."

The keyword list is intentionally conservative: it only covers phrasings Verinode is confident about, so it never misclassifies an ambiguous source with false confidence. Anything that doesn't hit one of these eight rules falls through to the fast-model fallback, then to Direct if even that comes back empty.

Source names versus channels

The channel is the normalized category. The source name is the specific, operator-facing label behind it, "Joe the plumber," "Front Street sign," "Angi," and it stays exactly as typed (trimmed of extra whitespace, capped at 120 characters). The two are stored separately: the first time Verinode sees a given source name for your business, it classifies the channel once and remembers it. If that same named source shows up again on a later lead, Verinode reuses the channel it already assigned rather than reclassifying it from scratch, the same "first observation wins" rule the platform applies to other cohort fields. This keeps a source like "Angi" from drifting between Referral and Organic across different leads just because the wording around it varied slightly.

Best-practice example

A CSV import brings in three rows with these source values: "Referred by Bob's Plumbing," "Sedgwick DRP assignment," and "Website contact form." Verinode classifies them, in order, as Referral (the "plumbing" and referral-adjacent phrasing matches the Referral rule), Carrier program ("sedgwick" matches before anything else could), and Organic / web ("website" and "form" both point there). None of this required you to map a column to a channel yourself; the source text alone was enough. On the pipeline list, the three rows now read "Referral · Referred by Bob's Plumbing," "Carrier program · Sedgwick DRP assignment," and "Organic / web · Website contact form." A month later, Referral Share on the Getting Leads tab reflects that one of those three leads (plus any Repeat customer leads) counted toward the referral-and-repeat share, benchmarked against operators like you.

Related reading

• Sales & Marketing: section overview
• Lead pipeline at a glance (tile + overview card)
• Getting Leads: acquisition-economics benchmark card
• Explore tiles: the Sales & Marketing metric catalog
• How to read a benchmark
• Forwarding documents
• Connecting your data