"How Did You Hear About Us?" Is the Least Reliable Field on Your Form
David Selva · · 3 min read
Lead Source Tracking, Music Schools, Marketing Attribution
Parents answer the source question with whatever they remember last, which is why a music school can pay for ads that the intake form swears never worked.
Ask a parent how they heard about your music school and most of them will say "a friend" or "Google." Both answers are usually true. Neither one tells you what actually got them to fill out the form.
That gap has a price. A school can look at its intake forms, see almost nobody writing "an ad," and cut the ad budget. If enrollment softens the next term, the forms will not explain it, because they never saw the ad in the first place.
People report the last thing they remember
A family's path to a trial lesson is rarely one step. A neighbor mentions the school at a birthday party. A few weeks later, the parent sees an ad on their phone. A month after that, they search the school's name and click the first result.
When the form asks where they heard about you, they pick one. Usually the friend, because that feels like the real reason, or Google, because that is what they did five minutes ago. The ad in the middle gets no credit, even though it may be the thing that turned a vague mention into an actual search.
Tracked source and reported source answer different questions
The system can record where a lead came from without asking: the ad they clicked, the page they landed on, the link in the email. That is tracked source. It is precise about the last click and blind to everything before it.
The form field is reported source. It is vague, but it often catches the word-of-mouth piece that no tracking ever sees.
The mistake is treating either one as the truth. I keep both on the contact record and look at them side by side. When tracking says "paid ad" and the parent says "a friend," that is not a contradiction. It is two parts of the same story, and it usually means the ad did its job by reminding someone of a recommendation.
Make the question more useful
If you keep the field, and I think you should, change what it offers. A dropdown with "Google," "Facebook," "Friend," and "Other" invites the lazy answer. Two small changes help:
- Ask it as "What made you reach out now?" That pulls out the trigger, like a new school year or a kid asking for guitar lessons, which is useful for timing your marketing even when it says nothing about channels.
- Add "A current student's family" as its own option, separate from "A friend." Referrals from enrolled families are worth tracking on their own, because they tell you which teachers and programs parents talk about.
Where I would not trust any of this
Small numbers. A school running twenty trial lessons a month cannot draw a conclusion from one month of source data, tracked or reported. Swings of three or four families are noise.
Give it a full term before you move money around, and look for patterns that hold across both kinds of source, not just one.
Before you cut the ad budget
Pull the last term's enrollments and put both columns next to each other, the tracked source and the reported one. Count how many families show an ad click anywhere in their history, even if they wrote "a friend" on the form. If that count surprises you, the ad was working. The form just did not know how to say so.