Overview
Sources are a great way to track where your leads come from, helping you make decisions about where to invest recruitment time and energy in future seasons. On this page, we will go over how Source Codes work as a data source and what that means for your imports and segments.
Fundamentals of Source Codes
When you create a segment using Source Code filters, you will notice two properties: Sources Alias and Sources Alias List.
Sources Alias will filter for the source based on its title or name, such as "College Board" or "Open House."
Sources Alias List will filter for the source based on its taxonomy or GUID, such as
fire.taxonomy.1234567. The taxonomy or GUID is different from the "code" you see when you create the source code; the GUID is automatically generated by Element451, and you do not need to know what it is for successful imports and exports.
How to Import and Export Sources
It is extremely important that you import Source data correctly by automatically mapping the Source Code name to its GUID. This way, you can ensure that all of your imported data appears when you filter using the Sources Alias List.
To successfully import Source data with the corresponding GUID, be sure to use the relevant automapping:
Sources - Source Code (Alias) - Customfor Source CodesSources - Source Code Segment - Customfor Source Code segments
See the sample export below:
This will only work properly if the Source Code and Source Code Segments already exist in the Data module. You can learn more about adding Source Codes here.
Creating Segments + Capturing All Source Code Data
If you have imported Source data using just the name - and not mapping to the corresponding GUID - it is recommended that you use both Sources Alias and Sources Alias List when creating a segment using existing Source data. An example of how to effectively use a source alias with a text filter is shown below. Note that the values are separated by a "|."
If you do not want to use both Sources Alias and Sources Alias List each time you filter for Source Codes and would instead rather clean up the Source Code data, you can add the Source Code GUID to data points currently missing it. You can first export a segment of users for which the field exists but does not have a value. You can then import that segment using the system auto-mapping described above.
All of this information also applies respectively to Source Code Segments, which are subsets of Source Codes.