Connecting Field Marketing Data to Your CRM: What to Import and Why
Attribution quality is capped by data quality. Four fields decide whether your reports mean anything.
Geographic attribution matches customers to nearby placements. That only works if your customer records carry the right fields, in the right format, for the right dates. Here's the minimum viable import and the mistakes that quietly break it.
The four required fields
- Full service address — street, city, state, postal code. A city alone can't be matched to a corner.
- Job date — the date the work happened or the customer converted, not the date the record was created.
- Total paid — revenue per job, so you can measure dollars rather than counts.
- A stable identifier so re-imports update rather than duplicate.
Why job date matters more than anything else
This is the single most common attribution error. If you import a year of historical customers on a Tuesday, every record gets a created-at date of that Tuesday. Attribution then credits whichever signs happened to be up that week — which is nonsense. Always map job date explicitly, and exclude records that don't have one rather than defaulting them.
Address hygiene checklist
- Standardize abbreviations before import (St, Ave, Blvd).
- Separate unit numbers from the street line.
- Drop records with PO boxes — they can't be geographically matched.
- Verify state and postal code agreement to catch typos.
Keeping imports current
Attribution reports drift out of date faster than anyone expects. A campaign that looks unprofitable in week two often looks strong at week eight once the jobs close. Import on a weekly cadence, and re-import historical corrections whenever your operations team cleans up records.
Common import mistakes
- Only importing won jobs and then wondering why conversion rates look impossibly high.
- Mixing quote value with collected revenue, which inflates revenue per pin.
- Importing duplicates from multiple exports, double-counting revenue in a zone.
- Excluding repeat customers who were originally acquired from a placement.
What good data unlocks
With four clean fields, you can answer questions most local businesses never can: which neighborhoods produce the highest job values, how long after placement revenue arrives, which agents place signs where money actually is, and what a sign is worth in each zone.
Import your customers and see the revenue map behind your placements.