Trying to find the proper way to allocate web orders is not an easy task. The easiest answer is to place a source code box in your shopping cart for customers to enter. However, this can be ineffective because the customer does not have any incentive to enter it. Adding a promotion to the web site to capture source codes may be a good way to get proper tracking but this effects profitability.
Another suggestion is to simply have a drop down box asking the customer what brought them to the web site including an option for catalog, referral web sites, search engines, or other specific methods. Each of these methods can act as a specific source code to be analyzed.
Furthermore, if the customer selected "catalog" as their source code, a small modification can be added to your system to add the last mailed source code to the order. This allows your company to truly track the performance of a specific source code that has been mailed. Otherwise, mailed source code results may be very misleading without factoring web orders. An option would need to exist to indicate the number of days between a mailing and a web order to count towards the source code.
Many simple changes can be made to allow web orders to be properly attributed to an original source code. With web orders increasing steadily, it will become more important for multi-channel marketers to know the true results of their particular source codes.