Record when a visitor types their email into the Intercom Messenger, and see it on that visitor’s journey next to the ad, keyword or referral that brought them.
SourceTrack registers Intercom’s onUserEmailSupplied callback in the browser. It records that a chat lead was captured. It never reads or forwards the email address, the visitor’s name or any message text.
Why connect Intercom with SourceTrack
- Automatic callback: Intercom calls SourceTrack when a visitor supplies an email in the Messenger. No extra code is needed.
- Lead capture, not chat opens: Opening the Messenger is not recorded as a lead.
- Acquisition stitching: The chat lead sits on the same journey as the visitor’s source, medium and campaign.
- Full visitor timelines: See the pages the visitor browsed before they gave their email.
What SourceTrack records
- A chat lead event: A journey event named
chat_lead_captured, with Intercom as the provider. - Acquisition context: First-touch and last-touch source, referrer and landing page, as for any visit.
What SourceTrack does not do
- It does not read the email address, the name or any message text.
- A chat lead is a journey event. It is not a counted conversion, and it is not sent to ad platforms or to a CRM.
Step-by-step setup
Step 1: Install Intercom and SourceTrack
Make sure both the Intercom Messenger script and the SourceTrack tracking code are loaded on your website.
Step 2: Nothing else to configure
SourceTrack registers Intercom('onUserEmailSupplied') on page load. It does not bind onShow or onHide.
Step 3: Test a chat
Open your site in a new private window, start a chat and type an email into the Messenger. The chat lead appears on that visitor’s journey in SourceTrack.
What you will see in SourceTrack
Open the visitor’s journey from your leads or visitors view. The chat lead shows up as a step labelled Chat lead captured, with a small chip naming the widget that captured it (Intercom). It sits in time order between the pageviews before it and any later step, so you can read the whole path: the ad or search that brought the visitor, the pages they browsed, and the moment they gave an email in the chat.
How it works under the hood
The SourceTrack tracker runs in the visitor’s browser. After the page loads it looks for the Intercom script on the page and, when it finds it, registers Intercom’s onUserEmailSupplied callback through the Intercom function. It retries about every half second, for up to roughly five seconds, so a widget that loads a moment after the tracker is still picked up.
Intercom documents this callback as firing only when a visitor enters their email into the Messenger. A boot or update call from your own code that carries an email does not fire it, so no extra guard is needed. It is a registration, not an assignment, so it does not replace any handler your own site has set.
When the callback fires, the tracker sends one small event, chat_lead_captured, with the provider name, the page address and path, and the visitor and session ids it already uses for every pageview. Each callback is written to take no arguments at all, so the email, the name and the message text are never even handed to SourceTrack’s code. Repeats of the same event on the same page are de-duplicated.
Test it end to end
- Open a new private window and visit the page through a link with UTM tags, for example
?utm_source=test&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=chat-check. - Open the Messenger launcher and start a conversation.
- Type an email address into the Messenger when it asks for one.
- In SourceTrack, find the visitor and open their journey. Check for the Chat lead captured step and the Intercom chip.
Common problems and fixes
- Do Not Track, Global Privacy Control or missing consent. The tracker sends nothing for that visitor. Test in a window without those signals.
- Consent is not given. Where your site requires consent before tracking, the chat lead is only recorded once tracking is allowed for that visitor.
- The SourceTrack snippet is not on the page that has the widget. Both scripts must run on the same page. Check the page source for the snippet, not just the site’s home page.
- The widget loads very late. SourceTrack watches for only a few seconds after page load. A widget injected much later, for example after a delayed tag manager rule, can be missed. Load it earlier or without the delay.
Related guides
- How to track UTM parameters in Intercom
- Troubleshooting tracking problems
- All integrations
- UTM validator tool
Frequently Asked Questions
Does this require custom webhook code?
No. SourceTrack registers Intercom’s browser callback on the page. Nothing is sent from Intercom’s servers.
Can I forward Intercom leads to Google Ads or Meta CAPI?
No. A chat lead is recorded as a journey event only. It is not a counted conversion and it is not sent to ad platforms or to a CRM.
Does an email sent by my own Intercom boot code create a lead?
No. Intercom documents the callback as firing for an email the visitor enters in the Messenger, not for one your code supplies.
