Answers
Lead rules: whose leads count, and what junk is
Out of the box, every contact created in your CRM is a lead. That is right for most businesses and wrong for two kinds: an app that also holds somebody else’s leads (an agency whose clients’ prospects land in the same Keap), and an app whose automation tags spammers the moment they arrive. Both were counted, and both were showing up in the morning brief as people to chase.
Lead rules fix that, in Settings → Tracking → Lead rules. Four kinds, and you can use any of them alone or together. Three of them say who counts; one says who never does.
Only these tags
Count only contacts carrying at least one of the tags you pick: your prospects tag, say, or the tag your intake form applies. This is the rule to reach for when you know who your leads ARE, which is most businesses, and it is far easier than listing everyone who is not one when your CRM holds hundreds of tags. Leave it empty and a contact’s tags do not decide anything.
Junk tags
Pick the tag or tags your CRM applies to spam. A contact carrying one is never counted, whatever else it matches: out of the lead counts, out of the follow up nudge, out of the brief. Junk is judged first, so a spammer is never somebody else’s lead either. Both pickers list every one of your own tags, all of them, and narrow as you type; we never invent one.
Owners
Pick the CRM users whose contacts are yours. A contact owned by anybody else counts as belonging to another owner, not to you. This is by the CRM’s own owner field, never by a tag: a tag is a label somebody applied, an owner is who the CRM says is responsible. Leave it empty and every owner counts, which is what you had before.
Field rules
Count only contacts where a field holds a value: a custom field, or the CRM’s own fields (contact type and source type on Keap, source and type on HighLevel). “Client is Pool Builder Marketing”, “Source type is not empty”, that sort of thing. When you add more than one, all of them have to hold.
Keap and HighLevel
Both. Keap keys tags by id and HighLevel by name, and neither of those details reaches you: you pick from a list either way. One HighLevel difference is worth knowing: HighLevel does not let us read its user list, so the Owners picker there shows the assigned user ids we have seen on your contacts rather than people’s names. Pick the id, and the rule works exactly the same.
Every number says what it is based on
A rule never deletes or hides anyone in your CRM. Every number that shows leads says, first, what it is based on, in your own names: the LEADS tile reads “Based on contacts owned by Ann or Ravi, tagged Prospect. Junk is anyone tagged Spammer.”, the settings card says the same under Counting now, and the morning brief opens its lead lines with it. What a rule left out is still counted beside it, as “left out: 9 junk, 40 outside your rules”, because a smaller number that says why is the one you can quote. You read what you are looking at; the arithmetic stays honest underneath.
When it takes effect
At the next data refresh, within a few hours. If you set rules on an account that has been with us a while, the first refresh may say some leads are “not yet checked against your lead rules”: those contacts were stored before we carried owner and tags, they are counted rather than excluded on a guess, and the nightly full refresh fills them in.
While we are here: three brief lines that changed
The “paid $199/mo for 8 months but nothing since” tip now reads the rhythm of the payments before it speaks. An annual payer shows as annual and is left alone until a year and a bit has passed with nothing paid, and a run with no rhythm gets no tip at all, because three payments at random intervals is not a subscription. The wording is “may be worth a call”, because it is a guess, and a guess should sound like one.
The follow up line says “at least 25 of your newest leads” when we checked 25 and there were more. We check 25 per refresh so a busy week cannot stall the publish, and the old line presented that cap as the total.