  Based on the QCD dipole picture of the BFKL Pomeron, we investigate the role
played by the saturation scale, Q_{sat}, in obtaining physical values for the
affective strong coupling in phenomenological fits to small-x HERA data. The
dependence on this scale appears since the collection of color dipoles
characterizing the proton target have average size 1/Q_{sat}, which is energy
dependent. Physically, this means most of the color dipoles are above but
sufficiently close to the border between a saturated and the dilute system. The
analysis is first performed in the leading-logs BFKL approach in the
saddle-point approximation and it could shed light in further investigations
using resummed NLO BFKL kernels
