topic Re: Intermediate Touches in Tips, Tricks & Best Practices

Intermediate Touches

Stacks42 — Wed, 21 May 2025 17:15:17 GMT

Hello Community,

We have StackAdapt integrated with HubSpot and I am wondering if it is possible to track and tag Contacts that engaged with a retargeting ad. Is there a way to do this with a custom property? Or am I limited to the First and Last Touch fields using a UTM? One of my colleages suggested maybe a custom property that could track Yes/No if they ever were hit with the retargeting ad. I'm not sure what the best way would be to solve this? It would basically be how to handle intermediate touch points via retargeting. Not sure if Campaigns would be the answer as an ad can only be associated to a single campaign.

Thanks!

Re: Intermediate Touches

ArisudanTiwari — Wed, 21 May 2025 17:39:17 GMT

Hello @Stacks42 ,
HubSpot doesn’t currently offer a native way to track intermediate (middle) touches. However, you can work around this by either:

Creating a custom multi-touch attribution model, or
Using a custom property, as your colleague suggested.

Here’s a simple way to set up and track middle-touch attribution:

1. Create a Custom Property
Go to HubSpot and create a contact property, something like "Engaged with Retargeting Ad."
You can set it as a checkbox (Yes/No), a dropdown, or even a date field if you'd like more detail with the date stamp.

2. Set Up a Workflow
Build a workflow that triggers when someone views a page with UTM parameters from your retargeting ads, or submits a form linked to a retargeting campaign

Apply the next step (Action) - Update the “Engaged with Retargeting Ad” property to Yes.

If you want to track and capture more insight, then you can create additional properties like:

Last Retargeting Touch Date – a date field to track when the interaction happened
Retargeting Ad Campaign Name – a text field to capture which campaign drove the engagement

This approach provides a scalable way to monitor retargeting engagement and bridge HubSpot’s attribution gaps. Let me know if you’d like assistance implementing this, I’m happy to help!

Re: Intermediate Touches

Stacks42 — Wed, 21 May 2025 17:45:21 GMT

Agreed. I thought the property could update via workflow whenever the Last Touch Campaign (UTM) contains a specific value, like in this case it would be Arizona campaign. Even though the latest traffic source Could overwrite, we would already have the tag applied to the contact.

Re: Intermediate Touches

Josh — Wed, 21 May 2025 17:50:39 GMT

Hi @Stacks42,

Your colleague was on the right track, I think. You can use ad engagement as workflow criteria:

You could then create an action to set the property value as mentioned:

Or you could even use a number property and have it increase a number for each time the contact runs through the workflow (each ad engagement).

As for the campaigns, you MIGHT be able to do this with campaign influence enrollment:

I would personally lean toward the custom property in this scenario, especially if your ads aren't necessarily specific to one campaign in HubSpot. Using the number to increase ad interactions as they are mid-journey would help from a reporting perspective because you can gauge how many times each contact is engaging.

Keep in mind, there are some challenges here, particularly cookies, multiple devices, etc.

Josh