topic Re: Over 80% of recent leads are coming in as Direct in Dashboards & Reporting

Over 80% of recent leads are coming in as Direct

sblocksidge — Tue, 05 Jul 2022 13:42:15 GMT

For the past year or so, there has been a rapid progression of lead sources not being appropriately tracked via the HubSpot forms on our website. I have gone through all of the steps mentioned in various help articles and we check all the boxes, yet it is still occurring. The code is on all our pages (in the header code), there are no UTMs that contain "direct" in them, we enabled a cookies policy via our HubSpot account, and our domain is secure (and redirecting to HTTPS). Thankfully, some of the leads I have been able to trace in Google Analytics to double check the source, but we also are missing key info such as "first page seen" and other things that help our content strategy. We pay for HubSpot mainly for this reason so we can obtain crucial ROI information. We are not a big or well-known company, and most of the direct leads are to deeper inner pages with multiple paths that are highly unlikely to be typed into the browser manually. I have also seen many other posts stating this same issue. Is this something the team is working on to fix or improve?

Re: Over 80% of recent leads are coming in as Direct

TitiCuisset — Mon, 11 Jul 2022 10:29:05 GMT

Hi @sblocksidge

Thank you for reaching out!

I want to share with you this article that lists multiple reasons why this could be happening - I think a couple of them could help here.

If you think those do not apply to you and think there is an issue, I would recommend connecting with HubSpot Technical Support, as Support is included in your subscription and they will be able to provide real-time assistance for this matter, where you are able to share screenshots and further information about this.

I however also want to tag some of our experts here that may be able to help - @Ben_M @Aakar @Jnix284 do you have any thoughts for @sblocksidge on this?

Thank you!

Best

Tiphaine

Re: Over 80% of recent leads are coming in as Direct

Jnix284 — Mon, 11 Jul 2022 11:30:16 GMT

Hi @sblocksidge , outside of the reasons listed in the article @TitiCuisset provided, the only thing I can think of that might be happening is if you might have more than one tracking code added to your pages or if you have a lot of AMP traffic.

Also, one suggestion, you stated you have the code in the header for all of your pages - for page load / site speed reasons, I suggest moving this to your footer instead. I am not sure if this could also impact the performance of the tracking code. Here's info on installing the tracking code so you can double check it is properly set up.

Re: Over 80% of recent leads are coming in as Direct

sblocksidge — Mon, 11 Jul 2022 12:05:26 GMT

Thanks, I will try the footer for the code! We definitely do not get a lot of amp traffic at all. and sadly the rest of the things mentioned in the article mentioned by Tiphaine have all been ruled out

Re: Over 80% of recent leads are coming in as Direct

Ben_M — Mon, 11 Jul 2022 12:40:00 GMT

Can you post a link to your site for us to see first hand what is going on?

Re: Over 80% of recent leads are coming in as Direct

sblocksidge — Mon, 11 Jul 2022 12:45:33 GMT

https://www.sixthcitymarketing.com/

Re: Over 80% of recent leads are coming in as Direct

Ben_M — Mon, 11 Jul 2022 17:27:46 GMT

Couple things I am noticing. One unrelated is that you are calling your Google Analytics UA version 2x on the page. So I would be suspect to read those numbers as multiple instances could cause issues in reporting.

With the Hubspot form I noticed you are using WP Rocket to lazy load the script. Do you still get the same result if you remove the lazy loading?

Re: Over 80% of recent leads are coming in as Direct

sblocksidge — Wed, 13 Jul 2022 13:12:47 GMT

Weird - we only have 1 UA code in the backend, it might be from some plugin we have it connected to?

And I just excluded the HubSpot scripts from the lazy loading, we need that implemented for our page speed, will see if that helps

Re: Over 80% of recent leads are coming in as Direct

Ben_M — Wed, 13 Jul 2022 20:45:28 GMT

I just checked Google on your site and it's not happening on all pages so could have been a bad implementation or someone missed code on the page. Personally speaking, I would always recommend the use of a Tag Manager (Adobe/Google) to prevent this type of issue. But this page as an example: https://www.sixthcitymarketing.com/services/search-engine-optimization/ . If you look at lines 41 and 125, you will see this code: ga('send', 'pageview') which is sending page views 2x to your analytics platform which is likely triggering the duplicate issue. Honestly at this point, if you haven't transitioned to GA4 yet both of those pieces of code will become obsolete when UA (GA3) is retired this time next year ( https://support.google.com/analytics/answer/11583528?hl=en ).

For the lazy loading, while it can help page speed, it can also cause problems depending on the execution. By lazy loading, you can inadvertently pull things out of sequence because WP Rocket then controls the loading and the elements are not loaded asynchronously as they expect. This can cause unusual behavior at times so I would be interested to see if this clears up your issue or if it persists beyond this change.

Re: Over 80% of recent leads are coming in as Direct

sblocksidge — Thu, 14 Jul 2022 12:04:29 GMT

The duplicate code was due to a plugin, that has since been removed but some pages are likely caching. But, back to the issue I posted about, I believe it was due to the lazy loading - I altered the settings in WP Rocket to exclude both the HubSpot tracking code and the Hubspot form code from being included in any speed settings, so they should load properly now. we had a lead come in after I made that fix and it finally showed it came in as organic, for the first time in months.

Re: Over 80% of recent leads are coming in as Direct

sblocksidge — Wed, 25 Oct 2023 18:12:56 GMT

We are still having this issue despite various changes, it's on and off too, which is confusing, most forms come through like this even though we moved the code to the footer and have directed it not to be lazy-loaded:

Would this be something due to people opening multiple tabs?

Re: Over 80% of recent leads are coming in as Direct

sblocksidge — Wed, 25 Oct 2023 18:15:51 GMT

We have it in our WP Rocket to not include the HubSpot codes in lazy loading. And HubSpot codes are implemented correctly as its in the same header/footer file across the site, our issue has nothing to do with GA, it has to do with HubSpot code not picking up source correctly. See my latest other reply with screenshots.

Re: Over 80% of recent leads are coming in as Direct

prhewson — Fri, 08 Dec 2023 15:25:46 GMT

Did you manage to get to the bottom of this? We are experiencing the exact same issue - not quite as bad as 80%, but an odd amount of direct traffic leads and a decline in organic.

We also use WP rocket, so I have just asked my developer to check out the exclusions (at a glance the hs scripts are already excluded though). Really hoping there is something there to fix it.

Re: Over 80% of recent leads are coming in as Direct

PamCotton — Fri, 08 Dec 2023 15:52:53 GMT

Hey @prhewson, Happy Friday!

Have you followed the steps @Ben_M @Jnix284 provided? The more information, screenshots, and details you can provide, the better I can advise on the next steps. If you want to create a new post with more information we can start from there too.

Kindly,

Pam

Re: Over 80% of recent leads are coming in as Direct

sblocksidge — Fri, 08 Dec 2023 16:00:36 GMT

I haven't! We have done everything. It's very erratic. Some leads come in correctly and others don't. I have asked support numerous times and they just say it's because users use incognito windows/private browsers. The correct page/source will come through as "first referred site" so I am usually able to track things down manually, but it's super annoying.

Re: Over 80% of recent leads are coming in as Direct

PamCotton — Fri, 08 Dec 2023 19:00:16 GMT

Hey @sblocksidge

If you are still unable to log in after following these steps, I would still recommend reconnecting with HubSpot Technical Support, as Support is included in your subscription and they will be able to provide real-time assistance for this matter, including hopping on a screenshare if necessary.

Kindly,

Pam