Attribution reports do no support conferences well, and I don’t see any great workarounds.
In our attribution settings, we keep contact import off as an interaction type. It’s not generally a meaningful interaction. I can’t turn it on just for conferences. It shouldn’t be synonymous with conferences.
Lists have limitations across attribution. They basically don’t work.
I’m not sure marketing events would be the solution, but there are limitations within the options and it will not apply retroactively.
Ideally there is some custom interaction that can be setup for conferences / offline. Very important as conferences are a huge spend for marketing teams. Conferences deserve their own interaction, it can’t be lists, import or some other option with limitations.
Upvoted. Conferences are one of the biggest line items in the marketing budget and the worst tracked thing in the portal.
Quick disclosure: I build an events app for HubSpot (EventEngine).
The workaround that works today: get a form submission onto the contact instead of an import. Attribution reports count form submissions. They ignore imports and lists, which is the wall you’ve hit. So for booth scans, even a simple internal “conference check-in” form, filled in by your team or pushed through the Forms API, gives attribution something it can count.
You’re right about marketing events. Registration and attendance land on the contact timeline, which is useful for reporting, but they don’t behave as attribution interactions and none of it applies retroactively.
That gap is why our registrations run through a HubSpot form on your own domain. Every registrant shows up in attribution as a real form submission, and QR check-in stamps attendance on the marketing event record. It won’t fix past conferences, but the next one stops being invisible.
+1 for a proper offline interaction type. Very happy to be corrected if HubSpot ships one.
Here’s how it shows up if you run events through EventEngine App.
