Google Ads > Gravity Forms > HubSpot

Marketing & Content Ads
1

Hi,

I’m having a few issues tracking the contacts that have been generated from Google Ad campaigns.

Here’s the current process;

  1. A user clicks on a Google Advert.
  2. They send a website contact form via Gravity Forms (WordPress).
  3. All fields including UTM parameter fields are sent to HubSpot.
  4. A new contact is created in HubSpot (again including all UTM fields).

Then when I look into HubSpot Marketing > Ads, I can see no new contacts have been created against the integrated Google Ads account. I can see the live campaigns, but no contacts are being generated against them.

The Setup:

  1. Google Ads has been connected to HubSpot with Auto tracking enabled.
  2. WordPress website utilises Gravity Forms. Gravity Forms has been connected to HubSpot using the Gravity Form HubSpot add-on.
  3. We use the WordPress plugin UTMGrabber HandL to sync the UTM parameters from the campaigns with Gravity Forms.
  4. New contacts imported into HubSpot show the UTM parameters.
  5. UTM parameters being used - utm_medium, utm_source, utm_term & utm_campaign.

Any ideas?

Many Thanks

Alex

2

Hey @AChadwick is the HubSpot tracking code installed on your pages? If so, is the gravity forms integration sending cookies with your form submissions? You can check this by going into the form receiving the submissions within HubSpot, checking your submissions and clicking on any specific submission. The panel on the right should show a warning if it’s not receiving cookies.

If the form isn’t sending cookies HubSpot can’t track them and won’t attribute these to your ads. There’s a great guide on all that’s needed for ad attribution on the knowledgebase here:

3

Hi,

Coming back to this issue, we have a few clients on HubSpot and use Gravity Forms. The contacts that come from Google Ads still do not populate within the HubSpot marketing tab under Google Ads.

The HubSpot tracking codes are on the website and when we check the form within HubSpot, it shows nothing to flag that no cookies are not being sent.

Any other ideas on why this could be happening?

Thanks

Alex

4

Hey @AChadwick My best guess here is that gravity forms isn’t passing the HubSpot cookie to HubSpot, if you look under your submissions in HubSpot forms do you see warnings about cookies not being sent?

5

What is the specific HubSpot cookie ID that needs to be passed over? Any further technical information on specific cookies or examples would be much appreciated.

The HubSpot embedded code has been added and auto tracking enabled within the HubSpot Google Ads settings.

Thanks

6

Hey @AChadwick it’s the HUTK cookie, There’s a guide on all that’s needed in the dev docs which might help! here

7

The short answer is:

The reason your contacts are not showing up in the HubSpot Marketing > Ads report, despite having the UTMs correctly captured, is likely a disconnect between HubSpot’s ad tracking cookie and the contact creation method.

HubSpot’s Ads tool relies on its own tracking cookie to link a contact to an ad click ID (gclid) and the correct ad campaign in the ad reporting dashboard, but your process of using Gravity Forms’ HubSpot add-on to push form fields, including UTMs, as contact properties bypasses this specific ad-tracking mechanism.

The ad platform report needs to see the click ID, which is typically stored in the HubSpot cookie, not just the UTM parameters you are passing manually.

The solution is to transition to a server-side tracking approach using the Google Ads API and the HubSpot API to send the conversion data and gclid directly, ensuring the ad platform gets the confirmation it needs to populate the HubSpot Ads dashboard :white_check_mark:

The long answer is:

Your setup is common, and you have correctly identified that manually passing UTM parameters via hidden fields or a tool like UTMGrabber HandL gets the marketing source information onto the contact record.

However, the HubSpot Ads tool relies on two critical pieces of data to link a conversion to a specific ad campaign in its dashboard: the gclid (Google Click Identifier) and the HubSpot tracking cookie.

When a user clicks a Google Ad, the gclid is appended to the URL.

The HubSpot tracking code on your website captures this gclid and stores it in the user’s browser cookie.

When the user fills out a form, HubSpot’s native forms or its direct integration mechanism checks this cookie and uses the stored gclid to tell the HubSpot Ads tool which specific ad the conversion belongs to.

By using the Gravity Forms HubSpot add-on to push contact properties, you are only sending the UTMs that were present in the URL or stored by your UTMGrabber tool; you are not necessarily sending the gclid or triggering the specific server-side event that HubSpot’s Ads tool needs to create the link.

The HubSpot ad platform is likely not seeing the event that links the conversion to the stored cookie data.

A far more reliable and robust solution that overcomes cookie dependency and integration ambiguity is to create a server-side pipeline.

This would involve configuring Gravity Forms to send its submission data via a Gravity Forms REST API v2 call or webhook to a server-side environment like Stape or Google Cloud Platform, managed by Google Tag Manager.

When the form submits, your server-side script intercepts the data, including the gclid (which should be captured by a hidden field in your form and passed along).

This script would then use the Google Ads API to send the conversion back to Google, giving Google the direct confirmation it needs for its internal reporting.

Simultaneously, the script would use the HubSpot API to create or update the contact, making sure to explicitly pass the gclid and any other necessary tracking identifiers directly to the contact record via the API payload.

This method guarantees that the critical gclid is present in both your conversion confirmation (for Google) and the contact record (for HubSpot), ensuring that HubSpot’s reporting correctly attributes the contact to the campaign within the HubSpot Ads dashboard, regardless of any browser-side cookie issues :white_check_mark:

This comment was generated with the assistance of an AI tool, incorporating my expertise in conversion tracking :slightly_smiling_face: