It looks like Hubspot is wrongly attributing lead sources in the following situation: users visit the website but don’t submit their contact details, then they come back via another traffic source and finally submit their details and become contacts. But Hubspot is attributing the lead source to the first website visit traffic source. It’e basically first click instead of the click that actually resulted in a user becoming a contact.
I checked and found out the lead source is being attributed after the contact is synched with the Salesforce lead source picklist. So basically when Salesforce is matching the lead source list, it looks at the first website interaction, not at the intraction that actually resulted in contact details being submitted.
Any idea how to change it so that the correct lead source is being attributed?
HubSpot automatically maintains different fields for this:
Original source: the first known source through which the contact found your website. This is automatically set by HubSpot. HubSpot is capturing the earliest known interaction, as soon as the website visitor accepts cookies. This could be direct traffic, social, paid etc.
First conversion: the first landing page and form the contact submitted on. This doesn’t have to do anything with traffic sources but might also be helpful for you.
There isn’t any field that stores the first known source associated with the first conversion, this does not exist out of the box.
If you wanted to store the source of the first conversion, this is something you would need workflows for. (In other words, without a Professional subscription, it’s not possible.)
The approach would be to create a property “utm_source” and “original utm_source”. You would implement the first property in your website form as explained here: Tracking utm parameters in HubSpot forms
In a contact-based workflow, you would then copy the value from the “utm_source” to “original utm_source”. This step is necessary as the form will overwrite “utm_source” with each form submission. By default, contact-based workflows enroll contacts only once, so “original utm_source” would stay the same and store capture the utm source parameter that was attached to a URL when a person submitted a form on your website. (It would however not capture the utm source if the person has viewed other pages before. By clicking to another page, the utm parameter would be removed.)
As you can see, it’s not entirely possible. It’s a limitation of the tool. My personal recommendation is to not focus on this too much and work with what HubSpot is offering out of the box.
Let me know if you have any follow-up questions. Hope this helps!
Hi @MaiaP ,
HubSpot stores the information about how the contact came to your CRM under ‘Original source’ property.
The Original source property tells you the first known source through which a contact interacted with your business.
Then ,there are two Original and Latest source drill-down properties that tell you additional information about the source through which a contact interacted with your business: Source drill-down 1 and Source drill-down 2.
All this web analytics history is maintained by HubSpot only and there is no way you can change it.
Check out this article here.
Hope this helps!
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