Question about leads marked as Direct Traffic

Smart CRM & Sales Hub Tips, Tricks & Best Practices
1

i everyone,

I am reviewing my contacts in the CRM and several of them are showing as Direct Traffic with the URL mysite.com/meetings…

What confuses me is:

  • It does not show if the lead actually clicked on the HubSpot CTA I set up as a button.
  • I cannot see which pages they visited before booking the meeting.
  • I am not sure if this traffic should be considered organic or if it is coming from somewhere else (e.g. social media, email, etc.).

Does anyone know how I can more accurately identify the source of these leads and track their journey before the conversion?

Thanks in advance!

2

Hi @Iscrisvesu ,

The referrer can be missing (typed/bookmarked links, restricted mobile apps/email clients, or HTTPS→HTTP hops), which HubSpot buckets as Direct. If visitors don’t accept cookies or the hit happens on an untracked page, the source can’t be determined and is counted as Direct traffic.

I know this can be frustrating, not being able to track accurate CTA performance. The best approach would be to link the UTM-tracked URL to the CTA

Go to Settings > Tracking & Analytics > Tracking URLs > Create tracking URL with page/campaign/source details > Use the meetings page URL as the destination. Create tracking URLs

Update your HubSpot CTA to link to the new tracking URL (not the raw /meetings link).

Use the same tracking URL wherever you promote the meeting, so visits/bookings are bucketed under the correct source and campaign.

For this CTA (meeting) specific journey analysis: Attribution report, choose a multi‑touch model and configure filters to focus on your meetings page/campaign so you can see upstream touchpoints (page views, clicks) that influenced the conversion. Create attribution reports

For contact’s activity on the website, ensure the HubSpot tracking code is working.

If this helps, feel free to mark it as the solution :check_mark: and give it an upvote :+1: !

3

The thing is, if I go with the UTM approach, it forces me to assign a source. And that is not really what I want. What I would like to know is where the person who clicked the CTA originally came from.

4

Exactly this. If you wrap a meetings link with a UTM on website, then you know that the click came from that specific link with that UTM but nothing more. There’s no info on the source, if it’s organic or paid social. Anyone knows if there’s any difference when you embed a meetings link vs when you use a Hubspot hosted meeting link? Is there anything that can be done with GTM or GA4?

5

Hi @Iscrisvesu,

There is more info HubSpot captures and it’s stored in Web analytics history properties. Some of the following properties could help you determine the source:

  • First page seen
  • First referring site
  • Original Traffic Source
  • Original Traffic Source Drill-Down
  • Last Traffic Source
  • Last Traffic Source Drill-Down

Here is an article that might help.

As for CTA interactions, page views, they are displayed under Activities, in the middle of a contact page.

Best,

Chaofan Wu

6

I get the confusion here. In 2025, the “Direct Traffic” label in HubSpot still basically means “we don’t know,” but the ways to reduce that blind spot have improved.

When you see /meetings show up as direct, it’s usually because the original referrer was lost this can happen if the link is shared inside apps like WhatsApp or LinkedIn, if the visitor typed/bookmarked the URL, or if tracking was stripped in a privacy browser. HubSpot will bucket those as direct since no referrer survives.

The cleanest way to get more visibility today is to make sure your meeting links are always wrapped with UTMs and not just dropped raw. That way HubSpot won’t guess they’ll inherit the parameters you set.

If you don’t want to “force assign” a source, you can use more neutral UTMs (like source=shared-link) and then cross-check with Attribution Reports to see the upstream pages and campaigns that touched that contact before the meeting (Create attribution reports )

Also, don’t miss the Web Analytics History properties. In 2025 they’ve become more reliable for surfacing things like “First page seen” and “Original source drill-down,” which lets you piece together the journey even when the last click is obscured

If you notice gaps, the issue is often that the HubSpot tracking code wasn’t firing on every page where the user moved before booking.

So in 2025, the rule of thumb is: meetings links without UTMs almost always inflate Direct. Wrapping those links and leaning on multi-touch attribution is the modern way to see where they actually came from. Hope this clears the fog.