My team has been trying to get our website traffic tracking to work for a while, with limited success. It logs some traffic, but shows no new users, no page views, and as a whole traffic is significantly lower than reported in GA.
Thanks for sharing the details. Based on what you’ve described, there are likely two main reasons your traffic reports aren’t matching up with Google Analytics:
1. HubSpot Free Plan Limitation
On the free plan, HubSpot only tracks sessions from known contacts, meaning visitors who’ve filled out a form or clicked through a HubSpot email. Anonymous traffic isn’t fully tracked, which is why your data looks incomplete compared to GA.
2. Cookie Banner Behavior
Even if your banner is set to allow cookies by default, HubSpot may still limit tracking unless the visitor explicitly accepts the cookies. Some browsers and privacy tools also block tracking scripts automatically. What you can do: 1. Double-check your cookie settings
Go to Settings > Privacy & Consent > Cookies in HubSpot and make sure tracking is allowed by default. Also, confirm there’s nothing else (like a third-party privacy tool or script) interfering.
2. Upgrade to Marketing Hub Starter or higher to access full traffic/session analytics (including anonymous visitors). Helpful links:
I feel like the plan limitations are likely responsible for the traffic report. I’m less sure about the activity on the contact record. These are my cookie settings:
Even if your cookie settings say “enabled by default,” HubSpot might still wait for explicit consent before it starts tracking especially if GDPR settings are turned on. So if people aren’t clicking “Accept,” they might not get tracked at all.
“Allow tracking before consent” Then open your site in incognito and check if the tracking works better.
Some WordPress setups (especially with cookie plugins) load the HubSpot script after everything else and by that time, it’s missed the page view entirely.
You could try using Google Tag Manager or placing the HubSpot tracking code manually in your theme’s <head> section to make sure it fires right away.
