Hi guys, I have noticed two distinct behaviors of contact creation when using the same browser to submit forms. Both are extremely suboptimal for our use case as we are a health care company and cannot afford to send an email to the wrong person.
The first is if there are multiple submissions of a form from the same browser, we have noticed that these submissions were merged into a single contact. The properties were overwritten, but the email was added as secondary. This is a nightmare for public computers, where we could put station up for users to submit a form, and all their information gets merged into a single vid. (And then when we want to target the lead we could send the message to a completely wrong person).
The second is a different behaviour of the exact same case. In this case we noticed that a user submitted a form , then another different user submitted the form, The contact vid email address was swapped, but the properties were out of sync! the Email address was of user2, and the first name and last name was of user1.
I understand this is a feature of cookie tracking, and with cookie tracking disabled we should be fine, however this setting is on a per-form basis and defaults to ON, making it trivial for us to make mistakes and errors.
In addition: even if this is a feature of cookie tracking, why the two different behaviours (overwrite vs add) for the email address?
An example of the first case was hubspot_contact_vid: 3021101 hubid: 4505273
An example of the second case was hubspot_contact_vid:37500551 hubid: 4505273
Apologies for the delayed response. HubSpot support is a better avenue for these types of general questions, as you'll almost always get a faster response, but I'm happy to offer some insight.
You are correct that these behaviors are tied to cookie tracking.
Your per-form observation is fair; it's sometimes easy to forget to disable this setting. While we don't have a way to disable cookie tracking across multiple forms or turn it off by default, the Forms API does put more flexibility in your hands (i.e. leaving out the hutk value on certain forms instead of just relying on someone to toggle the setting off in the UI).
Regarding those two contacts, I believe we're looking at a few separate behaviors here:
Most of this contact's form submissions were made with the v2 Forms API endpoint. Notably, the "Request an Appointment/Referral" form. This may behave differently than when an embedded form is submitted. I'd like to run some tests on my end to confirm this.
Looking at the history of this contact's email property, I can see three change sources: two form submissions and an "Analytics" source. The two form submissions correlate to the first name and last name being set correctly, but then the "Analytics" change only changed the contact's email back to its original value, "Cel...". The change source "Analytics" almost always indicates use of the identify function to me. In this case, the function would have only passed email and not a firstname or lastname value. That's why those properties weren't updated like they were with form submissions.
Apologies for the delayed response. HubSpot support is a better avenue for these types of general questions, as you'll almost always get a faster response, but I'm happy to offer some insight.
You are correct that these behaviors are tied to cookie tracking.
Your per-form observation is fair; it's sometimes easy to forget to disable this setting. While we don't have a way to disable cookie tracking across multiple forms or turn it off by default, the Forms API does put more flexibility in your hands (i.e. leaving out the hutk value on certain forms instead of just relying on someone to toggle the setting off in the UI).
Regarding those two contacts, I believe we're looking at a few separate behaviors here:
Most of this contact's form submissions were made with the v2 Forms API endpoint. Notably, the "Request an Appointment/Referral" form. This may behave differently than when an embedded form is submitted. I'd like to run some tests on my end to confirm this.
Looking at the history of this contact's email property, I can see three change sources: two form submissions and an "Analytics" source. The two form submissions correlate to the first name and last name being set correctly, but then the "Analytics" change only changed the contact's email back to its original value, "Cel...". The change source "Analytics" almost always indicates use of the identify function to me. In this case, the function would have only passed email and not a firstname or lastname value. That's why those properties weren't updated like they were with form submissions.
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