I'm running into a reoccuring problem when it comes to attributing marketing activities to ecommerce deals/orders in HubSpot. Specifically, Original Source Type is populating as "Offline Sources" for deals created in HubSpot via ecommerce integrations. When then attempting to display revenue by source or customers by source for ecommerce purchases, my data displays dramatically skewed with almost every deal being attributed to "Offline Sources" ergo Paid Search, Organic, etc., are not getting credit for the sales they brought it. This is happening in three different situations: - A Shopify/HubSpot native integration - A third party connector by Randem Group used to connect BigCommerce and HubSpot - A custom build integration between HubSpot and OpenCart
I would figure all three of these instances use the same API documentation therefore a solution for one would be a solution for them all.
My ask is does anyone know how I can get Original Source Type to pull accurately for deals created by purchases occuring in ecomm shopping carts then pushed into HubSpot?
Apologies for the delayed response. Happy to clarify further.
Contacts created via the Ecommerce Bridge — which those integrations are built upon — will always have the Original Source "Offline Sources" by default. These values will then populate their associated deals' Original source type properties.
HubSpot assigns Original Source values like "Paid Search" and "Social Media" by analyzing tracking data, which cannot be passed through the Ecommerce Bridge or the Contacts API.
Per this article, however, contacts' Original Source values can change if analytics information predating the contact's "Offline Sources" creation is captured by a form. If you have the HubSpot tracking code on your website and listing pages, the original source data can be passed if the visitor submits a HubSpot form or Forms API-integrated form.
With this said, the Shopify integration is unique in that our documentation states that:
Contacts that are synced over and created in HubSpot after the Shopify integration is set up will have Original source drill-down 1 and Original source drill-down 2 values based on their original source type as determined by Shopify. These contacts will be cookied and will be tracked in HubSpot as soon as they sync over from Shopify.
This isn't possible solely through the Ecommerce Bridge, so the integration must use some other channel (e.g. a supplementary Forms API submission).
If you can share links to a few contacts who were created via Shopify after the initial import and a link to your Shopify store, I can verify whether the tracking code is firing correctly and whether we would expect most Shopify contacts to be attributed to their true online original sources.
Apologies for the delayed response. Happy to clarify further.
Contacts created via the Ecommerce Bridge — which those integrations are built upon — will always have the Original Source "Offline Sources" by default. These values will then populate their associated deals' Original source type properties.
HubSpot assigns Original Source values like "Paid Search" and "Social Media" by analyzing tracking data, which cannot be passed through the Ecommerce Bridge or the Contacts API.
Per this article, however, contacts' Original Source values can change if analytics information predating the contact's "Offline Sources" creation is captured by a form. If you have the HubSpot tracking code on your website and listing pages, the original source data can be passed if the visitor submits a HubSpot form or Forms API-integrated form.
With this said, the Shopify integration is unique in that our documentation states that:
Contacts that are synced over and created in HubSpot after the Shopify integration is set up will have Original source drill-down 1 and Original source drill-down 2 values based on their original source type as determined by Shopify. These contacts will be cookied and will be tracked in HubSpot as soon as they sync over from Shopify.
This isn't possible solely through the Ecommerce Bridge, so the integration must use some other channel (e.g. a supplementary Forms API submission).
If you can share links to a few contacts who were created via Shopify after the initial import and a link to your Shopify store, I can verify whether the tracking code is firing correctly and whether we would expect most Shopify contacts to be attributed to their true online original sources.
Any chance you could expand on the supplementary forms api submission more? Based on other recent conversations I've had with various support staff at HubSpot I figured it had to be something along these lines, I just don't know specifically what in the forms API I need to direct my dev team to (again, I'm not a dev guy).
I'll try to find out exactly how we pass cookie data with our native Shopify integration.
In the meantime, I'm happy to clarify what I meant:
The Forms API allows you to pass a visitor's hubspotutk cookie (more info on all HubSpot cookies here) via the hutk field in the context object. It's up to you to retrieve the hubspotutk cookie's value with JavaScript or some other method, but then you can include it in your request to the Forms API. If the cookie value contains tracking information, it will populate the contact record which is created or updated via the form submission. This in turn affects and updates properties like Original Source.
The Forms API is one of the only ways to get cookie tracking information onto a contact record, so that's why I said the Shopify integration might be using a form submission to supplement the data passed via the Ecommerce sync message.
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