Seeing website activity for a contact

[hsriskantha]

Hello!

I am trying to track website activity for a contact. 

We have a form on our website, where contacts can sign up. However, this does not call the Forms API directly, and we would prefer not to do this. Instead, we call our own API, which in turn creates a contact using the Contacts API. 

Once we get a response back on the website, we do the following, in the hope of connecting the website activity being tracked by the HubSpot cookie with the contact we've just created: 

if (window && window._hsq) {
  window._hsq.push(['identify', {
    email: <EMAIL_ADDRESS> 
  }]);
  window._hsq.push(['trackEvent', {
    id: 'Submitted landlord form',
  }]);
}

This seems to be working, because I can then see the event through Reports > Analytics Tools > Events. But when I click on the contact in HubSpot, all I can see in the Website Activity section is: "Website activity shows you how many times a contact has visited your site and viewed your pages." (I also can't see the event under Activity, but maybe this is the expected behaviour.) 

Any help with this would be very much appreciated 

[jackcoldrick]

Hi @hsriskantha ,

I went to your website, accepted cookies and browsed a few pages before submitting the form on: https://www.lyvly.uk/landlords#signup.

It created a contact in HubSpot as expected and I've looked at the timeline of the contact. I can see the page views and if I view the web analytics information within the properties section I can see metrics being pulled in.

Please feel free to check by looking at contact with ID: 6550001 in the portal. See below also:

TIMELINE DATA SHOWING PAGE VIEWS:

WEB ANALYTICS PROPERTIES SHOWING METRICS:

I wonder if perhaps you are sending submissions on a filtered IP which would prevent this from showing up.

Regards,

Jack

[hsriskantha]

Hi @jackcoldrick,

Thanks for this -- the web analytics is indeed working as expected for 'real' contacts. 

A related issue: we see some of our leads have "Ads Activity", (e.g. "<contact> clicked on your Google Ads ad <ad name>"). However, the "Contact Created" activity still lists them as coming from Organic Search.

Is there anything we need to do to make sure this information is correct?

(Also: please let me know if I should create a separate thread for this.)

Thanks,

- Hari.

[jackcoldrick · Accepted solution]

Hi @hsriskantha,

It is entirely possible for a contact created organically to later click on a Google Ad. Providing HubSpot is connected to your Google Adwords account we will track these clicks. This happens despite them being created from a different source whether Organic, Referral, Email Marketing, Social etc...

However, I did notice something unusual. If you take the Contact with ID: 3580701 you will see that they were created organically on November 2019. However they originally clicked on an ad in September 2019 (before). I looked at the history of the original source property and I can see that it was correctly set to "Paid search" in November. However it was then updated via API to "Organic Search" a couple of seconds later. See below:

This leads me to believe that you may be overriding what HubSpot is setting using either a third party or custom integration. I would have no other visibility than this however.

I hope this helps!

Jack

[hsriskantha]

Ah yes, I've found where we've done this 

Thanks for your help!

[jackcoldrick]

No problem glad to have helped provide some insights! 🙂