Traffic Attribution

[primt]

I am a little bit consufed as to how Hubspot allows to attribute traffic sources to a new Contact.

Originally, I created a contact through API calls alongside my backend object creation. 

But because most of the traffic showed to be from offline sources, I get that I need a way to properly attribute where from a User came to my registration page and created a new Account. 

I've tried to submit data to a form I created on my Hubspot Account , along with the hutk in the context field but it still attributes to offline source.

Is there no way at all to pass proper cookies from an API call to Hubspot , so that a new contact is created with proper attribution (instead of "offilne source").

[primt]

As a follow up and related to this , when submitting a form via forms API , passing the hutk and an email in order to utilize the "create if not exists" logic for Contact , there is a chance that Hubspot will prevent the submission of the form data. But if I trigger this from my back-end , I still recieve a 200 status even thought the form submission was blocked. Is there a way to know that the submition I just requested was blocked by some response or at least a call to check the data were submitted? If not , in general what is expected to be done by users when their data submission is blocked (for any reason)

[TomM2 · Accepted solution]

Hey @primt the "original source" is always taken from the cookie upon creation, if the cookie isn't passed on creation and only passed after then the "original source" will still be offline sources since the creation pre-dates the cookie. 

The way you've outlined using the forms api passing the hutk is the correct way to attribute these however. If you create a new contact from forms with the HUTK then it will pull the traffic source from the cookie. New cookies won't update the original source if added after the contact was created and the cookie source happened after the create date since technically speaking the original source of the contact is still an offline source. 

You can also update the original sources through a workflow if you wished, but I'd recomend using the form submission with a cookie to ensure you get accurate reporting and tracking info.