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HCludts
Participant

AdWords Conversions Atributed to Direct Traffic

Résolue

Hi everyone,

 

 

We are experiencing some problems with the attribution of our contacts to sources. We are suspecting that a significant amount of our organic and paid sessions are not being recorded - while leads coming out of these sessions are being wrongfully attributed to direct traffic.

 

We are mainly noticing this from our AdWords traffic. We have the Hubspot ads addon installed which adds auto tracking to our campaigns in AdWords (we have checked the tracking template in AdWords and these are correct) .

 

This works really great from Hubspot to AdWords where we can always find back the conversion in AdWords whenever a new contact from paid is created in Hubspot.

 

However the other way around we see that not all our AdWords conversions (which only track the sign ups) are attributed to new contacts. However whenever that happens - we do see that a new sign up is created from Direct Traffic.

 

If we compare the hour of conversion and ip location we see that 9/10 times these contacts from direct lign up perfectly with the conversions in AdWords. 

 

Anyone else having similar experiences? From our end we are currently seeing 3 possible reasons for this problem:

  1. The auto-tagging for AdWord of Hubspot does not always load leading into a lost sessions - once the contact is made Hubspot than attributes it to direct since it can't attribute it to another source 
  2. People are coming in through a browser which does not store cookies (incognito navigation eg) resulting in the same problem as 1
  3. For some reason there are 2 sessions being recorded. The 2nd only starting on the page with our sign up form due to a tracking problem with the landing pages 

Hope anyone can help us further - we have had contact with support but so far have only given the standard documentation as help (which we have already read and did not fully answer our questions)

 

1 Solution acceptée
HCludts
Solution
Participant

AdWords Conversions Atributed to Direct Traffic

Résolue

Hubspot support was able to help us out - so sharing the answer here as promised 

 

 

"Hi Hannes,

 

Hope you had a great weekend! 🙂

 

I have just heard back from the team on more details on this:

 

The Ads tool attributes contacts to an ad based on the contact having a tracked page view to a URL with the ads tracking parameters. For the contacts in question HubSpot did not record a page view to the URL with ads parameters for this contact. However the URL with tracking parameters was recorded as "First referring site".

 

Why the contact's "First page seen" is not the page with tracking parameters:

Since the above URL was the referring URL for their page view, this implies that they must have viewed that URL first, however something must have prevented the HubSpot tracking code from recording a page view for their initial view.

 

Further investigating - we can see that the tracking code is firing on the correct pages. There are also other example contacts who do have a page view recorded to this page, so this lets us know that the tracking on the page is working in general. 

 

Thus, there could be a few possibilities on why the tracking code did not fire fully.

 

1) Slow Internet connection

Contact clicked the CTA on the page before the tracking code had finished loading and was redirected to the next page.

 

2) Browsing environment blocked Tracking code

The browser, device or network that the contact was on may have prevented the tracking code from loading on that page view. 

 

As this contact does not have its first page view recorded to the ads tracking URL, the Ads tool is not able to attribute the contact to an ad. This behavior may sometimes occur due to the above reasons, but for most contacts, they should be attributed to the ad as long as the Tracking code is firing normally on the page.

 

Hope this clarifies!

 

Cheers,

Pearleen"

Voir la solution dans l'envoi d'origine

4 Réponses
Aakar
Conseiller clé

AdWords Conversions Atributed to Direct Traffic

Résolue

Hi @HCludts

 

Have you tried looking into the 'Original Source' of the contact? If the original source is Paid and utm_source is Direct; it means contact came via PPC but didn't fill up the form right away. Contact visited some pages, here and there and filled up the form. In this case, source report might say, 'Direct' while the Adwords says, 'Conversion'.

 

I am not sure, what's your landing page or form setup looks like. But I would suggest to use the smart form on a landing page and use the URL builder to track the source. If you tag your AdWords URL properly and use a smart form (by Paid source), HubSpot will automatically pick up the paid source form. Here's how HubSpot categories the source. I would suggest using HubSpot URL builder (inside the campaign) to create URLs for AdWords campaign. If you want to track the extra information, you can create a hidden filed on the form 'utm_source', 'utm_medium', 'utm_campaign' etc. it will automatically pull the utm_ value from the URL.

 

I have outlined the solution on my blog, btw. Let me know if you need help.

 

Thanks.

Aakar Anil
Marketing Technologist
aakar.me | @aakarpost | in/aakarpost
HCludts
Participant

AdWords Conversions Atributed to Direct Traffic

Résolue

Hi Aakar,

 

Thanks for the reply ! 

 

We indeed looked at the original source as well but these were also direct. So in every way these contacts are seen in Hubspot as coming from direct without any touchpoint with Paid Search. However we can see from our conversion data in AdWords that they actually did come through AdWords.

 

We indeed might have to resort to manually tagging our campaigns instead of using the automatic tracking from the ad add-on.

 

We are currently further into talk with Hubspot Support - mainly because we were able to further support our suspicions about AdWords Traffic / Conversions being seen as coming from direct. 

 

A few days ago we received a new form submission. In the notification mail we got a message saying: "Found site via:" and than the exact UTM, GCLID and other tracking. However when we looked in hubspot this form submission was attributed to direct (also with a completely different landing page URL) Screen Shot 2018-06-15 at 09.32.22.png

 

 

I will keep you guys updated when support comes back to us.

0 Votes
neoye
Membre

AdWords Conversions Atributed to Direct Traffic

Résolue

Hey there, I've run into the exact same issue and tried loads of fixes without any luck. Did you manage to find a solution in the end?

0 Votes
HCludts
Solution
Participant

AdWords Conversions Atributed to Direct Traffic

Résolue

Hubspot support was able to help us out - so sharing the answer here as promised 

 

 

"Hi Hannes,

 

Hope you had a great weekend! 🙂

 

I have just heard back from the team on more details on this:

 

The Ads tool attributes contacts to an ad based on the contact having a tracked page view to a URL with the ads tracking parameters. For the contacts in question HubSpot did not record a page view to the URL with ads parameters for this contact. However the URL with tracking parameters was recorded as "First referring site".

 

Why the contact's "First page seen" is not the page with tracking parameters:

Since the above URL was the referring URL for their page view, this implies that they must have viewed that URL first, however something must have prevented the HubSpot tracking code from recording a page view for their initial view.

 

Further investigating - we can see that the tracking code is firing on the correct pages. There are also other example contacts who do have a page view recorded to this page, so this lets us know that the tracking on the page is working in general. 

 

Thus, there could be a few possibilities on why the tracking code did not fire fully.

 

1) Slow Internet connection

Contact clicked the CTA on the page before the tracking code had finished loading and was redirected to the next page.

 

2) Browsing environment blocked Tracking code

The browser, device or network that the contact was on may have prevented the tracking code from loading on that page view. 

 

As this contact does not have its first page view recorded to the ads tracking URL, the Ads tool is not able to attribute the contact to an ad. This behavior may sometimes occur due to the above reasons, but for most contacts, they should be attributed to the ad as long as the Tracking code is firing normally on the page.

 

Hope this clarifies!

 

Cheers,

Pearleen"