Examples of when to use "Property Groups"???

[#1]

Greetings all.  First time on the "HS Community".  Thanks for helping me.

What are some good examples of when you would use "property groups"?  I understand that I can make some new properties for either Contacts, or Companies, or Deals.  But when would be some situations when I would use the "Property Group" features?

[#2]

Q: Examples of when to use "Property Groups"????

Short A: n/a

Longer A:

HubSpot Property Groups (i.e., Contact, Company, Deals, etc.) are more of an organization tool than a 'feature'. As you've probably already seen when adding custom properties to HubSpot, those custom properties are intermangled [sic] with all other default HubSpot properties. This makes it very difficult to differentiate between what's what.

That being said, one good use of a Property Group would be for Custom Properties. You'll see this behavior in just about every single major HubSpot integration. (they build custom property groups automatically)

Remember, HubSpot is a team sport. The platform is designed to be used by marketing and sales teams, and the teams that support those functions.

As such, another good use of Custom Property Groups would be for special teams.

- Admin Properties - List Hygiene Properties

- Support Properties - Temporary Properties

Hope that gives you some context and sparks your creative uses for a very valuable part of HubSpot.

Always happy to help you build on HubSpot.

[#3]

Frank thanks for the reply.  A little context might help drill it down for me even more.  Thanks again for thinking and helping with this.

We are a small manufacturing/direct sales company that sells product X.  We have reps around the country that sell our products.

But my main goal/need is to take our contacts and be able to "tag" them or "label" them from the sources we find them through.  Examples:  We do 5-10 trade shows a year and we'd love to truly know which one they came from.  We could walk away from each show with 300 attendees contact info.  I would want that associated with the show they went to...and not just "trade show".  

We also have a ton of other marketing efforts that I'd love to have the "tag" as well...just as we want to do above: referral; website; call in; billboard; magazine ad; etc...

In the end I'd like to be able to do lists/reports/searches on how many clients came from  what sources...etc.

Hope that helps to clarify.  Would these "groups" be good for me to do this with?  Since HS doesn't offer "tags" per se.

[#4 · Accepted solution]

>>Would these "groups" be good for me to [use as a sort of alternative to tags in HubSpot]?

Doubtful. Even as a workaround. But maybe another set of eyes may see things differently. (explanation below)

The screenshot you see shows three (3) uncollapsed custom property groups that were auto-created by integrations. Collectively, these 3 custom property groups contain maybe 10 custom properties.

What you don't see are the over 200 default HubSpot properties that are contained in the five (5) collapsed default property groups.

Now imagine that those 200 default HubSpot properties are all sorted alphabetically within their property groups and we wanted to add some custome properties, BUT didn't have the option to segregate them from the default HubSpot properties.

See the potential mess? It gets worse.

The current collapsed state of those property groups is NOT 'sticky' which means every single time we need to refresh the screen after editing a contact property within a property group we have to scroll through literally HUNDREDS of properties to find what we're after. (a minor inconvenience considering most users have no business making regular modifications to property definitions anyway, so no biggie)

Hopefully, you have greater context around the organizational value custom property groups bring to the discussion. That being said, I don't see how they could help with 'tagging' in any way whatsoever.

[#5]

Thanks for your insights @MFrankJohnson! Integrations are one of the best examples of property groups and when to use them/how they are typically used. 

The thing about organizing your properties and property groups is that it will differ by business and company needs.

Personally, I have used property groups when creating a content and campaigns involving specific pieces of information about contacts that I am going to gather for a large numer of contacts (wedding information, for example) and then storing all relevent fields within that group (food preferences, food allergies, plus 1, etc.) to keep the information seperate from my main pool of information for general marketing or sales purposes. 

If you are looking to create a tag for contacts to show which trade show they came from, then just creating a contact property within the "contact information" group may be sufficient. Unless you are looking to gain a lot of information around the trade show (which show, what dates, what product demo did they sign up for, etc.); in that case I would say that creating a group of properties for "trade shows" could be beneficial. Again, up to what works for your business and organizational habits.

I want to tag in a few other users who have worked with property groups: @ChristianRieck, @exceptionalrisk, @Kam007 do  tips and tricks do you have for @EJR?

Thanks, 
Jenny

[#6 · Accepted solution]

Hey @EJR,

i think the two most important use cases are mentioned: integrations, e.g. when you sync your HubSpot account with Salesforce or Shopify there will be automatically a new property group. Second, some companies work with several teams in HubSpot, working in different subsidiaries, probably different companies (sales organisations) or countries. They have different needs regarding information connected to a contact. Here contact properties are a good way to organize the properties. 

Your question regarding the tracking of a lead source I agree to Jenny - There are many ways to create a reporting here - questions what is really needed. How do th contacts get into the HubSpot CRM (by Form, Upload?). Maybe that is already your tag to create a little reporting (contatcs who filled out a certain form or belong to list XY). The reporting add on might then also be interesting to look at. 

BR

Christian

[#7]

Additional example: @vitae discussed using property groups for pharmaceutical properties in this thread.

[#8]

Does this help @EJR? If so, please mark as solved.