Traffic from blog with a Direct Traffic original source

[Lucasghc1]

Hello everyone,

We have both our blog and landing pages hosted on Hubspot, plus we have Automatic cross-domain linking activated.

We added CTAs on our different blog articles redirecting to our LPs so we can capture more leads.
The issue is all contacts following this path :
Blog article visit > Click on LP cta > Form submit on LP
all arrive in HS with a "Direct Traffic" original source.

We can see they first landed in the blog as the First Referring site is the blog article.

Any ideas how we could change that to collect the source that initially attracted them to the blog article instead ?



Thanks

[danmoyle]

Hi @Lucasghc1. While the blog post is the first visit, how they got to that blog post is the property Original Source. So the question is, how did the prospect hit your blog post? HubSpot defines Direct Traffic as "Traffic categorized under Direct traffic do not have an indication of their source. Typically, these are people who typed the URL directly in their browser, or removed all query parameters before entering a site. To view the entrance URLs for these visitors, click the Direct traffic source." So this could mean a few different things as you can see. You should still be able to measure the journey though. You could make lists of contacts who have viewed specific pages, or parameters like including blog in the page URL. You can also use attribution reporting to show which assets like the blog have led to contacts created. 

Hope that helps! 

[Lucasghc1]

Thanks for your reply @danmoyle, "how they got to that blog post is the property Original Source." That's precisely what I would like to have in our Original Source property. Right now it's 99,7% of the time 'Direct Traffic" which obviously is wrong. :

Here's our blog traffic by source - mostly Organic.
Blog Traffic by source

And our Landing Pages traffic, where leads convert - mostly Direct. 
Landing Page traffic by source
At the moment If a lead lands on our blog from Organic Search, clicks on a cta redirecting to a LP & submit a form there : the original source in Hubspot is 'Direct Traffic'. 

How can we make sure we don't lose this Blog original source when they convert on our LPs ? 

I thought of creating workflows based on utm properties but I would have expected this to be fully automated since both out blog & lps are hosted on hubspot. 

Thanks

[danmoyle · Accepted solution]

If I were in your shoes, I would reach out to HubSpot Support to ask about this. What I'm seeing here is that your blog traffic is in the thousands, of which a couple hundred is direct traffic. Then the LP traffic is in the hundreds, and much of which is a similar amount as the direct in the blogs. So original source would still be direct traffic. That makes sense to me so far. That means their original referring source was direct, not organic search. From there, you can begin to see data like CTAs clicked on the blog posts, the journey through attribution reporting, and then dig deeper into specific contacts and how they found you and what pages they viewed. 

I would look into HubSpot reports to see if you can create a custom contact report that shows which blog posts they viewed and perhaps which landing pages they viewed. That along with attribution reporting could possibly tell the story of what blog posts are driving conversions. The traffic reports you've shared are telling original referring source, which seems to be logical if organic traffic isn't clicking the CTAs, but direct traffic is.