Custom Property or Timeline Event

Marketing & Content Tips, Tricks & Best Practices
1

Hi there,

We want to push data from Segment to Hubspot. In Segment, we have some important events like agent dashboard visits, campaign created, campaign started, billable, etc. that I want to track in Hubspot. All these events are recurring events and I want to track them every time it occurs. Should I create custom properties for each or pass all these events through timeline events?

2

@LAryan Great question!
I would recommend setting these as custom properties because the data points you defined sound like very actionable behaviors. Setting these as custom properties allows you to use them in workflows to trigger emails, notifications, etc.
Timeline events can theoretically do the same thing, but you will have a lot more flexibility with pulling the events at a certain point in time as a custom property.

3

I’m really stuck on the mapping part right now. I only have a handful of events, but they contain around 70 to 100 unique properties in total. Manually building out all those properties in HubSpot and linking them up inside Segment is a massive, tedious bottleneck.

5

Hi @prateek.s and all, I hope that you are well!

Thanks for reaching out to the HubSpot Community!

Did you check the HubSpot Data Sync’s “Generate mappings” option?

With it, HubSpot compares field names and data types, including custom properties, and suggests compatible mappings for review.

Also, I’d love to hear from our Top Experts: Hi @danmoyle and @rebeccatravels do you have any tips to help, please?

Wishing you a lovely day, and thanks so much! :orange_heart:

Bérangère

6

Welcome to the Community @prateek.s. I agree that manually creating and mapping 70–100 properties is not a sustainable setup. I think the important distinction for your situation compared to the original post is that you don’t need to turn every attribute included in your Segment events into a HubSpot CRM property.

I’d recommend identifying the relatively small number of fields that need to be retained on the contact/company/deal record because they drive an action in HubSpot. For example:

  • Latest relevant action or product interaction
  • Date of the latest event
  • Product, plan, feature, or category involved
  • Lifecycle or qualification signal
  • Usage count, score, or threshold flag
  • Any field needed for enrollment, branching, personalization, lists, reporting, or rep notification

Those can be created as a focused set of HubSpot properties and updated by the Segment integration. Everything else can remain as event-level context on the custom event/timeline event rather than becoming a permanent CRM field.

In other words: use events for the full behavioral history, but use properties for the “current state” or the few values HubSpot needs to act on repeatedly. That keeps the schema manageable and prevents the CRM from becoming cluttered with dozens of low-value, one-off fields.

If there is truly a requirement to map a large schema, the better technical route is usually to create the CRM properties programmatically through HubSpot’s Properties API rather than manually in the UI. But I would do a schema-rationalization exercise first, because automating the creation of 100 properties can still create a long-term governance problem.

Hope that helps!