Need help with HubSpot conversion tracking issue
Our team uses HubSpot for managing leads and customer registrations. We connected it with Salesforce but now we have a big problem with duplicate contacts.
Our customers work in the hotel industry and they often switch between different hotel locations or work for multiple hotels. This creates many duplicate contact records across different accounts. When existing customers fill out our lead capture forms, HubSpot automatically merges the new submission with their existing contact record instead of creating a fresh lead entry.
This is making things confusing for our sales team because they can’t tell which submissions are actually new leads versus existing customers.
HubSpot doesn’t allow us to create forms that bypass their deduplication process and always generate new leads.
Possible workaround
We want to use a third party form (like Formstack) embedded on our HubSpot landing pages. This would solve the duplicate issue since it always creates new leads in Salesforce. But we lose the conversion tracking that HubSpot normally provides.
I reached out to HubSpot support asking how to send conversion data from the external form back to HubSpot through their API. They just pointed me to their Forms API docs and said I need to build a backend server solution.
I know some basic coding but I’m not a web developer. Can this be done with PHP directly on the landing page? Are there any existing libraries or tools that might help?
Any guidance on the best approach would be really helpful!
Have you tried using HubSpot’s contact properties to flag these differently? I had a similar issue and created a custom property called ‘Lead Source Type’ that gets populated from the form data. With external forms like Formstack, you can push this info to HubSpot through their contacts API instead of the forms API. This way you keep the lead generation but still see what type of submission it is. You’d just need a simple webhook from Formstack to HubSpot that creates the contact with your custom properties. Takes minimal PHP knowledge and doesn’t need complex backend setup. Conversion tracking still works fine with HubSpot’s standard tracking code on your landing pages.
Zapier’s your best bet if you don’t want to code anything custom. I had the same issue - needed external forms but wanted to keep HubSpot tracking intact. I set up a Zapier automation that triggers when Formstack gets a submission, then pushes the data to HubSpot as a new contact with properties that tag it as a form conversion. The trick is making sure your HubSpot tracking code fires a conversion event when the form submits. Just add a simple JavaScript snippet to your success page that calls HubSpot’s tracking functions. This kept our conversion metrics accurate while giving us better control over duplicates. Cost me about $20/month for Zapier but saved weeks of dev time.
I faced a similar challenge with tracking conversions on HubSpot using external forms. You don’t necessarily need a full backend server for this; I found that you can achieve it with JavaScript. What worked for me was setting up event listeners on your Formstack form’s submission. When a submission occurs, you can trigger a custom event that sends the conversion data back to HubSpot via their tracking API. Ensure that HubSpot’s tracking script is correctly integrated on your landing page. While this method won’t give you the same in-depth analytics as HubSpot’s native forms provide, it effectively captures conversion data for your reports, offering a good balance between flexibility and tracking efficiency.
skip the forms api and use hubspot’s tracking code events instead. when your formstack form submits, just fire a custom event with _hsq.push([‘trackEvent’, {…}]) - it’ll register the conversion in hubspot analytics. way simpler than backend work and you don’t need much coding knowledge.