TUTORIAL: How to set up events in HubSpot

Date Published: 08/30/2011
Author: Diana Urban

Who is this document for?

This document is for Enterprise HubSpot customers that want to use events to track visitor interactions with their website pages, web applications or mobile applications.

What are the types of events?

  • Visited URL events - An event that is triggered when a visitor visits a specific URL or range of URLs that have your accounts tracking code.
  • Clicked Element events - An event that is triggered when a visitor clicks on a page element such as a button, an image, and link.
  • Submitted Form events - An event that is triggered when a visitor submits a HubSpot form tied to your account.
  • Custom events - An event that is triggered when a visitors interacts with your shopping cart, video, web application, or mobile application.

What can you do with these events?

  • Event Analysis Report - Events automatically create an event analysis report. The event analysis report shows how many times the event has been triggered and by how many visitors. It also shows you the first and last touch sources for the visitors that triggered the event. Lastly, you can see the pages and other events that have also been triggered or visited by visitors that triggered the event you are looking at.
  • List Segmentation - Whether or not an event has been triggered can be used as criteria for building lists in HubSpot.
  • Lead Scoring - Whether or not an event has been triggered can be used as criteria for scoring contacts in HubSpot.
  • Trigger Workflows - Using smart lists based off of event criteria, you can trigger Workflows in HubSpot. An example would be sending a series of followup emails to contacts that clicked on a specific download link on a website page.
  • Content Personalization - Using smart lists based off of event criteria, you can customize content such as Calls to action depending on whether or not a contact triggered an event.

What do i need to get started?

  • The HubSpot tracking code must be installed on any page that you want to track events on.
  • Come up with a short list of click events you want to create. Does you have any key Calls to action that you want to track clicks on and use in list segmentation?

 


Instructions for setting up a click event

  1. The easiest way to create a click event is to use the Events Bookmarklet.
  2. You can also manually create click events following these steps:



1. Go to Reports > Events

Navigate to Reports > Events.

 

Go to Reports > Events


2. Create a new event

Click on the Create New Event button.



3. Name your event

Click on the area to the right of the pencil Icon to name your event. We recommend using the past tense when naming your events. Some example events might be Visited the Blog or Signed up for a Demo.



4. Choose the type of event

  • Visited URL events - An event that is triggered when a visitor visits a specific URL or range of URLs that have your accounts tracking code.
  • Clicked Element events - An event that is triggered when a visitor clicks on a page element such as a button, an image, and link.
  • Submitted Form events - An event that is triggered when a visitor submits a HubSpot form tied to your account.
  • Custom events - An event that is triggered when a visitors interacts with your shopping cart, video, web application, or mobile application.

Visited URL Events

Enter the specific URL that when a visitor loads will trigger the Visited URL event. You can also use wildcards in the URL to have the event fire for a range of pages. For example, using * at the end of a URL will allow the event to fire on any pages that contain the first part of the URL. So if all of your blog post URLs began with http://blog.example.com/ you can use http://blog.example.com/* to fire the event for specific posts like http://blog.hubspot.com/amazing-blog-post.



Clicked Elements Events

Enter the ID, Class or a jQuery selector for the element on your website page that you want to track clicks on. You can also install the Events bookmarklet to easily click around your website and create new clicked element events.

For example, If you had an image on your page with this HTML <img id="GeorlandAD" src="/Georland.png"/> the ID would GeorlandAd.

Then you have the option to specify a page URL that will limit the Clicked Element event to only triggering for visitors that click on the element on that specific URL.

Lastly, you can associate a conversion value that will appear in your Event Report. So if you are tracking clicks to an Ad and every click nets you x amount of money, you can track that using this option.

 


Submitted Form Events

Select the HubSpot form that you want to trigger the Submitted Form event. Forms that submit to HubSpot via the Forms API are also included in the dropdown list of forms.



Custom Events

Creating custom events requires a JavaScript developer to write custom Javascript to submit an event to HubSpot when certain conditions are met. If Javascript is not enabled in the application, more common in a mobile application, a developer would need to submit the event to HubSpot via our Events API.

If you have a developer, the API documentation for creating custom events can be found here.

If you do not have a developer, but would like to track custom events, please contact our Support team and ask about our paid custom event setup service.



5. Tag your event

Type in a tag for your event to make it easier to group and find the event later.


6. Save the event report

Click the Save report button to save the event and generate an event report.



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