Events are more than just a way to bring people together – they’re packed with data that can provide valuable insights for your business. But are you using that data to its full potential?
If it’s not flowing into critical business systems like your CRM and marketing tools, you could be missing out on key information that could fuel your growth. This is exactly what our CEO, Jonathan Kazarian, highlighted in a recent session at Event Tech Live London 2024. Check out the video above to hear him explain it in detail.
We agree with this approach, so to help you make the most of your event data, we’ve outlined Jonathan’s best practices for integrating your event platform with a CRM, with a special focus on HubSpot. While these best practices are tailored for HubSpot, most of them also apply to other CRMs. Our goal is to help you unlock the full potential of your event data.
Understanding the Role of HubSpot and Event Management Platforms
Integrating event data into HubSpot is key to helping your marketing and sales teams be more effective. However, while HubSpot is a powerful CRM, it’s not built to handle every detail of your event planning process.
HubSpot is great for managing contacts, deals, and customer relationships. It’s designed to track leads and customers in real time as they move through the sales funnel.
On the other hand, event management platforms are made to handle the nitty-gritty of event planning - registration, on-site logistics, and all the details in between. These platforms can capture specific event details like attendee preferences, session choices, and meal requests - things that don’t really belong in a CRM.
Storing too much event data in HubSpot can clutter your CRM and slow things down. The smart move is to let event platforms handle the event-specific data and then sync only the most important info with HubSpot.
Event Attribution versus Registration Attribution
Attribution is all about figuring out how your marketing efforts, like events, are actually helping your business. There are two main types: event attribution and registration attribution. Each one plays a different role in measuring how well your marketing is working and what kind of impact it’s having.
Event Attribution looks at how events contribute to your business's long-term goals. In B2B marketing, events are just one of many steps in the customer journey. They usually tie into a bigger sales process, with their full impact showing up later down the road.
To measure this accurately, use a longer attribution window, like 365 days, so you can see the full impact of events on your sales funnel. HubSpot’s customer journey reporting tool then tracks how events move leads through the pipeline - like how many meetings at an event led to demos - helping you understand how events play into the bigger sales picture.
Registration Attribution, on the other hand, focuses on where the registrations are coming from. It tracks the immediate actions that lead to conversions - like a click from a LinkedIn campaign or a referral link. While it’s great for measuring the effectiveness of specific campaigns, it doesn’t capture the long-term effects events have on customer behavior.
HubSpot has difficulties with this kind of data. It’s built to track real-time lifecycle data - like contacts and deals - but it’s not designed to store point-in-time info, like when someone registered for an event. HubSpot’s “Original Source” and “Last Source” properties tell you where contacts came from, but if they register for multiple events, this information can get overwritten. This makes it hard to track the source of registrations over time, and event touchpoints can get lost in the shuffle.
To sum it up, while registration attribution is great for tracking short-term marketing results, event attribution needs a bigger-picture approach that HubSpot isn’t fully set up to handle.
HubSpot’s CRM struggles to track this complex, long-term data without losing important details, making it a great tool for tracking the overall customer journey but not for diving deep into specific event data.
Tracking Event Data in HubSpot: The HubSpot Data Model for Events
HubSpot offers a range of tools for tracking event data, but it’s important to understand how data flows through the system. Everything starts in your registration platform; from there, data flows into the following objects within HubSpot.
Marketing Event Object
HubSpot introduced the Marketing Event object in early 2021 to store event-related data within the CRM. However, it's limited in that it only tracks basic information such as the registrant’s name, email address, and their registration status (whether they registered, attended, or canceled, for example). It doesn’t provide a comprehensive picture of the event's full impact.
The good news is that HubSpot is actively improving this object. There are plans to add a child object to give more detailed insights into individual attendees and their actions during the event.
Until then, the Marketing Event object is helpful, but it won’t give you everything you need to measure event performance. For example, it doesn't allow for nesting events, which makes tracking detailed actions, like session registrations, difficult to track in the native HubSpot objects.
Contacts and Deals Objects
How can you track attendees who come to your event? Once their data is captured and pushed to HubSpot, it’s linked to Contacts and Deals in HubSpot. Every registrant is associated with a contact record, which helps you track their interactions with your company over time. This is crucial for nurturing leads after the event and understanding how engagement with the event influences the sales process.
By associating event participation with specific deals, you can also track how events contribute to your revenue and where each deal is in the sales pipeline. This makes it easier to understand the ROI of your events and whether they directly lead to closed deals.
Keep in mind that If you only have the Marketing Hub and not the Sales Hub in HubSpot, you won’t have access to the Deal object. This might not be a concern if you don’t have a sales team actively managing transactions. But if you're selling bulk tickets or sponsorship packages, you may find the Deal object crucial for tracking those specific sales transactions!
Timeline Event Object
The Timeline Event object is HubSpot's most effective tool for tracking event engagement more precisely. As attendees interact with your event - whether by registering for sessions, participating in chat, polling, or Q&A - each interaction can be captured and the timeline event will provide a detailed log of engagement.
By the way, it’s a good idea to customize the timeline event object for each event to ensure you're capturing important actions without filling your CRM with unnecessary data. For example, by tracking interactions like session participation or engagement in live sessions, you can focus on the key data you need for post-event analysis and follow-up.
How To Create A Contact In HubSpot: Field Mapping
Why Flexible Mapping Is Important
HubSpot lets you customize field mapping for each event, which is key to keeping your data organized and accurate. It’s important to update only the necessary information while leaving everything else untouched, or you risk losing valuable details. For example, you may need to update company details, like job titles, for each new registrant. However, fields like email addresses should only be updated if the information is incorrect.
You can also set it up so that fields are filled in only if they’re blank, preventing you from accidentally overwriting important data. This ensures your records stay clean and you don’t disrupt other reports that rely on that information.
Field Mapping for Group Bookings
For events with group bookings - where one person buys tickets on behalf of others - you may want to update the records as more attendees are added.
HubSpot’s flexible field mapping allows you to sync new contacts into the system as their details become available, ensuring that all registrants are accurately represented.
Field Mapping and GDPR
When integrating event data with HubSpot, it’s also important to consider GDPR requirements. You can set up whether contacts imported from your event should be marked as marketing contacts, which allows you to email them while following privacy rules.
Make sure contacts are properly flagged when they enter HubSpot to stay compliant with data protection regulations.
How To Use Non-HubSpot Forms To Integrate Event Data
As mentioned, HubSpot isn’t the best tool for tracking event registration attribution on its own, but there are some workarounds available for capturing this data. One of these options is enabling non-HubSpot forms within your HubSpot settings.
When you enable non-HubSpot forms and add HubSpot’s JavaScript tracking to your event registration site, you can track the source of your event registrations directly in HubSpot.
For those familiar with HubSpot’s source tracking properties, such as “Original Source” and “Original Source Drill Down 1 and 2”, this method allows you to feed that information into HubSpot. It will enable you to track exactly where your registrants are coming from - whether it’s a LinkedIn campaign, a referral, or another source.
Be careful, though - using this method will overwrite the last conversion properties in HubSpot. If your organization cares more about tracking the last conversion event (such as when someone books a demo), you may want to think twice about using this integration. The event registration will overwrite the last demo booking field, which might disrupt the tracking of that particular conversion.
Another crucial factor to keep in mind is that if your event platform is hosted on a domain different from the rest of your HubSpot suite, you'll need to whitelist the event platform's domain. If you don’t do this, HubSpot won’t receive any data from that external domain, which could result in incomplete tracking.
Lastly, if you’re embedding the registration widget into your website, it’s important to ensure that the event platform you’re using supports cross-domain tracking. This ensures that data can flow seamlessly from the event registration site into the HubSpot system via the widget, providing accurate source tracking and ensuring smooth data integration.
Importing HubSpot Data into Your Event Platform
Now that we’ve covered how to get data into HubSpot, let’s discuss the reverse: how can you pull data from HubSpot into your event platform in real time at the point of registration?
Common use cases for importing HubSpot data into your event platform include:
- Validating contact information: Automatically pull in details to ensure the attendee’s information is up-to-date and accurate.
- Eligibility verification: Check membership tiers or other criteria to determine what tickets or offers an attendee can access.
- Automated discount application: Apply discounts based on membership or other attributes stored in HubSpot.
Use Case: How Impact uses the Accelevents - HubSpot integration
Let’s look at a practical example of how importing HubSpot data during registration can turn your CRM into a powerful validation tool.
Impact, one of the largest HubSpot agencies, uses the Accelevents platform to run their events. They integrate HubSpot data to validate contact details and check eligibility based on membership tiers. For example, members of certain tiers can access exclusive ticket types that non-members cannot. Additionally, depending on their membership level, attendees automatically receive discounts at the time of registration. All of this happens in real time as they register for the event!
Scoring Event Engagement with HubSpot
At Inbound 2024, HubSpot introduced a significant enhancement to their lead scoring functionality, and they have continued to roll out a few new updates since. The new HubSpot scoring tool allows you to track event engagement and award points based on registration and attendance for events.
It can be customized to differentiate between online and in-person events. For example, in-person interactions can be assigned more points, reflecting the higher value of face-to-face engagement compared to virtual participation.
Interaction data updates in real time and appears as a contact property in HubSpot, allowing you to identify your top event attendees and most engaged participants. Additionally, you can add a decay factor to track any drop-off in engagement over time, helping to gauge the effectiveness of your post-event strategies.
For organizations hosting a variety of events such as roadshows, webinars, or field marketing events, this feature provides valuable insights into attendee behavior and engagement, helping you to refine future event strategies.
How To Evaluate The Integration Capabilities of Your Event Software Vendors
When evaluating event management platforms, be sure to ask the right questions about their integrations to ensure a smooth data sync between your event platform and your CRM.
Here are some key questions to consider:
How do you handle sync errors?
Sync errors happen, especially during system outages. So, it’s important to ask how the event platform deals with these errors. Does the vendor have a team that monitors integrations? What happens if data fails to sync? Accelevents, for example, tries to resend the data in intervals ( 2, 4, or 8 seconds), keeping it in a queue for up to 24 hours to ensure it’s captured once your systems are back online.
Can your team assist with field mapping and data issues?
Sometimes, sync errors occur not because of outages, but because of field mapping issues. Make sure your event software vendor can support custom field mapping (e.g., mapping picklist fields from your registration platform to your CRM). This can prevent sync errors that happen when fields don’t align properly.
Will you provide experts to help me build the right Integration for my needs?
Some integrations are very basic and plug-and-play, while others are more flexible and allow you to customize how the data flows and is managed. You want to work with an event expert who also understands your CRM or marketing automation platform inside and out and can help you build the right integration for your needs.
Are your integrations unidirectional or bidirectional?
When evaluating integrations, a key question to ask is whether the integration only pushes data from your event platform to HubSpot, or if you can also push data from HubSpot into the event platform.
For example, if you’re using HubSpot forms to register people, you might want that registration data to flow back into your event management platform. Does the event platform integrate with HubSpot so you can set up triggers (adding someone to a list, having them fill out a form) that automatically send event data into your event platform?
Can your platform handle non-HubSpot form data and cross-domain reporting?
If you use non-HubSpot forms for registration, ensure the platform can capture that data and sync it properly into your CRM. Also, ask whether cross-domain tracking is available, especially for event registration widgets embedded on external sites. This ensures accurate source tracking, giving you detailed event data reporting within your CRM.
Conclusion: Make Your Event Data Work for You
Integrating event data into HubSpot is just the first step. To truly benefit from your integration, you must take a few extra steps to make sure your data drives action.
- First, be careful with the fields you map into HubSpot. Only sync the data that matters. Don’t overload your CRM with unnecessary details that make it harder to focus on what’s important.
- Then, monitor your integrations to ensure they’re working correctly. Set up a system to track if something goes wrong, and ask your vendor how they handle errors.
- Finally, use the data you’ve integrated. Don’t let it just sit in your CRM. Leverage it to make smarter business decisions, improve your event strategies, and refine your follow-up. The more you use your event data, the more value your events will bring to your business.
If you want to discuss your integrations and how to get value out of them, contact us. We’re always happy to talk strategy!
