Hubspot Direct Traffic Solved – Over 30% of Traffic Labelled as Direct

Too much Hubspot direct traffic? If you’ve reached this article, you’re being plagued by an issue that bothered us for some time on key accounts. You’ve been analyzing your lead data and you have seen an overwhelming amount of “direct” leads that do not correlate with your acquisition or Google Analytics data.

And for us, that’s not cool. Not one bit. Luckily after weeks of poking around we found that there is a relatively easy fix and cause identification for this issue. I’m posting this article because I wish I had it for myself at the time.

If you’re getting a percentage of direct traffic leads in your Hubspot funnel that just don’t make sense for your data, it’s likely there is some sort of code that is delaying the firing time of the Hubspot tracking javascript.

Solving this is essential to get the platform tracking properly. There are a large number of help and support articles out there, such as this one, but none of them seem to attack the root cause of the issue. I personally spent weeks with HS support getting to the bottom of this.

The issue is most likely the code’s loading time.

Are you using NitroPack?

NitroPack is an awesome plugin we’ve written about in the past. But you do need to stay on top of the tool as it can manipulate the way code loads in certain instance.

It does just this with the hubspot tracking code.

This is what the hubspot tracking code should look like in it’s basic form:

<!-- Start of HubSpot Embed Code -->

<script type="text/javascript" id="hs-script-loader" async defer src="js.hs-scripts.com/xxxxxx.js"></script>

<!-- End of HubSpot Embed Code -->

This is what the Code looks like with NitroPack enabled:

<script async defer src="//js.hs-scripts.com/xxxxxxx.js" nitro-delay-ms="6500" id="hs-script-loader" data-nitro-for-id="hs-script-loader" type="nitropack/delayedscript"></script>

Contact the NitroPack team. They will be friendly enough to help you exclude this JS from your resources so it loads properly.

Move to GTM

If your code is not being fired from your Google Tag Manager we also suggest to implement this. Google tag manager firing is known to be quicker and more reliable than coding it into general website builders.

Hubspot Direct Traffic Acceptable Variance

In our training we do understand that it is impossible to attain an absolute perfect level of accuracy given the nature of integrated reporting infrastructures. That being said, if your data disrepancies are larger than 10% this is not an acceptable metric for growth marketing best practices.

Brandalytics is a certified Hubspot agency partner and digital marketing and growth marketing agency located in Toronto, Ontario. We help businesses excel with paid and organic campaigns, reporting, call tracking, CRM and marketing automation.