The Complete Guide to HubSpot Custom Events

Custom Events vs. Custom Properties

Custom properties are a powerful and versatile tool for capturing data at a single point in time. Custom events allow you to capture data at multiple points across time. 

Take app login behavior as an example. A custom property could show you the most recent time a customer logged into your app. But what it is not good at is showing data for every time that customer has logged in. That’s where custom events come into play!

A custom event can be created for every instance of an activity. Custom events even have their own custom event properties to give further context to the event. So in the app login example, you could see every time they have logged in, and then for each of those events you could see the type of device they are using and their IP location. This allows for a much fuller picture of activity over time, as well as more powerful potential for segmentation and automation. 

Custom Events vs. Other HubSpot Tools

HubSpot's broad toolkit offers a ton of different ways to store data and there's not always one way to do things. 

HubSpot offers Marketing Events, Custom Events, and Timeline Events, which can get confusing due to their distinct functions. However, there are best practices that clarify when to employ each one, ensuring you effectively manage and leverage your data.

Marketing Events

Marketing Events are an "object" in HubSpot and can be used when you want to track and analyze the impact of specific marketing activities or campaigns across different channels. These events are ideal for:

• Measuring the effectiveness of marketing campaigns (e.g., webinars, trade shows, other large events).
• Understanding how these events contribute to leads, conversions, and customer acquisition.

Timeline Events

Timeline Events, on the other hand, are used by public app developers to sync timeline activities from their app to HubSpot. This is helpful for:

• Tracking individual customer interactions like email opens, clicks, form submissions, and page views.
• Creating a detailed activity history for each contact, which can help personalize follow-ups and enhance customer relationships.
• Automating workflows based on specific interactions recorded in the timeline.

Custom Events

Custom Events offer a more flexible way to track interactions that don't necessarily fit into predefined HubSpot events. They allow you to add activity to the timeline of Contacts, Companies, Tickets, or Deals.

Use Custom Events for:

• Automating marketing and sales processes based on specific user actions
• Segmenting contacts based on these custom interactions for more targeted marketing campaigns.
• Attributing and reporting on which interactions are driving conversions and contributing to your bottom line

Creating Custom Events in HubSpot

Custom Events can be created in a variety of ways, depending on your use case. There are even no-code options for non-technical HubSpot users.

Use Cases for Custom Events

There are limitless possibilities for how you could use custom events for marketing, sales, customer success, and beyond. Here are some use cases we have come across:

PLG Free Trial Onboarding

In the landscape of Product-Led Growth, the free trial onboarding process is not just a preliminary step; it's a critical juncture that can determine the success or failure of user conversion. A seamless onboarding experience is essential because it's the first real interaction that potential customers have with your product.

You can integrate your software data into HubSpot using Custom Events in a few ways including: 

• Track webapp activity with HubSpot's tracking code
• Integrate product data from a data warehouse
• Track logins with the Form API
• Create a custom API integration 

With this data managed inside of HubSpot you can utilize HubSpot's native tools and automation to nurture your customers, guiding them through a successful onboarding and turning them into loyal, paying customers. 

Equipment Performance Monitoring

You can create custom events for any type of activity, even ones that don’t involve customer behavior. A perfect example is that of an internet provider that monitors customers' modem and router performance for errors. They could create a custom object record for each piece of equipment and associate them with the customers that own them. 

With Custom Events and a custom API integration, equipment error events could appear on the Contact or Company record of the customer whenever the equipment isn’t performing as expected.