HubSpot is a marketing platform designed to help increase leads and drive better engagement. They are the masters of inbound marketing … heck, they invented it!

This article is all about configuring the Wistia - HubSpot integration for collecting leads and sending viewing and listening data into contact records. If you’re generally curious about what this integration can do, here’s an overview of the HubSpot integration’s features.

Now let’s get to setting up the integration!

Let’s start with a brief overview. There are 3 key steps to getting fully integrated:

The first step is usually a one-time thing, and thereafter you’ll only need to repeat steps 2 and 3 for each media you want to track.

Head on over to the integrations page within your Wistia account settings: Account > Settings > Integrations.

Scroll down to the Marketing Automation Integrations section, and click on HubSpot v2 (with custom forms).

When you click Connect, you’ll be prompted to log into HubSpot. Once you log in and authorize the integration, it will show as ✔ Connected and ✔ Primary. Only one integration can be set as Primary, indicating HubSpot as the active integration on your account.

It’s that easy! This will authorize Wistia to request your HubSpot lists and forms for display within videos. Wistia will also be able to create and update contact records to send leads and engagement data into your HubSpot account. Note that HubSpot does not send leads into Wistia, so the next step will help us identify users.

With the HubSpot integration connected, we’re one step closer to enriching our leads with video viewing data for advanced automation. Now we need a method of identifying new and known leads.

The first option is the Wistia Turnstile, which will collect lead information in your Wistia stats and send those leads directly to HubSpot.

With a Turnstile added to the video and connected to a HubSpot list, you can move on to the final step: embed the video on a page with your HubSpot tracking code to start collecting leads!

If you’d prefer to use a HubSpot form instead of a Turnstile, the following section has everything you need to know.

Looking for more flexibility around form fields? Our HubSpot v2 integration has the option to embed HubSpot forms within your Wistia videos. Just like Turnstile, form submissions within a video will serve to identify your viewers so they can be tracked properly by the integration.

Using a HubSpot form in a Wistia video provides more control over the form fields and appearance, just like a normal HubSpot form. You can even employ custom styling from within the HubSpot forms editor! The only drawback to a HubSpot form compared to Turnstile is that the data will only be sent to HubSpot, and the leads will not show up within Wistia stats.

Once the integration is enabled, a HubSpot Forms section will appear in the Customize panel. From there, you can choose which form to display in your video, when to display it, and add helpful prompt text to encourage viewers to complete your form. Here’s what that looks like:

Whether you’ve chosen to use HubSpot forms or Turnstile to identify your audience, you’re now ready for the final step — embedding your video for tracking!

If you’re using Wistia Live with registration enabled and would like to send registrants to a list in HubSpot, head on over to your live event’s registration page. Here, click “Sync Registrations” to select your desired HubSpot list. Then, click “Select.”

If you’d like to update the list, click “Update Registration” and select a new list.

To use a HubSpot form on your live event’s registration page, click “Convert to HubSpot form” from your Registration page in your Wistia account. From here, you can select the appropriate form for your live event.

Check out this page for a full overview on setting up a HubSpot form for your live event’s registration.

The real magic of this integration involves the Wistia player and the HubSpot tracking script working together. First you’ll need a webpage set up with your HubSpot tracking script. Embed your media on that page and you are good to go.

Our friends at HubSpot have some great documentation on finding your HubSpot tracking script and then installing it on your website.

If you’re embedding on a HubSpot landing page or a HubSpot COS page, that script should be installed for you automatically. Wistia media pages (in your account) don’t have the HubSpot tracking code on them. This is why you need to embed your medias out in the wild in order to start pulling data into HubSpot.

Once the page is set up with your HubSpot script, you can embed your media. We recommend going with the inline, Standard embed, and for videos, the Popover embed is another great option.

Tracking listening data for podcast episodes or other audio files works somewhat differently from tracking videos since you can’t add a Turnstile or a HubSpot form directly to an audio embed. That said, a Turnstile or form submission is always necessary to successfully identify listeners as known leads, so they’re still a part of the equation here. There are two methods for tracking listening data.

The most reliable way is to embed a HubSpot form on a landing page. On submission, the form should take your user to a page where your individual audio episode or audio-only Channel is embedded. You’ll want to ensure that both the page with the form and the page with the embed has a HubSpot tracking code on it.

The other option is to embed the HubSpot form itself on the same page as the episode or Channel. This is less reliable since a user may listen to your content without submitting the form, in which case they wouldn’t be identified or tracked. Again, this page should have a HubSpot tracking code on it.

When visitors subscribe to a Channel, they’re prompted to fill out their name and email address similar to how they would for a Turnstile. However subscribing to a Channel won’t identify a user as a known lead for the purposes of tracking listening data. You can sync your subscriber list with a HubSpot list, but this will only send contact data to HubSpot, not tracking data. Users still have to be identified by a Turnstile or HubSpot form in order for listening data to be tracked.

The real heart of this integration is getting engagement data to show up in contact timelines. The Wistia - HubSpot integration uses HubSpot’s powerful Timeline API to pass over data collected from your embedded medias. Once you have this integration set up and the medias embedded for tracking, we’ll send the following events for every identified user who plays the media on your page:

The “Played X%” events are milestones, so they only update at the intervals listed above. This means that if you see someone with a “Played 1%” event, they played between 1% and 24% of the media (at 25%, it would update to the next milestone). For a more detailed look at their engagement data, you can actually access the Heatmap of their session within the HubSpot timeline.

One of the coolest things about this integration is that you’ll see video heatmaps in your contacts' timelines. Click View Video and Heatmap to display them:

This adds some extra detail to your available metrics, showing the exact percentage of the video that was watched, which portions may have been re-watched, and even a preview of the video itself. While the Heatmaps are not directly used for automation, they provide an in-depth look at the viewing behavior of individual contacts.

The Wistia events sent to HubSpot can be used for segmenting lists and building automations. For example, you could set up an “Active list” to only show contacts who have watched 75% of a media, indicating their interest in your content. Or you could include a Call-to-Action on your video, and target viewers who convert on that link.

HubSpot refers to these events as filters for your Active lists, and they are applied at multiple levels.

First we’ll select a broad, event-based filter around which to build the automation. They are each labelled within Wistia Hubspot V2:

Annotation, Call to Action, and Turnstile filters are all based around fairly specific actions unique to videos; clicking an Annotation Link, converting on a CTA, or submitting to a Turnstile. The Play filter is the most versatile, as it opens up choices for segmentation based on how much engagement has happened, utilizing the “Played X%” events.

Once you’ve chosen the top-level event to focus on, you can configure your automation with more specific filters. There are a wide array of secondary filters to use because HubSpot displays all available Wistia properties. However some are more practical than others:

Some cool things you can do with this:

These filters are included with the data we send to Hubspot, however they are largely irrelevant for automation as they are specific to data on the Wistia side:

With the HubSpot-Wistia integration, you can easily embed a thumbnail of your video in your email campaign. When visitors click the image with the play button, they’ll be sent to your website to watch the video.

When you use this integration, your recipient's email addresses are automatically piped through to Wistia stats. So for everyone who clicks through on the email, you’ll be able to see who they are and what parts of the video they’ve watched as identified viewers in Wistia!

First, you’ll want to grab the email campaign link from Wistia. Pick the video you’d like to share, and click the Embed & Share button (if the video is in a project) or select Embed > Email from the left sidebar (if the video is in a Channel). Then select Email Campaign Link, and make sure HubSpot is your chosen Email Provider.

Change the size, autoplay options, and page the video links to. Then copy the email merge tag.

For HubSpot it should look something like this:

Next head over to HubSpot’s Email Builder.

When you’re editing your email in HubSpot, click the Source Code button in the Main Body Text editor. This will ensure that the editor won’t mess with the code that we paste in.

Paste in the email merge tag.

And then you should see the thumbnail of your video appear in the preview window. Pretty cool, eh?

Once you’ve got that beauty ready to go, send that email!

It’s always good to send a test message to yourself first to make sure everything’s linked up right. Note that when HubSpot sends the test message it will pass through “EMAIL” to our tracking system instead of your actual email address.

When you send the actual email, it will substitute the recipients' emails in instead.

May your click-through rates be high and your video engagements long!

With Media Bridge enabled for your HubSpot integration, you’ll see two Wistia modules in HubSpot to select media — one for email and one for a landing page.

Instead of searching in Wistia for the media you want to add to a Hubspot email or landing page, you can search your entire Wistia library and embed medias without needing to leave HubSpot.

If you have your HubSpot integration connected and would like to turn Media Bridge on, you’ll need to reauthenticate your integration and make sure you check off the Media Bridge check box on the Integrations page within your Wistia account. After you’ve enabled the check box, be sure to hit the “Disconnect” button, then the “Connect” button again to complete the reauthentication process.

If you don’t have the HubSpot integration, you can find more information on your Integrations page, or reach out to our Sales Team here.

Once you reauthenticate your integration, or set up your integration with Media Bridge capabilities checked off, you’re just about there! Within HubSpot, you’ll either need to create an email or landing page to see this in action.

Head into HubSpot and create a new email. From here, search for the Wistia module by clicking “More” under “Content.”

Drag the Wistia module anywhere into your email and use “Select from Wistia” to browse all synced medias to embed into your email.

Within HubSpot, your medias will reflect the same organizational structure from your Wistia account.

You can also search for a specific title, and filter the media type to see video or audio.

Once selected, you can change the play button color, add padding around the media, and even use a custom link to link to a landing page where the media is embedded.

Now, you’re good to go!

This process is very similar to adding medias to emails, but let’s go over the details!

First, you’ll want to search for the Wistia module by cliking “More” under “Content.”

Drag the Wistia module anywhere on your page and click “Select from Wistia” to browse all synced medias. This includes both audio and video. You can only browse one media type at a time though, so make sure you have the correct media type selected in the Media Bridge browser.

When you’ve selected your media and you’re done customizing it, make sure to hit “Apply changes” to see the media in your landing page preview.

You’re all set!

The short answer is no, you don’t need a Turnstile or form on every video, but it does make the integration a lot more reliable.

This tracking relies heavily on cookies being set in a viewer’s browser, and those cookies being present any time someone watches your video. These cookies are set upon form submission, so having forms in and around your videos is the best way to ensure that leads are being tracked as expected.

Since cookies don’t carry over between browsers/devices, this creates the possibility for tracking loopholes. For example:

Alyssa, using her work computer, submits to a HubSpot form on one of your landing pages. She then watches a video on a different page set up for integration tracking. By the time she leaves your site, Alyssa has a contact record in HubSpot with her lead data, and you can see her viewing data within the activity feed.

Later that evening, Alyssa is home from work and decides to watch more of your video content. She uses her smart tablet which is her preferred device for personal use. Alyssa, on this different device, goes straight to the video content without completing a form, and watches several videos. This data does not show up in the contact record because this new device does not have a tracking cookie to identify Alyssa as a known lead.

Think of it this way: a Turnstile or Form isn’t always required, but any opportunity for someone to skip or ignore your Turnstile/Form is a possibility that their data may not be passed into HubSpot.

Even though you can’t put a Turnstile or a HubSpot form on an audio episode, it’s still necessary that your listeners submit one for tracking to work. This sounds counterintuitive, but the good news is that HubSpot tracking can cast a wide net.

As long as the Turnstile or form is submitted on a page with a HubSpot tracking code, and as long as your audio episode is embedded on a page with a HubSpot tracking code, then we can capture listening data from your audience and send it to the correct contact record in HubSpot. They can be the same page or different pages - tracking will work either way.

The trick here is to ensure that the Turnstile or form is filled out before the user listens to your audio episode. The best way to ensure that is to embed a HubSpot form on one page and on submission, have it take the user to another page where the audio episode is embedded.

The HubSpot integration has a few moving pieces that have to come together for tracking to work as expected. Here is a checklist of things to look out for when the data isn’t showing up:

To be on the safe side, make sure you’ve followed all 3 key setup steps above. Each of these steps has an important function for integration tracking. In particular having some kind of Turnstile/form involved for identification, and embedding your media on a page with the HubSpot script are the steps most often overlooked.

Under Account -> Settings -> Integrations, make sure HubSpot is set to Primary. Only the Primary integration will receive data from Wistia. To fix this, click on the integration to expand its options, and select Make Primary.

In order to see Wistia events/data, you need to enable the “Wistia” filter, under Integrations.

E-v1.js is the Wistia javascript library — it essentially is the player, and it controls all the Wistia functionality on your page. Certain embeds, such as the Fallback/iframe embed, can still function for media playback without E-v1.js on the page. However E-v1.js must live on the webpage, just like your HubSpot tracking code, for this integration to work.

If you are using an iframe embed on your page, it’s possible that your CMS has removed the E-v1 script from the embed. The E-v1 script should be after the <iframe> element of the embed and looks like this:
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If there isn’t an instance of E-v1 outside of the iframe, the Wistia and HubSpot scripts will not be able to get the correct information from each other.

The good news is that this is easy to fix by adding the E-v1 script to your page. We recommend adding it to the <head> element of your page. Feel free to copy the example above and paste that right into your page.

As long as you’ve followed the steps on this page, HubSpot tracking will work with just about any embedded instance. That said, if you’ve followed everything here and you’re still not seeing engagement data, it’s time to check what container you’ve embedded your video in.

If you’ve embedded a Wistia iFrame within another iFrame container, tracking will not work. It will break any on-page tracking, because it obscures the ability for E-v1.js to determine which actual page the video is embedded on.

An extra iFrame will prevent the external E-v1.js script from seeing that there is a wistia_embed element on the page (on the Wistia iFrame embed). E-v1.js needs to be able to interact with the Wistia player, and the additional iFrame essentially acts as a barrier between the E-v1.js script and the wistia_embed container. The best way to solve this is to remove the additional iFrame completely.

Styling issues can happen when “Set as a raw HTML form” is selected. If you uncheck this box the Wistia styles will be applied.

Still stuck? We’re here to help! Send an email to [email protected] or use the contact form to reach out. We’re happy to work with you on ironing out the wrinkles.