How to edit the original source property in HubSpot

Hey everyone. Chris Higgins from Electric Monk here. I just wanted to make a quick video to tell you about an update that HubSpot made yesterday that I think is kind of interesting. If you've been using HubSpot for a while, you'll be aware of the Original Source property. This is a default property in HubSpot that tracks the source of every new contact that's added to your database.

So there's a bunch of source options available in this property, like organic search, email marketing, referrals, paid, and whenever a new contact is added to the database, this property is automatically set for you by HubSpot. So as an example, if someone who isn't in your contact database discovers one of your posts on Facebook, clicks the link through to your blog, and then fills in one of your forms, their original source would automatically be set as social media.

So this property is really useful at giving you that high level overview of where your contacts are coming from, but it really only works if a contact has landed in your database via one of those sources that HubSpot has specified for you. If you're manually uploading lists or you're syncing them via the API or a third party integration, then in those instances, each contact's original source is automatically set as an offline source. This can make reporting on your most effective marketing channels really challenging, especially if you're in a position where you've migrated your database from another platform across to HubSpot, or you do a lot of manual uploading or you're using  third party tools for lead generation.

So historically, the Original Source property has always been uneditable, but as of yesterday, you can now retrospectively update that property on all of your contact records. If you check out the HubSpot product blog, there's an article there detailing the changes that have been made. So if you've got a HubSpot database that contains lots of contacts, who sources listed as offline, and you know what the actual original source of those contacts is, you're now able to go in and change that in each contact record.

And you can even automate this. So if you've got a bunch of contacts in a list and you want to change the original source for all of those contacts, you can easily create a workflow to do that. This is a really tiny update, but it will definitely be useful to a lot of HubSpot users, myself included. 

Personally, I'd still like to see HubSpot add even more functionality and customizable options to this property. For example, it would be great if you could add your own custom sources so that when you're uploading a list of contacts to HubSpot, you can specify exactly where those leads came from, such as an event or a webinar. It would also be really great to see some deeper integration with some of HubSpot's connect partners so that you can track the performance of your third party lead gen tools.

I hope you guys found this useful, and if you've got any questions or thoughts about this update, please feel free to drop them in the comments below. Cheers.