You open a marketing report to see which channels are actually working, and instead of clean answers you get this: "Meta Ads" split across a dozen campaign name variations, and integrations showing up as mystery number strings like 289271 instead of, you know, the name of the tool.
HubSpot's source drill-down data is genuinely useful. It's just not always readable. And messy source data makes reporting slower, noisier, and easier to get wrong.
The fix is to build one clean, custom source property that groups all that mess into the categories you actually report on. Here's how.
Before you touch anything, a quick clarification, because it matters for what you can and can't do.
HubSpot automatically sets three related properties on every contact: Original Traffic Source (the broad category, like "Paid Social"), plus Original Traffic Source Drill-Down 1 and Drill-Down 2, which add increasing detail. Drill-Down 1 gives context like the platform. Drill-Down 2 gives the most specific detail - the exact campaign name, a URL, or, in the case of integrations, a unique ID number.
The important part: these three are set automatically by HubSpot and can't be manually edited. They're analytics properties. You can't clean them directly, and there's no native "Drill-Down 3." So the move isn't to fix them. It's to create your own separate property that translates their messy values into clean ones.
A clean source property means your reports group the way you think. "Meta Ads" is one line, not fifteen. "PandaDoc" reads as PandaDoc, not as an ID number you have to look up every time.
That makes filtering, grouping, and analysis faster, and it makes your dashboards something the whole team can read without a decoder ring. Cleaner source data leads to clearer insights, which leads to better calls on where your marketing budget actually goes.
A quick word of honesty before you build it: this method uses a branching workflow, which means a little ongoing upkeep. Every time you add a new ad platform or integration, you'll add a branch. It's a one-time setup with light quarterly maintenance, not a set-and-forget. For most teams the clarity is well worth it, but you should know what you're signing up for.
Don't guess at your source values - pull the real ones from your own portal first. This is the step most people skip, and it's the one that makes the whole thing accurate.
This gives you the exact list of drill-down values in your account, including those cryptic integration ID numbers, so you know precisely what you're mapping. Do the same for Drill-Down 1 if useful. Those integration IDs are specific to the apps you've connected, so this report is the only reliable way to know yours.
Replace the messy default drill-down fields in your dashboards and reports with your new Clean Traffic Source property. Instead of a dozen Meta variations or a numeric ID, you'll see one clean, reportable category.
A clear-eyed look before you rely on it.
It only applies going forward, and to matched records. The workflow populates records as they enrol. Contacts already in your database won't get the clean value unless you enrol them too - you can do a one-time enrolment of existing records, but check your branch logic covers their older source values first.
Original source is set once. HubSpot stamps a contact's original source when they first enter and never changes it. That's exactly why this works cleanly for original-source reporting, but it's also why re-enrolment should stay off.
Integration IDs can shift. The ID codes in Drill-Down 2 are tied to the specific connected apps. If you swap tools or reconnect an integration, re-run the Step 1 report and update your branches.
Keep the branch list maintained. Review it quarterly. New channels and integrations mean new branches, or they'll fall through uncategorised.
Clean source data is one piece of reporting that tells the truth. If your dashboards are fighting you, your attribution is murky, or your whole reporting setup has grown faster than it was designed, that's the kind of thing we sort out.
Neighbourhood is a Diamond HubSpot Partner. If your reports aren't telling you what you need to know, give us a shout and we'll take a look.
Talk to us about your HubSpot setup.
If you want more hacks like this one, practical, no-fluff, built for teams who actually run HubSpot day-to-day. Here's where to find us:
Ops Intel, our newsletter for HubSpot admins and RevOps teams, lands in your inbox with exactly this kind of content. No padding, no roundups of stuff you've already seen. Subscribe to Ops Intel now.
We're also on Facebook and YouTube if you'd rather watch someone click through it than read about it. Follow us there for more updates.
Happy HubSpotting!