How to Fix Messy Source Data in Your HubSpot Reports

How to Set It Up

Step 1: Find Out What's Actually in Your Drill-Down Data

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.

• Go to Reporting > Reports > Create report > Single object, and choose a contact report.
• Set the filter to Create date is all time.
• In the visualisation, display Count of contacts by Original Traffic Source Drill-Down 2.

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.

Paid traffic is the usual mess, and a lot of it starts upstream. If your campaigns aren't writing consistent values in the first place, fix capturing UTM parameters properly in the first place before you build branches around whatever is arriving today.

Step 2: Create Your Clean Source Property

• Go to Settings > Properties and create a new dropdown property. Name it something clearly custom like "Clean Traffic Source" or "Source Grouping", not "Drill-Down 3," since that implies a native field that doesn't exist and will confuse whoever inherits your portal.
• Add the tidy category options you actually want in reports: Meta Ads, Google Ads, LinkedIn Ads, PandaDoc, and so on.

Step 3: Build a Workflow to Populate It

• Go to Automation > Workflows and create a contact-based workflow from scratch. (If your sources are tracked on deals or companies, build it on that object instead.)
• Set the enrolment trigger so records enter as soon as they're created with source data known, for example, Create date is known and Original Traffic Source Drill-Down 1 is known.
• Turn OFF re-enrolment. Because HubSpot sets original source once and doesn't change it, you only want this to run per record once.
• Build an if/then branch for each source you want to clean up, matching on the real values you found in Step 1:
  • If Drill-Down 1 is Paid Social AND Drill-Down 2 contains your Facebook campaign name, then set Clean Traffic Source to Meta Ads.
  • If Drill-Down 1 is Offline Sources AND Drill-Down 2 is [your PandaDoc integration ID], then set Clean Traffic Source to PandaDoc.
• Name each branch after its clean category so the logic is readable when you come back to it.

Step 4: Swap It Into Your Reports

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.

This is the point where the rest of your reporting gets easier. A single tidy source property is what makes proving ROI with HubSpot's custom report builder possible, and it's the difference between a channel breakdown people argue with and one they act on. The same property is what carries through to building dashboards people actually read.

A Few Things Worth Knowing

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, and 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.

There's a compliance angle, and it's a useful one to have. These properties sit on contact records, which makes them personal information under the Privacy Act 1988. Australian Privacy Principle 10 requires you to take reasonable steps to make sure the personal information you hold is accurate, up to date and complete. Replacing a mystery integration ID with a value a human can read is a small, defensible piece of that, and the OAIC guidance on APP 10 is a straightforward thing to point at when someone asks why data hygiene work is on the roadmap.

Want Your Reporting Built to Actually Work?

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. It's the bulk of our RevOps and HubSpot work.

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.

Stay in the Loop

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, arrives 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.