AutoCapture website events

AutoCapture is HubSpot's automatic event tracking tool that captures clicks on interactive elements (i.e., links and buttons) across your entire website without needing manual setup. Custom events manually track selected website interactions, but AutoCapture automatically records all visitor actions. This gives you complete behavioral data to improve personalization and AI-driven decision making. HubSpot decides what clicks are tracked according to the following standards:

• Click tracking respects configured bot and IP filtering configured on the analytics settings pages.
• HubSpot only tracks clicks when consent has been provided. On sites without a cookie banner, consent is implied and clicks are tracked. On sites with a configured cookie banner, HubSpot will not track any clicks until the visitor explicitly grants consent. This behavior is similar to page view tracking, with one exception: page views still occur when consent is not granted, but those views do not include the hubspotutk cookie and are therefore anonymized. 

Once your tracking code is installed and active, you'll need to verify raw events to use them throughout HubSpot tools.

Before you get started 

Before getting started with Autocapture, please note the following information.

Understand requirements

Understand limitations & considerations

• While AutoCapture is turned on by default, you can turn it off.
• You should monitor your raw events regularly to identify new interaction patterns you want to verify.
• Raw events are limited to 250M occurrences a month.
• Verified events are limited to 50M occurrences a month. You can create up to 2000 verified events per HubSpot account.

Understand raw and verified events

When working with AutoCapture, there are two types of events: raw and verified. You must manually verify raw events to create verified events.

Raw events

AutoCapture automatically captures website interactions as raw events. These appear in the Raw events table and include:

• Clicks on interactive elements (buttons, links, menu items, tabs).
• Detailed interaction data, including name, description, URL path, CSS selector, number of occurrences, and last seen date.

• Please note:

  • Raw events are captured and stored but aren't available in HubSpot tools.
  • HubSpot is explicitly excluding certain types of clicks from being captured. These include: 
    1. Clicks on empty spaces, images, plain text, checkboxes, and iframes.
    2. Repeated clicks on the same interactive element in quick succession without page refresh.

Verified events

To use raw events throughout HubSpot, you need to verify them. Verified events are:

• Available across all HubSpot tools (i.e., workflows, lists, etc.).
• Displayed on contact record timelines.
• Usable in lead scoring and segmentation.
• Integrated with datasets and journeys.

Verify an event

Raw events can be verified in the event visualizer. The visualizer is AutoCapture's built-in website viewer where you can:

• View which website element corresponds to each event.
• Verify you're tracking the correct interactions.
• Edit event criteria within HubSpot.
• Review how many occurrences each event has had.

To verify an event:

1. In your HubSpot account, navigate to Data Management > Event Management.
2. In the left sidebar menu, select the Explorer tab.
3. On the Raw events tab, in the table, click the raw event name.
4. Verify the name of the raw event or edit the name to be more specific. It's best to use descriptive event names (e.g., Learn Our History - Homepage)
5. Click Create verified event in the Visualizer. You'll be redirected.
   
6. Verify or edit the Event name, Event description, and Event criteria. Adding a detailed description helps AI generate more accurate and relevant content.
    

   Please note: when you edit the event criteria (CSS), it adjusts what makes the event fire. Editing CSS selectors required a foundational understanding of CSS and your website's structure. Consult with a web developer if you aren't able to make changes.

7. Click the Filter by text checkbox to construct verified events that match the CSS "event criteria" and the exact text typed into the filter. This gives you more control around how you define verified events.
8. I'd like to track this on section, select an option.
9. Click Create a verified event.
10. If you don't see what you want to track, you can click Launch visualizer in the top right corner and enter your URL.
11. Once the visualizer loads, you can hover over any clickable element to configure tracking.
12. You can toggle between verification and navigation modes in the top right corner to move between pages or expand elements on your site.

When you verify an event, historical data is backfilled for 90 days or 50,000 of the most recent occurrences (whichever is smaller). The backfilled data can take up to a few hours to appear. During this time, there will be a loading icon by the verified event name. New data will populate in your verified event in real time. 

Please note: once a verified event is created, you can't modify the event criteria. If you need to make changes, you need to create a new verified event from the original raw event and delete the original.

When can I not create a verified event?

There are a few different reasons you may be blocked from creating a verified event:

• If the filtering criteria for a verified event is already set and cannot be changed in this case
• If the name of the verified event has already been used
• If the criteria has been modified where there are no found matching elements or too many matching elements

Edit verified events

Once an event if verified, you can only edit the name and description.

1. In your HubSpot account, navigate to Data Management > Event Management.
2. In the left sidebar menu, select the Explorer tab.
3. Click the Verified events tab.
4. In the table, click the verified event name.
5. Edit the name or description.
6. Click Save event.

Delete verified events

You can only delete a verified event if it's not used in a HubSpot tool (lists reports, workflows, etc.). When you delete a verified event, all data is removed and it can't be undone.

1. In your HubSpot account, navigate to Data Management > Event Management.
2. In the left sidebar menu, select the Explorer tab.
3. Click the Verified events tab.
4. In the table, hover over the verified event name.
5. Click the Actions menu and select Delete.

Work with verified events

Once you have verified events, you can:

• Create segments: group contacts by similar behaviors for personalized experiences. You can filter segments by Pages clicked by adding a filter for the event. 
• Create workflows: automate business processes triggered by custom behavior. You can filter by Pages clicked by adding a filter for the event enrollment trigger within Websites & media > Website events > Pages clicked during the set up process.
• Create reports: analyze behavioral data for insights. You can filter by Pages clicked by adding a filter within the report viewer or during the report creation process.
• Create journeys: design customer journeys. You can filter by Pages clicked by adding a filter within the report viewer or during the report creation process.