An exciting project that we have just finished is DFP (now Google Ads) ad targeting using HubSpot on a large Joomla website.
In short, here’s how the system works:
- Someone visits the Joomla website and fills in a HubSpot form – the person is automatically assigned a hubspotutk which is associated to his HubSpot profile.
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When the same person visits the website again, a PHP script is triggered (using Ajax) to get all his information from HubSpot using the hubspotutk cookie. This information is then saved to a local cache. This step is necessary to eliminate the connection overhead to HubSpot and to circumvent HubSpot’s 40K API requests/day limitation. After the information is saved to the local cache, it is then pushed to the local storage of the browser in order to reduce the number of requests to the client’s server.
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When the same person visits the website afterwards, a different script is triggered and passes on all the browser information to DFP using key-value ad targeting (for example, yearlyIncome = >$200,000, businessTraveler = yes, etc…), resulting in accurate ad targeting for the person.
Of course, we faced many challenges while implementing the project, for example, we discovered that the value of the hubspotutk does not have a 1-1 relationship to a a HubSpot profile. In other words, the same HubSpot profile can be associated to 1 or more hubspotutk. In fact, this is the main reason why 1) a HubSpot export does not contain the hubspotutk and 2) there are no HubSpot API calls that return the hubspotutk in their response.
We hope you that you found our process for DFP ad targeting using HubSpot interesting. If you need help with the implementation, then contact us and we’ll do the work for you affordably, cleanly, and elegantly.