APIs & Integrations

dimitrisor
Member

External website integration with HubSpot Blog

Dear Hubspot support team,

Until now we have been using HubSpot's blog-system successfully having our blog content accessible through blog.domain (our website's sub domain).

We recently decided that we want our HubSpot-blog's content to be served through our external website.

So,

  1. We implemented a script that integrates with our HubSpot-Blog's content through the HubSpot-API.
    As our website is based on a MVC-framework, the URLs that are generated from our integration-script are as follows:

domain/blog/posts/
domain/blog/post/{post-slug}
domain/blog/authors
domain/blog/author/{author-slug}
domain/blog/topics
domain/blog/topic/{topic-slug}

  1. The next action we did was to disconnect the existing subdomain "blog.domain" from HubSpot COS Domains panel and handle the request in our apache-server.

The issue we are now facing is that we cannot get any analytics for our blog-posts in the backend of hubspot.

Is that happening because we are somehow bypassing the routing process of HubSpot?

If yes, what would be the best approach to achieve what we want, so that visitors will be able to access our HubSpot-Blog's content only through our external website and under specific URLs, without losing HubSpot analytics capability (views, campaigns etc.)?

Could you help us set up a proper HubSpot Blog configuration so that we don't lose any of its functionality?

As this matter is urgent for us, we would really appreciate any help.

Thanks in advance,
Dimitris

3 Replies 3
Tunch
Contributor

External website integration with HubSpot Blog

@BAM5 Did you get any progress on this or manage to get it to work? We want to be able to do this exact same thing

 

@Derek_Gervais Any update from your end?

0 Upvotes
Derek_Gervais
HubSpot Alumni
HubSpot Alumni

External website integration with HubSpot Blog

Hi @dimitrisor,

Just to make sure that we're on the same page, you're using the HubSpot blog backend, but you're not actually hosting the live blog on a HubSpot domain? The majority of blog analytics come from the HubSpot tracking code and other tracking features that are included on a HubSpot hosted blog site. It's not possible to fully replicate this on an externally hosted website, since you'll be missing some key functionality provided by our built-in analytics tracking.

The closest you'd be able to get would be including the HubSpot tracking code on all of these external pages. This would provide visitor tracking and other info, but it wouldn't populate a lot of the blog-specific analytics (since we don't know it's a blog).

0 Upvotes
BAM5
Participant

External website integration with HubSpot Blog

What would we need to do to make it so hubspot tracking requests signal it's a blog?

It seems to me that there's only 3 ways that hubspot could be tracking blog analytics.

  1. Through the http request to hubspot's servers, in which case it would be impossible to replicate that.
  2. Through the js tracking code which hubspot servers then match the page url to the blog and thus executes additional functionality to track blog analytics
  3. Through the js tracking code with a flag to the hubspot servers that this is blog post id X.

Taking a quick look through the hs-sites page for the blog I didn't see any flagging in the tracking code so it has to be 1 or 2. If it's 2 we would be able to achieve our goals if we were able to give hubspot analytics code the url patterns that would match the blog on our sites. If it's 1 then we're ...ahem... "out of luck" (hah, aparently *spiral based fastener*'d is a censored word on these forums) unless we want to load an iframe in the client as well to track the view which would be counter productive because I'm trying to optimize for bandwidth as well as having the page be integrated into our spa.