Data Hub @ the HubSpot Admin HUG 🐙

Welcome everybody to another event of the HubSpot Admins Hug. Um, I'm Kyle. Deanna is the other host here. Uh, we are here every Tuesday at this time, uh, sharing things that will hopefully help you as a HubSpot admin or power user or partner or whatever you may be. Get more value out of this platform we all share. This is our homepage. If you are not familiar with it, definitely check it out. This is your source of truth for all of our upcoming events. We have a lot of things scheduled and we have more coming, but you are here today. We're talking about Data Hub. We got 3 friends here from the, from HubSpot's product team who are gonna go deep on that. I will keep my comments as brief as possible and get over to them as soon as I can. Next week, April 14th, is HubSpot Spring Spotlight. This is an annual event where they announce new things. This year there is no, like, in-person event component of that, but here at the Admin Hug we are doing an officially sponsored Admin Download. So if you want to know what's happening, what's changing with Spring Spotlight, all the new features and stuff, I will be doing a short presentation just explaining some logistical stuff and doing kind of a roll-up. And then we have several different product teams giving short demos and live Q&As. So if you, if you want to keep up with what's happening there, please come. Again, we have lots of other things scheduled. Check them all out. Register for all of them. Come. We'd love to have you. We also have a YouTube page. All of our sessions, we try to record and put here. Today's session will be recorded and posted here. So if you ever want to rewatch a session or if you miss one or want to share it with a friend, YouTube is the best place to find recordings. Um, we are very close to being able to have another show-and-tell event. We do these every so often where you all present things you're working on. It's excellent peer-to-peer learning, some of my favorite stuff we do here at the Admin Hug. Um, yeah, so if you have built anything you're proud of, uh, constructed a really, uh, complicated workaround or, or solved a problem in HubSpot, please fill out this form, let us know. Uh, we have a handful of you who have done this. Thanks to you We are very close to scheduling this. If we get 1 or 2 more, we will get this on the books as soon as we can. We'd love to see this happen in May, for example, if we could just get 1 or 2 more. Community.hubspot.com is a space we have to discuss admin sorts of things. More often, Deanna and I are on LinkedIn. We have a space for The Hug. We have a handle for The Hug. Both of us very active there if you want to connect with us. Talk with us, DM us, LinkedIn is a great place to do that. Again, we are here every week. If you have any suggestions, requests for speakers or topics you'd like to see here at the Hug, you can fill out this form or again, just reach out to us directly on LinkedIn. We will do our best to get that on the books for you. And then here is an overview page, adminhug.info has a lot of great information. Go to /m/housekeeping, you can see links to all the things I talked about today. And some, some more besides. So Deanna put that together and it is, it is a great place to find all the resources you need. With that, I will now hand it over to the team, although I failed to ask which one of you goes first. So anyway, one of you take it over.

Yes, that's me.

All right. All right, so today is a talk about DataHub. So I only have a few slides here and then we're going to go straight into the product, show you all some cool stuff that's being developed or going to GA very soon. So just a quick recap is that we changed Operations Hub to DataHub. I think everybody in this call probably knows, but it's just kind of good to reiterate that we moved away from this collection of tools that was Ops Hub and we're trying to really kind of drive the narrative home of Data Hub is for all your data to be connected together and to really power the, the agentic customer platform that HubSpot is becoming. So this is a screenshot from or a photo from Inbound last year in San Francisco and I assume a couple of you at the very least were there as well with us to learn about Data Hub. So The interwebs and LinkedIn especially was really excited about this move. So it seemed like we did the right thing by rebranding this and really kind of getting closer to the data as the narrative for Data Hub via Operations Hub. But of course we are doing a lot of work still now to actually make it a much stronger offering and really building more into the features that are in Data Hub already. One of the things here to reemphasize, I think, which is good to reemphasize rather, which is that what has been driven all the time is that context is key. Like your AI platform is only as useful as the data that's in the platform. I think that's an obvious point in a way, but it's also important to emphasize again and again. That's also what Yamini and others are doing. This is a screenshot just from LinkedIn a couple days ago. And so context really is the key thing. Like we still win deals with HubSpot. It's not a secret that we have 300,000 customers or at least close to 300,000. Well, like one of the big reasons that we have this is because we have a really strong integration landscape and we have these connections to all the outside tools to bring the data into the platform and really supercharge HubSpot itself. Now I'm going to give you a bit of a sneak peek here on what we are planning to do for this year. And really, like, how to think about this is we're making sure these tools work better together. So it's not only Data Studio and automation, it's basically all these things coming together. Data quality as well, which is the first thing here in the sneak peek, which is that we're working on making sure you can do data quality operations right at the time that you're bringing the data in. So if you're doing an import, if you're doing a data sync, if you're just bringing some data in from somewhere, maybe it's a warehouse, we'll make sure that you can actually operate on that data, clean the data, dedupe the data before it hits the CRM and maybe starts triggering a workflow or a dynamic list or something. We know that this is a pain point for many of you, that is duplicates. And so the more we can catch them before they even hit the CRM, the better that will be. I would assume you all agree with that. The second one is more AI, like not a surprise, more AI everywhere, but hopefully useful AI with the right context, as I was saying. So it's AI in two ways. It's AI as a step-by-step coach to kind of make sure you find what you need. Breeze Assistant is really good at this already, but it's also more specific AI agents like Data Agent that just become more capable because it can also speak to the features that are there. Like it has the context of Data Studio. It does so many more other things that really make it like a powerful LLM agent that you can use to talk to your data, basically. Now, what we've been doing, and maybe some of you noticed this, is that Data Studio switched a few times in terms of like the interface, the user interface. So we did a few tweaks here and there, small and large. I acknowledge that's been annoying to sometimes navigate. However, with every change that we're doing there, it's quite intentional. And we do see that especially for new customers who haven't seen all the other changes, they're actually quite happy. And we see that they can get to a dataset that is in the right shape faster and with more success. So we're not gonna do this every few weeks. Obviously we're not gonna keep doing that, but we've made a lot of investments post inbound to really get Data Studio especially to a better state of ease of use. And it's still in beta, of course, but after we did all that, that we are going to go to GA, which is in the not too distant future. And then last but not least, Data Hub is all about more sources. So we launched Data Studio with 120 sources. We're going to add more. There's also, of course, the Marketplace and the ecosystem that's adding more apps and more sources all the time. But specifically for Studio and Data Hub, we're going to be launching an API. We have webhook capabilities. Some of that is in the demos, by the way. More warehouse vendors that are going to be unlocked to bring all the data into HubSpot and basically unlocking the entire ecosystem. So whatever you want, you're going to be able to put that into Data Hub and Data Studio to then activate it further.

All right, and then I'll give it to Kelly for the first demo.

Awesome, thank you so much, Koon. Hi everyone, I'm Kelly Yuen, pronoun she/her, and I work on HubSpot's Data Studio. Let me go ahead and share my screen. So I'm super excited to share more for those of you who may be new to Data Studio and also highlight some of our recent updates for those who are already experts. I will, uh, Just one, I do wanna call out that I am using one of our demo portals. So if you see some things that you may not see yet in your portals, that is why. In general, we know that scattered data is a common challenge. Your customer data lives in different tools, and when you need answers, it's hard to piece all that together. So when someone on the team asks, "Which accounts are healthy?" or "How should we expand?" you have to spend hours pulling reports or making a best guess without a complete picture in front of you. So what I'll show you today is how to bring that data together and turn it into something that your team can actually act on, and quickly, all within Data Studio. So the goal here isn't just about connecting the data, but making it actually usable. So I'm going to ground this in a pretty simple example. Let's say we are an edtech SaaS company, and our subscription data lives in Stripe, and our CRM and marketing engagement data lives in HubSpot. So we're going to take all this data together, put it together, and then action on it. So if I hadn't already done so, I could go ahead and connect sources by clicking Connect External Data Source. From here, you can see that I already have Stripe connected, but I could continue to add additional sources if I wanted to. I could upload a file, webhooks, which Mark will talk about in just a little bit. And if I can't find what I'm looking for, I can always request it here. If you wanna see some of the sources that you already have connected, you can go to our source library. Some of you who are familiar with the tool might recall there being two tabs before, one for HubSpot sources and one for external sources. We've recently combined the two into one consolidated place, making it easier to find what you're looking for. So if I didn't, again, if I didn't have the sources connected, you would just select the source that you're looking for. You can also use the search bar and you would go through through that authentication process to input that data. Connecting data to Data Studio does not consume any credits, so you can connect as many sources as you'd like. And then for each source, while you're going through the flow, you have a column limit of about 200 columns, and you can select which specific columns you want to get sent into HubSpot. Um, let me go ahead and since I already have Stripe connected, I'm going to go ahead and jump to a pre-created dataset where I already have my HubSpot contacts data and Stripe subscription data combined. If they weren't already combined, you can go ahead and add the sources to your dataset. As Koen mentioned, we've been making some updates to Data Studio to make it easier to use. So if you remember that, that side panel before, we now moved all of the key actions to the top over here of the table to make it easier to find the key tools that you need to shape your data as, as needed. So right now I have HubSpot contacts combined with my Stripe subscription data all in one table. If I wanted to manage my columns, I could move them around if I needed to. I could remove them, or I can add columns. When you're adding columns, you can add columns directly from a source You can also add columns powered by Data Agent, or you can add a custom formula column as well. Again, you can also add additional sources. So let's say you wanted more information beyond HubSpot Contacts and Stripe, you can add in more sources here. You can also enrich your dataset. So if you had any missing data and you wanted to make sure that your data was complete. You can enrich that data, you can add in formulas, and you can also add in filters as needed. If you prefer, we also offer advanced configuration when you're managing your sources. So what that looks like is you'll have this clear map of how all of your sources are connected, and you can manage how they're joined together. You can manage what that looks like, and you can see a preview of what it looks like when it's all joined together. So you do have this more advanced configuration configuration for you to modify this. And this is an area that we will continue to invest in, so you'll see some improvements coming down the line here as well. I also want to call out one of our recent changes. Oops, sorry. In this, let me just open this back up. Actually, I'll just go here. When you're creating a custom formula, we also made it easier to switch to our guided editor. So we know that for some, you know, formula syntax might not be, some of us might not be as familiar with formula syntax. And so you, if you're typing a formula and you're getting stuck, you can always switch to our guided formula editor, which makes it a little bit easier if you would prefer to use this point and click UI that makes it easier if you're not as familiar again with that formula syntax. In addition to this, if you go back to the advanced editor, we also will offer support on this right-hand side, or you can add a formula with AI, which is leveraging Breeze to help you write that formula out. So let's say this looks good. I could save it and add this column to my dataset. For this example, let's say I want to reach out to anyone who doesn't have our corporate training subscription to see if we can upsell them. I don't want to reach out to those who have trials or already have active corporate training subscriptions. So what I'm going to do is add a filter. I'm going to add some filters to this where the status of their subscription is not trials. So you can see that gets filtered out as I go. And then I'm also going to add a filter where the subscription name— let's see, one second— does not include corporate training. Okay, perfect. Now that I have the customers filtered out who I don't wanna reach out to, I can go ahead and, oops, sorry, wrong filter. Is not equal. There we go. Now I can go ahead and I can take this dataset now that it's shaped the way I want it to, and I can go ahead and activate on it. Before doing so, just a reminder that we do have data agent capabilities from within Data Studio as well. So if I wanted to add on more, for example, if I wanted to have data agent add in information about recent hires so that we could tailor the messaging so that we know, you know, you've recent hires, you might want corporate training. Would you be interested in the subscription? Or let's say you wanted to add a one-liner to your reps about why this is a good candidate to reach out to. Data Agent can help add in those columns to your dataset. So from here, you know, right now my dataset looks good. This has all the contacts who I wanna reach out to with this really tailored, you know, campaign. I can go ahead and I can now use my dataset. One thing I do wanna make sure is really clear, when you are manipulating data in Data Studio, it's not going to your CRM until you want it to do so. So this is fully a space for you to play around, to manipulate the data, to shape it in a way that works for you and your team, and you don't have to worry about it muddying your CRM. So you can go ahead and use this information. You can sync it to your CRM, or you can use it in a segment for that tailored campaign. You could use it in a workflow, a report, you could export it, and you don't necessarily, again, need to sync it to your CRM if it doesn't need to live there, or if it's like one-off scenario. Data Studio is a great way for you that allows you to define your data once and then use it in a bunch of different places. Again, for this scenario, I want to create a segment with this data and then I'll use that segment in a marketing campaign for this upsell opportunity. I'll go ahead and click on Segment and then that'll take me directly to our segments tool where I can then use it in my campaign. I also want to call out, if we just go back to that dataset, one of our recent updates that has been rolled out recently is within the Sync to CRM tooling from Data Studio. We do have a new update that allows you to sync to multiple objects at once. Previously, you could only sync to one object at a time, so hopefully this makes things a little bit easier. As a reminder, as you do set up your syncs or you set up any of your further activations later on, We added in a little bit more credit transparency so you could see exactly how your credits will be spent on these different activations so you know how it's being used. All of our credit-consuming activations are inclusive of sync to CRM, workflows, segments, and exports. Reporting does not consume credits at this time. So just to recap, we took this data from Stripe and HubSpot, combined it together in Data Studio without pushing it to the CRM just yet. We can push it to the CRM if we want to, or we can use it in other places like segments, reporting, workflows, and I can export it as well. If you ever want to go back and look to see where your datasets are being activated, you can go to the datasets tab and look at the used in column to see where your datasets are being activated so you can see where those credits are being spent. We went from having data in different systems to exactly, our team knows exactly what to do next with the data combined in one place. We have a lot more coming soon. As Koen mentioned, we're experimenting with AI in more places. We're looking at bringing in data quality tools to help with deduping here. We're really excited about what's coming next. We're going to continue with some of those ease-of-use improvements, and we're eager to hear your thoughts and feedback. So thank you so much for the time today. I'll go answer some of those questions that came through in the chat and Q&A, and then Mark, I'll pass it over to you.

Thanks. I'm just going to answer one of the questions that came in the Q&A first, which is around best practices for when people export data outside of Data Studio. And in general, what should they do within Data Studio HubSpot? So I think the way to think about this is your activations, your key activities that you do, like using data in workflows, in segments, lists, etc. That, that should live within HubSpot. If for whatever reason customers still want to track and send data for reporting outside of HubSpot, that is that is still fine. A lot of big customers have other sort of downstream systems or reporting platforms, etc., which they use, and hence they need to do that. But the best practice is you ensure that you're bringing back the data that is relevant for your activations, whether it is lists, workflows, campaigns, or anything that your HubSpot front office teams use. To ensure they're doing their jobs correctly. That's sort of the, like, way you can distinguish. But again, it completely depends on the use case that the customer uses. All right, I'm going to share my screen a bit and we can— okay. Can you all see my screen? I think, yeah, okay, great, thanks. Yeah, so I'm going to talk a little bit about like just some of the, some of the value, like majority of the value that comes from Data Studio is the fact that you can connect to external sources. We have a long list of external sources we support and we have an even longer list of external sources that customers want us to support. So given that in mind, we are trying out a few new things that I'm hoping to show and demo. Some of this stuff is pretty unimaginable because it doesn't exist today, but also because, yeah, it's, it's something that is hot off the press and that we can— I'm hoping we— you'll have a sneak peek into. But it helps us, you know, support all the sort of the large list of apps that maybe we can't support natively, we can't build integrations for. So that hopefully helps customers. Yeah, I'm just going to go through it. So So there's two things that we are introducing soon. One is, so if you think about these as developer sources, one is APIs and the other one is webhooks. APIs again is a way to be able to bring data in programmatically using APIs into Data Studio, right? That's, that's the first step. What we're doing right now, or what we've already done rather, it's in, it's in a beta already. So you'd be able to access it, is have something called a file ingestion API, which is essentially an API that you can, the customer can connect to and start sending CSV files for now. In a certain, they can choose the format they want to start sending that data in and it comes in Data Studio as a source. Simple. So if a customer again was trying— think of a use case like if you've got— if you're working with like a really legacy app or software and it's very difficult to find like typical connectivity, you— but you want to keep them in sync, you probably want to— you want to export CSVs in a regular format, have a process that exports these CSVs. And then have a— and use this API to be able to ingest that data in a frequent manner into Data Studio. So yeah, that's how the File Ingestion API works. I'll quickly show what it looks like. Again, this is my test portal. So there's a lot of stuff in here that is being worked on. So yeah, so for example, So if I walk through, so these are, these are files that I've uploaded from my API. Again, it's just a file, a CSV file. It'll come in as a source. You can choose the format and the columns that you want to ingest in and it starts coming in and just start keeping it up to date. So yeah, you can do as much as you want in here. With regards to the actual documentation, there's, you can find it in our HubSpot developers documentation. There's, you can search for Data Studio or you can find it under the tab called Data Studio here. There's something called Data Studio ingestion which allows data source, those updated data source tools. Like I said, for now we just support the creating and updating of data sources that ingest files. Soon we will support other things like JSON. And yeah, in general, we're keen to hear other recommendations or any other feedback that you have in terms of requests of folks that want to use APIs to ingest data into Data Studio. So yeah, so developer sources API Here's the documentation. You should be able to connect to it. There's the steps on how to authenticate it, what scope you need, and then start ingesting data into Data Studio. From here on, it should be like how straightforward, like any other source that you add. You can use it in a data, in a dataset. You can start syncing from it. You can use it in workflows, etc., just like how you would otherwise. So So yeah, so this is the first one, which is File Ingest API. A few things to call out, I guess. We support CSV file formats for now, up to 512 MB per file size. It's in public beta and it's available at DataPro. So you can start accessing it right now. You can also find it in March's change log if you subscribe to that and, and you can find details about it in there or you can search in under product updates and you'll find more details there. So yeah, so that's the first one. The second one is webhooks. So this is something that I'm personally excited about is to be able to connect third-party apps well, in general, other third-party apps or long tail of third-party apps that support webhooks to Data Studio. So again, this will be, this allowed. So if there is a third-party app that you use that supports webhooks pushing data from that app via webhook into Data Studio, then this would be a good use case or a good fit for that need. So, so you'd be able to create a webhook data source based on whatever third-party app you want to connect to. Most third-party apps these days do connect, have good connectivity, or you could just— I mean, a lot of folks use Zapier. Zapier has good webhook connectivity as well. In fact, one of the demos that I'm going to show is using one is Zapier. You can start pushing in event data from, from the third-party app, and we will allow you to create and update that data in the data source. You can make sure the data source looks as expected, and then you can choose your event schema and format. And again, it'll be available as a data source in Data Studio, which you can then reuse for your own purposes. This is work in progress. I'm hoping it's out soon. It will be available to DataPro. I can quickly demo. So what did I do today? So I had a Typeform integration which was pushing in leads data like an NPS form. And it was connected to my Zapier, which then is connected to Data Studio. So then this is how the event data starts coming in. So as and when an event comes in, it'll then update here in at the next read, which is typically like about like, I don't know, it takes 2 to 5 minutes to show up. But yeah, sometimes it comes faster. It doesn't take that long. But yeah, it should be fairly handy. So again, creating, if you want to know how to access it, So you go to connect to source as webhooks. So you have this link. So when you open this, you have this link which you can copy and paste it into your third-party app wherever it says that, you know, give me your webhook link, etc. So you copy this and paste it in your third-party app. And once you've done that, most Third-party apps that I work with or that I've seen have like a test feature, which would be like, oh, test this event and make sure that data is showing up as expected. So once you do that, you can test and the data starts showing up on the left-hand side and you make sure that it shows up like how you expect it to. If not, you just refresh it and try again. Maybe you like, for example, if you use Zapier a lot, you want to make sure that the column, the the event payload has got the right columns and data that you want to capture. And then you give a name to your data source and you save it. And that's when it starts showing up here. So these icons, we might change this. This is very much work in progress, but this is what it looks like. And now it'll start showing up in here and your event data starts showing up in here. Obviously, Like any other source, you can use it in your dataset, in your dataset, or you can use it to sync workflows, etc. What else is there to mention? Yeah, you can create and update data based on what identifier you set. We don't have the update flow yet. But I think that's still work in progress. And so yeah, so that's webhooks, which is, which should be good because for any, think of this as any of the apps that you, you can't typically find in, say, the either the marketplace or in the source catalog, or it doesn't support, you know, the integration in the right format that you'd like, etc. And you want to use this kind of customizable event format, then webhooks is a great way to do it. And hopefully that expands our connectivity to the long tail of apps that we can't natively support, and, and that allows customers to actually start ingesting more data into Data Studio. The last one from me is, yeah, just in general, some more Native apps that we have, that we have now made available is Azure Synapse and Redshift and Notion. These are some of the apps that we've made available to ingest data into Data Studio. Synapse and Redshift are at enterprise because they are considered data warehouses. And Notion would be available as again at your typical data pro to be able to ingest into Data Studio. I'm trying to think what else. Yeah, I think that's it from me in terms of updates from the sources side. I probably look at questions now.

Great. Thanks, everyone. Uh, yeah, we have a few questions in the Q&A. Um, and I apologize, it turns out our, uh, our presenters here have been unable to post in the chat, which is why they've not been answering things in the chat. We haven't quite figured that problem out yet. Um, but if you have questions you asked in the chat that haven't been answered, please move them over to the Q&A and we will work through those. So everybody hop into the Q&A now, all you attendees, and make sure your questions are there. Upvote the ones you want answered most, and then we will work through them most upvoted to least upvoted as we usually do.

Hopefully that helped.

I just promoted everybody.

Promotions all around.

Everybody's a super admin.

That's, that's the standard approach, I think.

Yeah.

Um, cool. Well, while questions are still filtering in, I'm gonna go ahead and start asking some of these top ones. Everybody hop in and, and upvote to, to guide me in this. Uh, Joshua Oaks, uh, asks, do this webhook functionality replace the existing webhook functionality, or is different?

I think if you're referring to the existing Webhook functionality, you're talking about Webhook data into workflows. It is, it is different. In any case, it is different. This is to be able to allow connectivity into Data Studio. So allowing that Webhook push of that data into Data Studio. Which the existing webhook functionality doesn't allow. So if your use case is you want to bring in event data or you want to bring in certain data from a third-party app that supports webhook into Data Studio to be able to manipulate, transform, combine with other sources, just like how Kelly mentioned, demoed, or use it in other places which Data Studio allows, then this is the use case for using for, for that kind of connectivity.

Yeah, and then it could be from the Data Studio used in, in webhooks or, or many other things. I'd be curious to know, uh, friends here who are, uh, DataHub users, um, how you've been using that webhook functionality in, uh, in workflows and what what new opportunities this opens up for you, because, um, I know a lot of people who love the webhook action in workflows, but it is sort of famously limited in what you can do with it. Uh, so this feels like it opens up a lot. Um, Sabrina asks, file ingestion— is there any idea on how to grab PDF files to add them to records? We have documents/contracts stored externally.

That, that's a good question. I, I think, I think for now the what we're solving for is more structured data in terms of like column-based or table-based format and that data coming in and being ingested as a source. But that's not to say that this isn't a valid use case to be able to enrich your contact information or any kind of object information you have with PDF files, etc.

So, yeah, I mean, yeah, because the file ingestion you said right now is just CSV files, right?

Yeah, just CSV files and in a tabular format in terms of data. That's how we'll ingest the data.

Yeah. So, Sabrina, I don't know if you saw, now in beta we have a Google Drive integration where you can connect Google Drive files and folders and put them on CRM records. And there are workflow actions as part of that integration. So like you can automatically add or create Google Lock and Google Drive files and folders that way. People are excited about this. Also, a lot of people don't use Google. We are using Google Drive as our first investigation into this. This sort of functionality. And once we get it right, we are expanding to SharePoint and Office. All the dates on that are TBD. I don't know if development on that has started yet. But Sabrina, my question to you is, where are these PDFs stored currently? Because I would guess if you're just looking to get them attached to records, um, that's not going to be a Data Hub feature. That's going to be some sort of integration. And we are, we are building those actively right now. So, um, reach out to me if you have questions about that. Happy to connect you with that team. Rebecca asks, could the file ingestion API be used both to update existing objects and create new objects?

Yeah, um, you— so, so the file ingestion API will allow you to create data source in Data Studio, and once you have the data source, you can use the data in the data source in a data set which will— which you can use to create or update records using Sync to CRM functionality. So you'd still need to create that data source first, which is the ingestion of the data coming from your file or your webhook or whatever. But then you'd be able to use Data Studio Builder and the Data Studio actions to be able to sync that data, map it to existing properties, or create new ones. Um, yeah, hopefully that checks out, Kelly, in case that can— based on— uh, yeah, of course.

Great. Uh, I— thanks, Diana. I was just gonna— I was trying to figure out how am I gonna find that link while I'm moderating the Q&A. Perfect. Sabrina, check out the link, uh, Diana just dropped in the chat. Uh, great. Rebecca's question we just did. Cooper asks, what is the difference between webhook data source and custom events?

Great question. I think again, I'm maybe I'll defer to like either Kelly or Koen if they know more about custom events. But like I said, I think in terms of what the webhook data sources right now allows you to do is bring that event data from a third-party app into Data Studio without actually creating records, etc. And, and I think if you're using custom events, you have to create those custom record events first and ingest them into the CRM. That's my understanding. Now please correct me.

Yeah, yeah, here I'm happy to let you all speak if you know more about this than I do. But just as point of reference for everybody watching, because I don't know much about custom objects, but I do know how to navigate to literally everything inside of HubSpot. So here's the custom events page, um, and when you create an event, you have two options. Uh, some app integrations we already have set up, and so if like, you know, you're trying to bring in event data from DocuSign, this will probably maybe be easier, get you what you want, rather than setting up a webhook. But if it's some, like Mark mentioned earlier, there's a long tail of apps that are never going to be listed on a screen like that. And so if you want to create a custom event, you know, you can come in here and the visualizer is great for tracking things that happen on your website. If you know how to code JavaScript, you can do that. You can set up webhooks. I guess this is probably the question. The feature in question. So I don't know exactly.

Again, I think— yeah, go ahead.

Yeah, the big difference is basically what Mark said is like unified events and all the event-related functionality that you're showing here, Kyle, is related to getting it directly to the CRM. So directly into the platform to be used there. The Data Studio kind of gives you more flexibility to just send whatever, doesn't have to fit the CRM. Doesn't need to be picked up by the CRM necessarily. There is also a good, I think, call out in the chat where somebody said, you know, we create our own data warehouse in HubSpot. That's actually a kind of useful mental model. Like, it's a warehouse, unopinionated. You just send the data, you know, through webhook, through like ingestion from apps. You can import the CSV as is, so you don't do the mapping to the records. You just put it there. And then you can use it afterwards. So you kind of like split those things off into two different steps, which creates, of course, tremendous flexibility and also more power. And so I would say that's like a good way to think about this. Of course, some of this is going to be overlapping. Like if you pull in, as you know, let's say Stripe data into Data Studio and sync it to the CRM, that's very similar to the, you know, the general Stripe integration if you don't do anything else. So there's always ways, and then a workflow can perhaps also do the same thing, right? There's always ways that this functionality will overlap just because, you know, some of that is quite powerful.

Great. I hope that answered the question. Thanks for rescuing me as I got myself in too deep. Bill asked this question 13 minutes ago. Will there be a native Azure connection? I believe Azure was mentioned in the demo, right? That's a, that's a thing.

Yeah, I mean, I'd be, I'd be interested to know what, what you're connecting to and what you want to actually enable. Like, for example, the current Azure connector, which is, which you can find in the marketplace, allows you to bring in data from your Azure Synapse instance. And bring it into Data Studio again as a source and then use it to bring it, take sync into CRM workflows, etc. But there's still no connectivity from HubSpot to your Azure warehouse or whatever. So this is still a one-way sync. So again, I'm keen to understand what your use case is. Feel free to share more information afterwards if you like.

Great. Yeah, again, that question was asked a little while ago, so it may have been before you mentioned Azure at all. I don't know, but that's the tricky thing about Q&A, figuring out if, if the questions have already been answered or not. Okay, um, Chaitali, I'm going, uh, put a different— a couple different comments in here. I'm trying to figure out exactly how to mush them together, but asking specifically about integrating Keychain app into HubSpot for one of the sales directors. Um, I, I am concerned. I am sure I will have to use a third-party app like Zapier, but I am concerned how I can show this keychain's data separately in HubSpot. I know literally nothing about keychains, so you tell me if that question has—

I have— I, I'm— I probably don't know much about keychain as well, but again, like, I think If it, if it supports a webhook, there is a way to— that means that there is a way to bring that data from Keychain into your either Zapier and from Zapier to HubSpot or directly into HubSpot as event data like when something happens. I don't know what Keychain does. Like, generally, like, I don't know, is it about keys being transferred? So when he gets transferred, then, then, then that event occurs, and that data starts coming into, into Data Studio. On, on your second part of your question, which is the concern about having to map or to concerned about how I can show this keychain data separately in HubSpot. I think that's where Data Studio is, is, is super powerful. Like you can have it as a source in Data Studio as like keychain source, keychain data. You can rename it whatever you want and that lives separately from your CRM. So you don't have to bloat your CRM, you don't have to create new objects, you don't have to create new custom objects, to like make sure that it's syncing correctly, etc. I mean, if you want to, it's great, but you don't have to. But if you wanted to have a separate place where you can see that data and use that data elsewhere, then Data Studio is great. You can use that. But again, you'd have to check whether— like, again, I haven't gone too much detail as to whether it supports a webhook type functionality, or if not, then you know, there's the API. If you have access to developers or developer personas that can use an API, that's another option as well.

For the niche apps that are out there, you can always— yeah, sorry Kelly.

No, no, no, it's all good.

So, what I've seen with customers that works, you know, like obviously you can't support all the apps out there, but what works sometimes is if you can get the data the Niche app into a Google Sheet, then you can get the Google Sheet into Data Studio, and then you can work with that data anyway without needing some in-between solution. And so either that or webhooks is the, let's say, typical way that these workarounds are done. Of course, you could add another tool in between, but then your data pipeline becomes more complicated.

Just to speak to the follow-up Note where you want to make sure there's two separate sales funnels, your regular leads and leads coming from Keychain. Again, Mark just mentioned this, but I think that's one of the great things about Data Studio is that you can bring in your Keychain data as a source, and then you can activate that source, you know, in a campaign. You can use it in a workflow if you want to like automate some outreach to these specific leads that are all from source. Without having to have those source leads live in your CRM.

Cool. Thank you. Tyler asks, would file ingestion or even smart properties based on file property data ever be able to accommodate OCR-based functionality down the line for things like scanned documents, images, etc.? Et cetera. Um, Mark, I'll let you answer in just a minute, but I want to point out to Tyler, there's been a lot of updates recently to file management in HubSpot generally. Um, we're getting better at indexing, like if you upload a PDF or an actual like text document or Word document, it indexes those words so you can search and find them that way. You mentioned specifically like handwritten documents, that's a whole additional level And my guess is before that, you'd be better off finding a dedicated OCR app to process these files before they're ingested into HubSpot than to wait for HubSpot to develop that. But Mark, I don't know if this—

yeah, I, again, I think, I think this is, this is also awesome, um, where it's, it's like the need is to ingest unstructured file formats or unstructured files and then make sense of it. It doesn't support that yet. Right now, the initial use cases for structured sort of tabular format files, there's future iterations that we continue working on. And if there's feedback and we see there's enough need for this, then yeah, that makes sense.

Yeah, yeah, I, I, that's, yeah, I think, I know you've said that a couple of times, but it just clicked for me. So I'm going to repeat it for some people here. There's kind of when we're talking about file ingestion here, we're talking about specifically ingesting data into Data Studio, right? And, and that supposes that we are building tables. And so files that give you table-like data, starting for now with CSVs, are a great fit for that. Anything that is unstructured or handwritten or otherwise not a CSV file, um, there, there are definite use cases in HubSpot where we're thinking about file management more broadly. That's where that that's where the, the, you know, file scanning— I was just indexing— I was just talking about comes in. But that's, that's a different team working on different problems here. The File Ingestion API Mark showed is specifically for getting structured data into Data Studio. So I think that is worth remembering. Um, Chad asks, when configuring Data Studio webhooks Is it possible to backfill data into the table from an export, or do you need to trigger a webhook across every record to fill it for the first time?

I'm gonna think through that a little bit. Uh, Data Studio, if it is possible to backfill data into the table from export, or do you need to trigger?

Um, complicated one, but I think I think the answer is no.

I think, I think the answer is no as well. I think, I think you, you will, if I'm understanding correctly, yeah, you will have to set up, um, so, so think of like the, the, um, my, my brain's gone a bit blank, but yeah, you'll have to set up like the, the structure, the schema of the the data that's coming in from the webhook. So if for whatever reason that changes and as it's ingesting, then you would have to reconfigure that webhook source as a new one to trigger it the first time to bring data in.

Great. That is all the Q&A questions we have so far, and the timing is perfect. So how I'd like to wrap up here is, first of all, thank you, Kelly, Mark, and Koen for being here and for sharing your knowledge and demoing stuff and answering questions. That means a lot. If you have any last thoughts for the room, now is the time to say it. But my last question for each of you in addition to those is if anyone wants to connect with you after this to continue discussing Data Studio, what's, what's your preferred method for them to do that?

I think, I think LinkedIn or email is fine, to be honest.

Yeah, either is okay with me.

Yeah, I guess that's also what's typically shared, right?

Yeah, so I totally understand if you don't want to share your email in a room with 87 people, but it's always deeply appreciated. I see Kelly has done it. Uh, so, uh, you know, no pressure, Mark and Koon, but if you want to see all those heart emojis, those are just for you. Uh, great. Thanks so much for being here. Uh, any last thoughts before we shut it down? Great. Well, thanks again. Thanks everyone for coming. Uh, thanks all of you for, for spending another Tuesday here at the, uh, HubSpot Admins Hug. And hope to see you all next week.

Bye, friends. Bye. See you Tuesday.

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