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When a customer reaches you via WhatsApp, the most valuable bit of context is where they came from: which Click-to-WhatsApp (CTWA) ad they tapped, which website link, which email campaign. Without that attribution, your reporting collapses into “WhatsApp” as a single source. With it, you can compare campaigns, calculate ad ROAS, and feed proper attribution into HubSpot deals. This page covers the three patterns Flowella supports for moving campaign attribution from WhatsApp into HubSpot.

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Pattern 1: Click-to-WhatsApp ads (ctwa_clid)

Facebook and Instagram CTWA ads attach a click ID (ctwa_clid) to every conversation they originate. Meta passes this ID into the conversation context when the user taps the ad and starts the chat, and Flowella forwards it to HubSpot on the contact record. Flow:
  1. Customer sees a CTWA ad on Facebook or Instagram.
  2. Customer taps the Send Message button on the ad. WhatsApp opens with a pre-filled message and Meta records the ctwa_clid.
  3. Customer sends the message. Flowella receives the inbound message with ctwa_clid in the metadata.
  4. Flowella creates or updates the HubSpot contact with the ctwa_clid value on a dedicated property.
  5. Flowella also stores the ctwa_clid against the conversation so analytics can join back to the ad spend.
Meta’s Conversions API integration to send conversion events back to Facebook Ads Manager uses the same ctwa_clid. See CTWA Ads for setting this up so you can optimise ad spend on actual conversions, not just clicks.
When you put a Chat on WhatsApp button on your website or email, you’ll use a wa.me link. The link supports a text parameter that pre-fills the user’s first message: 
https://wa.me/441234567890?text=Hi%20I%27m%20interested%20in%20%5BSPRING_LAUNCH%5D
Flowella can parse the pre-filled message for tracking codes and write them to HubSpot. The convention we recommend:
  • Use a bracketed keyword the user is unlikely to type by accident, e.g. [SPRING_LAUNCH] or [NEWSLETTER_JUL].
  • Wrap the keyword in markers so the parsing is unambiguous.
  • Keep the keyword short and human-readable so the pre-filled message still looks natural.
The extracted code lands in the HubSpot contact’s whatsapp_entry_source property (or a custom property you specify in Flowella → Settings → HubSpot). A practical pattern: in your HubSpot campaign tool or marketing spreadsheet, build a small lookup of campaign → entry code, and generate one wa.me URL per campaign. Use a URL shortener or the campaign’s tracking URL if you want a tidier link on email and ad creatives.

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Pattern 3: Form-submission UTMs

When a HubSpot form submission triggers a WhatsApp workflow, the standard HubSpot UTM properties (hs_analytics_first_url, hs_analytics_source, hs_analytics_source_data_1 etc.) are already on the contact. Flowella reads these via the HubSpot integration and surfaces them in the conversation context. This is the cleanest pattern when WhatsApp is a follow-up channel: the customer originally arrived via a UTM-tagged URL, submitted a form, and Flowella triggers a WhatsApp Flow that fills in the gaps. The UTM attribution is preserved end to end without anything specific to WhatsApp.

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Building HubSpot reports against this data

Once the attribution lands on the contact, you can build standard HubSpot reports against it:
  • Contacts by whatsapp_entry_source — which campaigns drove WhatsApp leads
  • Deals → first source = WhatsApp — revenue attributable to WhatsApp-originated contacts
  • Workflow performance by source — which campaigns produced the highest reply / conversion rates inside the WhatsApp Flow
See Reporting and dashboards for the report patterns we recommend setting up.

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What attribution does Flowella write to HubSpot?

By default, Flowella writes the following properties on each contact during WhatsApp activity:
PropertyTypeWhen written
whatsapp_opted_inBooleanWhen the contact gives WhatsApp consent
whatsapp_first_message_atTimestampWhen Flowella first sees an inbound message
whatsapp_last_message_atTimestampUpdated on every inbound message
whatsapp_entry_sourceStringFirst inbound message’s parsed source code or ctwa_clid
whatsapp_campaign_idStringThe Flowella campaign ID for the conversation, if applicable
whatsapp_template_last_sentStringThe most recent template sent to the contact
You can map additional WhatsApp data to custom HubSpot properties in Flowella → Settings → HubSpot → Field mapping.

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Common gotchas

Not every WhatsApp inbound carries a ctwa_clid. Only those that came from a Facebook/Instagram CTWA ad do. Direct messages (where the customer typed your number into WhatsApp manually) won’t have this value, which is correct — there’s no ad to attribute them to.
The pre-filled message is just a default. Some users delete it before sending, others edit it. Don’t rely on it for critical routing logic.For robust attribution, prefer ctwa_clid (which the user can’t strip) over text pre-fill parsing (which they can).
A customer who clicked a Facebook CTWA ad on Tuesday, didn’t message, then opened the same ad on Wednesday and did message, will have the Wednesday click’s ctwa_clid in the WhatsApp metadata. HubSpot’s standard first-touch / last-touch attribution still works on the underlying UTMs if the customer also visited your website in between.