A marketing manager I work with lost most of a Tuesday to this. She was setting up a webinar and wanted one extra question on the registration form, so people could say which session they were coming to.
She made it a required field on the Zoom registration link and registrations stopped working. She took the field off and they started again. She put it back on to check she wasn't imagining things, and they stopped again.
It turns out the HubSpot Zoom integration accepts three required fields in a webinar registration link: first name, last name and email. Add a fourth and the registration fails. That's in HubSpot's own documentation, though you'd be forgiven for missing it.
The integration is decent at what it does. The problems come from the gap between what it does and what people assume it does, because that gap is where afternoons like hers go.
What happens when you turn it on
Quite a lot, to be fair, and it's included on every HubSpot plan.
Connect Zoom and your webinar registrants and attendees sync into HubSpot as contacts. Attendance duration comes with them. Each webinar maps to a record in the marketing events object, so you can build lists from who registered, who turned up, who stayed 40 minutes and who dropped off at 6.
Recordings and transcripts can sync to contact timelines too, ordinary meetings included, which sales teams tend to notice before marketing does.
And on Professional or Enterprise there's one way to send data in the other direction: the "Add Contact to Zoom Webinar" workflow action, which registers a contact into your Zoom webinar automatically. Someone fills in a HubSpot form, a workflow puts them in the webinar. That needs Professional or Enterprise only because workflows themselves do.
For a modest webinar programme, one a month, no custom questions, this is plenty. Turn it on and let it run.
The trouble starts when someone asks for a registration question the form doesn't have.
Three fields
The limit comes from one sentence in HubSpot's documentation:
“The Zoom integration only accepts and syncs with three required fields in the Zoom registration link: First name, Last name, and Email. If the registration link has any other required fields, the registration will fail.”
The failure is worse than it sounds. The registration itself fails, so the record never gets created in Zoom, there's nothing to sync, and nobody attends a webinar they were never registered for.
Which means the moment you need anything beyond a name and an email address, whether that's a session choice or a job title for the sales handover, registering people through Zoom stops being an option.
My client hit it on the third webinar she'd ever run.
Which way the data moves
Registration and attendance data flows from Zoom into HubSpot. The workflow action above is the only route back the other way. So Zoom owns the registration experience: the form is Zoom's, the page is Zoom's, and everything you'd like to change about either is a Zoom setting rather than a HubSpot one, assuming it's a setting at all.
Then the smaller print, and I'm listing these because each one has cost somebody a morning:
- One Zoom account per HubSpot account, which becomes a problem the day a second department turns up with its own Zoom account.
- Webinar features need Zoom's webinar add-on, paid separately on the Zoom side.
- Zoom Personal Meetings don't sync at all.
- A contact you deleted in HubSpot stays deleted. The integration won't recreate them, even when they register for your next webinar.
- Users on your own Zoom account never become contacts, however many webinars they register for.
One more, and this one still catches people. Since 8 January 2025, the Zoom contact properties can't be used in new lists or filters. Segmentation runs on marketing event properties now: attendance duration, registration status, attendance percentage. Most older blog posts and forum answers still point at the dead properties, which can cost you a confusing half hour if you follow them.
The attribution problem
This is the one that catches people later, usually at budget time.
HubSpot's attribution reports are built on interactions, and form submissions are an interaction type that's on by default. A registration taken on Zoom's page isn't a HubSpot form submission. So when a contact who already exists in your CRM registers through Zoom, the report records no interaction at all. The webinar happened, they attended, and the attribution report never finds out.
Brand-new registrants do slightly better, in a technical sense. The sync creates their contact record, and contact creation is itself an interaction. But that credit points at a sync job creating a record, and the webinar never enters the story.
Run a year of webinars like this and the programme that touched half your pipeline appears in the budget conversation as roughly nothing. I've been in that meeting. The events person knows the webinars work, and the report keeps saying otherwise.
If events matter to your revenue story, the registration has to land as a HubSpot form submission. There's no report setting that repairs it afterwards.
The two ways round it
There are two sensible ways to set this up, and I'll be straight about where our own product fits in each.
Route one: let Zoom keep the event. Zoom's integration creates the marketing event in HubSpot, and EventEngine reads that record, builds a branded landing page for it on your own domain, and publishes the Zoom join URL on the page. It does the same with Eventbrite events. Your webinar gets a page that looks like yours, instead of a Zoom form with your logo squeezed into the corner.
What route one doesn't change is the registration. People still sign up on Zoom's form, so you still get three fields and still get no form submission. Plenty of webinar programmes can live with that, and if yours can, this is the lightest path.
Route two: take the registration in HubSpot and treat Zoom as the room. Build the event page and form in HubSpot, ask whatever your event needs to ask, and send the Zoom join link in the confirmation email. Every registration is now a real form submission. Attribution sees it, the follow-up runs on your data, and the session dropdown just works, because it's your form.
The trade is that on this route the native sync isn't registering people into Zoom for you. Either the workflow action does it, three fields and all, or the join link goes out in your emails and Zoom is simply where the event happens. I'd rather own that trade than the three-field one, but it is a trade.
We built EventEngine around route two because I kept hand-building it for clients: the page, the form, the reminder emails, the QR check-in, wired to the marketing event so it fits what HubSpot already knows. $249 a month, 30 day free trial, and it reads Zoom's marketing events out of the box.
Whichever route you take, pick it deliberately and pick it early, because running events in HubSpot gets harder the more you do, and registration is the wrong thing to be migrating in the middle of a busy events calendar.
Questions that come up
Does the HubSpot Zoom integration sync webinar registrants? Yes, from Zoom into HubSpot. Registrants and attendees sync to contact records and map to the marketing events object, along with attendance duration. The only path in the other direction is the "Add Contact to Zoom Webinar" workflow action, which needs a Professional or Enterprise subscription.
Can I add custom fields to a Zoom webinar registration and sync them to HubSpot? No. The Zoom integration accepts three required fields in the registration link: first name, last name and email. If the link has any other required field, the registration fails.
Do I need a paid Zoom plan for the HubSpot integration? The meeting features work on a standard Zoom plan. Webinar registration and attendance sync needs Zoom's webinar add-on, which is charged on top of your Zoom licence.
Can I connect more than one Zoom account to HubSpot? No. HubSpot supports one Zoom account per HubSpot account. Departments running separate Zoom tenants can't each sync into the same portal.
Why aren't my Zoom webinar registrations showing in HubSpot attribution reports? Form submissions are an attribution interaction type and are on by default. A registration taken on Zoom's own page isn't a HubSpot form submission, so for a contact who already exists it creates no interaction, and the webinar never appears as a touchpoint. Capturing the registration on a HubSpot form is what puts it in the report.
