Question

How can I prevent HubSpot from causing a Zap to run multiple times?

  • 5 August 2022
  • 3 replies
  • 135 views

Hello! We have a source of truth dataset in Airtable that gets written from HubSpot through a collection of Zaps. Essentially, this pipeline captures new Deals in HubSpot and writes them to AT with the intent of having a known-good copy in the case of errant (or intentional) data changes in HubSpot.

We’re investigating a way to have Zaps ‘listen’ for a change in HubSpot on a deal under a certain status (e.g. anything ‘Won’ with a previous date), then check that against our previously written Airtable data and rewrite HubSpot to match.

We’ve successfully written Zaps (which I would be happy to share) that perform this action. Our issue, however, is that HubSpot changes the “close date” to current day any time a property change is made. Some properties auto-save while others don’t commit until you click save. In either use case, this creates a cascading loop which triggers the same Zap several times before filtering itself out. At this point, the end result is still achieved, but at the expense of a huge taxing of Zaps running in sequence any time a change is made. As one could imagine, with several users in HubSpot touching deals, this stacks up very quickly.

My question: has anyone run into a similar experience, either with HubSpot/Airtable or other datasets that auto-write, or have best practices in preventing Zaps from looping?

 

Again, I’d be happy to go into detail or provide whatever info from our Zaps that may be helpful. Apologies if this is too high concept or vague, but we’re troubleshooting in real time. Thanks so much!


This post has been closed for comments. Please create a new post if you need help or have a question about this topic.

3 replies

Userlevel 7
Badge +12

Hi @timmyo!

I was wondering how you got on with this - were you able to do either of the options above? Let us know if you still need some help with this!

Userlevel 7
Badge +12

@timmyo 

one possible solution is to create a user in Hubspot Specifically for Zapier.. In your zaps that trigger from Hubspot see if you can pull back the hs_updated_by_user_id field. Then in your filters, have it set up so that your zap will not continue if the user that last updated the object was the Zapier Hubspot User

Userlevel 7
Badge +9

Hey there, @timmyo! Great question and we definitely appreciate you reaching out. 

I wonder if this interesting thread may be of any help:

I’m super curious to hear if anyone else in the Community has additional insight to share also!

Keep us posted! 🙂