HubSpot Reporting Workshop - SLCHUG December 2017

Editor's Notes

1. The problem that a lot of us have is we’re not numbers people, we’re creatives. I got Ds in math. But ultimately our goals are building brands and revenue. There aren’t any prizes for best creative work or infographic, at least if they don’t do their jobs. There are things we do that drive traffic and conversions and things that just don’t work. What we think is a killer piece may not mean jack to our audience. What gets measured gets improved, as they say, so we need to measure nearly everything we do.
2. Besides self improvements, the numbers hold a big key to your self preservation. Reporting is your best weapon to make your case and show the overall value of what you as a marketer do. If you want to be fireproof, you need to be able to show you do your magic, and that means reporting to your organization and especially your sales team.
3. Sales wants lots of sales at the lowest possible cost. Most of them don’t see the bigger picture because they’re not asked to. Their livelihoods depend on closing deals. As much as HubSpot and other companies push this marketing and sales alignment, our very nature is different.
4. Marketing we have to see the bigger picture. We recognize sales as a key output but not the only output, and quite frankly, we’re not always output based. We have to focus on things that make up the system: branding, content, reach, impressions, rank, and conversions. We’re hunters, they’re the gatherers. The same, but different roles.
5. As a result, things get messy and we wind up fighting ourselves. And it really comes down to a lack of understanding each others perspectives.
6. Let me share briefly why I’m presenting on this topic and focusing on connecting everything to revenue. As many of you know I serve around 20-30 sales people aross many different divisions. Access has survived and thrived for 35 years because we’re very financially cautious. Of course, HubSpot was a pretty significant investment for us, especially since we knew it would take some time to really get it rolling. The first year was tough, we really didn’t have a lot of closes we could directly attribute to HubSpot. Year two we got things rolling and really made a strong case. Our case was so strong that we took year three and four off from really trying to prove the dollar for dollar value of HubSpot. We thought that argument was done. When the bill came in for our fifth year renewal, some people freaked out. They decided to cut it because they didn’t think it was doing anything. That was on me. It happened because I got lazy in my reporting and visibility. I had reports for me set up but nothing that neessarily connected directly to revenue and sales enablement. So there were some tense moments. We have multiple sites and blogs, not to mention 200k leads and dozens of workflows in HubSpot. That company has us by the balls, so to speak. The results are there and we made our case, but it was a good wakeup call to stay on my reports, not just for me but for everyone in the company.
7. Reporting was the answer. I had to get serious about showing the data behind what I do. I had to dig through every sale we made and show where marketing influenced it. I also discovered that I needed to pull back the curtain to show people in the company more of how we worked, so they can understand why the HubSpot tool is so valuable to us, but also so they understand more about our jobs and why we spend time breaking down Facebook analytics and so on. So with that in mind I’m going to walk you guys through some basic HubSpot reports. If you can put these in place, and run them regularly, you’ll have a pretty good idea of what’s working and what isn’t, and you can show your executives and sales team what you’re doing and why it’s important.
8. First off, let’s talk about attribution. We’re going to build an attribution report as well as a separate sources report. When I first started in reports I thought they were the same, but I now understand attribution to be encompassing of the journey a buyer goes on before they cut you a check. The source is merely the channel that brings them to you. It’s part of the journey, but really just the beginning - which is important.
9. If you want to prove just how invaluable your work is to your organization, attribution is critical. Looking at the touchpoints of the customer journey, there are a lot of ways people engage that directs them to the next phase. Many of those are marketing and branding, and the more of them you can claim credit for, the better off you are. The more data you have, the more you’re able to see what is and isn’t working.
10. To measure attribution you need to start with the end in mind. Then you’ll work your way backward from there. Maybe you want to see which blogs are leading to conversions, or you want to see which sources produce the most leads, or which pages convert the most customers. And I have to warn you that this is an enterprise tool feature, which unfortunately not everyone has. However, I’ll provide some resources at the end for those of you looking to do something similar with Google Analytics.
11. They do have some basic reports ready to go out of the box, but these really only work when you have a simple implementation. In my case, I have five different divisions in my portal, along with five blogs, tons of landing pages. I can’t just run a report across my portal, so I build mine from scratch, and I think you should too if you have more than one site or more than one blog in your portal.
12. I’m going to select a list of inbound leads built for one of my divisions, then down here I’m going to select Last Interaction, which will show me which pages they’re joining that list from. There are a lot of other options on this page and I’ll go over some of those later.
13. You create the report and a few minutes later it’s produced. Within a matter of minutes I can clearly see where these people came from that triggered them to join this list.
14. And since I’m both lazy and extremely busy, I want this report sent to me. I do not want to have to go in and build it every week or month. So on the left side of the page I’m going to click “email this report” then set it every 5th at 7am.
15. Attribution is one area where HubSpot really shines because you can view the customer’s journey from source to conversion and attach it to a specific name. Other systems like Google Analytics don’t quite go that far but they’re still worth your time. These links will be posted online, but the first is a good breakdown of attribution models from a Google guy and the
16. Now, let’s talk sources. As I said earlier sources are part of an attribution report but they’re important enough to be singled out on their own. Sources are generally where someone’s buyers journey begins. Their first exposure to you or your content. In terms of this chart, it’s the stuff to the left.
17. Obviously you know why this matters. Some channels drive more clicks than others. Some channels drive more customers than others. And some channels are just a waste of your time. And when the budget masters and salespeople call you up to ask why you spend so much time blogging, you need to be ready with an answer.
18. If you have a simple portal - one site, one blog, for example - you can start by just clicking on the reports tab on the top menu then clicking sources. This will show you your basic channels. This is actually a fairly powerful report - you can filter by visits, contacts, and customers. You can filter by domain as well, which again doesn’t help if you have a lot of landing or PPC pages. Build it how you like it, save it, then you can automate distribution. That’s a good basic overview of where your traffic is coming from.
19. HubSpot now offers a little fancier tool for sources that has a little more oomph behind it.
20. HubSpot now offers a little fancier tool for sources that has a little more oomph behind it.
21. There is a lot of data to dig through when you get to the traffic analytics page. It’s going to load on sources, which is obviously what we’re talking about here. Right off the bat you can sort through domains, then you can click the different types of reports you’d like to see with the big pulldown menu at the top. Which sources have high and low bounce rates, which sources produce customers, which sources convert the most, where your new contacts are coming from. It’s a lot to look at and probably more data than most need, but if you have the time to dig through it there are good nuggets in there. The downside? You can’t automate these reports, they can only be exported from this view.
22. Scroll down to the bottom of this page however and there’s the basic data again. This time it’s sorted by sources with some of that same data we just saw charted above in boring numeric format. I’m a visual guy but easily overwhelmed so this is more my speed. I like to get in, get the numbers and the takeaways, then get the hell out.
23. The cool thing about this part is you can customize the columns
24. And clicking on a specific source drills down into some useful information about it.
25. The downside? If I want to make this a regular report, I have to go back and build it, or add it to my dashboard and export it regularly. I want things to just appear in my box, so I can whip it around to whomever I need to. In order to do that for sources, you have to go back to the Attribution report we built a few minutes ago.
26. While we’re heading back to that first report, let’s customize this a bit and build a report specific to blog subscribers. What sources are producing my blog subscribers? To find this, we can’t just use the broad source report. I want to build a report based on a specific list, in this case my blog subscribers. Keep in mind you can do this with any list - people with 5 pageviews, people who open every email you send. If there’s a list, you can build a report behind it.
27. To build this particular report, I selected a list and the conversion type “added to list date.” That’s an important one if you’re building a report based on lists. Then, I scroll down to interaction scoring type and select “By Source” and “First touch.” This will show me where this person came from the first time they stumbled onto our properties.
28. And there’s your report, and of course hitting the email report link on the side will deliver that sucker to your inbox anytime you want. Now, that was a specific list, but you can do the same report for your entire portal, specific domains, even specific pages, all going back to that creation page you hit after selecting your report type. If sharing your data with a lot of people is important to you, this is probably the easiest route to take.
29. The competitor report then pops up a couple items, most of which your salespeople and executives won’t give a shit about but if you’re ahead of them then you’ll get some high fives. Also, I have no idea why my primary domain has a 43 marketing grade, but my other site is a 69. They’re basically the same.
30. Actually, this is kind of important. Click on your own company’s score and the system will give you a checklist of items to fix. In the case of my website it wasn’t finding our blog’s RSS feed, plus some pages had SEO issues - H1s, things like that. Fixed a few of them and suddenly we’re at 77. Pretty cool.
31. This was a major lifesaver for me. We are all probably using campaigns in here, and previously the campaign reporting was pretty good as far as showing your the performance of the individual elements but really seeing how the campaign had performed was difficult.
32. You can see how many contacts, opportunities, and deals were influenced by the campaign. Here’s one I launched just a few weeks ago that, to be honest, I had no idea was doing so well. I’m lazy about associating social posts and I missed a few emails so those sections are scarce - there’s a chance I’m missing out on even more key metrics from this campaign. It only works on campaigns created since September 1. One trick I’ve tried that seemed to work: Clone an old campaign. You won’t have the full data from all time but you will from that point forward. Another option is to disassociate your old content from an old campaign and connect it to a new one. In both instances, it’ll
33. Let’s talk briefly about tracking URLs. If you’re not familiar, these are links to your content that auto populate source and medium information. Links the originate from HubSpot through email, CTAs, or the social tool will automatically have this populated, but you should still use these pretty much any time you’re sharing content elsewhere. Ads, for example.
34. Use this tool to build the URLs you use to populate AdWords, paid social (if you’re not using the ads tool within HubSpot), anywhere else you can think of, you can set a specific source and medium using this tool and it’ll populate with your campaign data and Google Analytics. Really simple and easy.
35. A couple final things. We’ve talked quite a bit about HubSpot Academy and the various certifications you can take. One area we haven’t harped on as much is HubSpot Projects. I like the certifications but what I really want, and why I got involved with SLCHUG in the first place, is learning things that are directly applicable to my own efforts. The cool thing about HubSpot Projects is exactly that - it’s a list of things you can build in your own portals, and these will walk you through each one step by step. There are some on reporting, starting a blog, social media publishing and so on.
36. A couple final things. We’ve talked quite a bit about HubSpot Academy and the various certifications you can take. One area we haven’t harped on as much is HubSpot Projects. I like the certifications but what I really want, and why I got involved with SLCHUG in the first place, is learning things that are directly applicable to my own efforts. The cool thing about HubSpot Projects is exactly that - it’s a list of things you can build in your own portals, and these will walk you through each one step by step. There are some on reporting, starting a blog, social media publishing and so on.
37. A couple final notes. No matter how many leads you generate, no matter how much revenue you think you generate, you’re always going to be tied at the waist to sales. In most organizations sales will always be able to poach more budget than marketing. That means you need to make yourself invaluable to sales, AND make sure they know it. This is what Dan Tyre talked about right? Sales and marketing have to partners, not just for content, but for your survival. Build reports that guide your own efforts but that also show your progress and your “why.” Go over these with sales - why do we blog? Well, it accounts for half of our traffic and 20% of our customers. Oh shit, salespeople might say, maybe I’ll blog. They’ll vouch for you, and you can expand your efforts because of that. So work with sales closely. Most of them won’t give a shit because they just want money, but one will. Make that person your champion and once he’s closing more deals the others will follow suit, I promise you. Show your work. Unless you’re doing high volume sales, take the time to examine each new contract in your company. Chances are you’re influencing them in ways that don’t show up on reports. It could be pageviews or an eBook they downloaded last summer, then sat on until they rediscovered it in a pile. If you’re ever uncertain, or need help sorting through things, abuse HubSpot customer service. I say that at every one of these things, don’t I? Go to the HubSpot Academy and take these two courses. Sales enablement was announced earlier this year at one of our meetings and has a ton of value. I also recommend the Inbound Sales certification even if you’re not in sales, as it’ll cover what to do with leads that come in. Believe it or not, a lot of them don’t know what to do. They treat it like an outbound lead, and assume the lead doesn’t know anything. They huck over irrelevant documents. Inbound leads are from Venus and Salespeople are from Mars. At my office we’re actually working on getting them to go through the Inbound Sales certification alongside us.
38. VOLPE?