There’s no denying that to be successful at inbound marketing, you need good, clean data and reporting. As a proud HubSpot Elite partner, SmartBug Media® follows HubSpot’s best practices of using data to make informed decisions with marketing. In fact, we’ve taken these practices even further with our Intelligent Inbound® approach.
For SmartBug Media, Intelligent Inbound means taking a flexible, data-driven approach to help your organization get results to maximize your ROI. It probably goes without saying that we’re incredibly passionate about data and reporting. We love harnessing the power of data to provide you with the insights and information to improve your marketing.
HubSpot Reporting is one of our favorite tools to use at SmartBug Media, and with HubSpot’s recent updates to these tools, we’re excited to help you get the most out of your marketing. We’ve broken up these updates into three phases that are necessary in order to be successful at reporting.
Before you even begin building out your HubSpot Reporting dashboards and visuals, having a clean database is an essential part of getting started. Your data must successfully answer these three questions before you’re ready to move on to the visualization phase:
If your answer to any of the above questions is “no,” then consider completing a data cleanup or a HubSpot portal audit. Start with a portal audit, and be sure that your HubSpot tracking code is properly set up on your website.
You may also want to consider using HubSpot workflows to clean up some of that “dirty data.” With clean data, anything is possible, and without it, your business will be forced into a data silo—one full of bad decisions.
After you’ve completed the proper checks to ensure that your data is properly managed, moving on to the phase of data visualization is the next step to HubSpot Reporting. Think of the data visualization stage as a camera lens: There are many angles and views available, so how you set up your view is important to your overall success.
HubSpot has made a few key updates to their data visualization:
Launched at INBOUND 2020, HubSpot’s new Sales Reporting functionality provides sales teams insights into the overall health of their business. With this new offering, sales managers and teams can better understand their performance through custom reporting options, including:
This new reporting function is only available to those with Sales Hub Professional or Enterprise-level users.
If you haven’t done a deep dive into your traffic analytics tool in HubSpot, now is as good a time as any. With HubSpot’s recent update, the previous website traffic performance tool has been combined into the traffic analytics tool, allowing you to drive even deeper into your data.
With this new custom option, you can easily create custom calculations between properties. Using this feature, you can also automatically calculate other things such as the minimum, maximum, count, sum, or average value of a property. A few examples of the use of this property might include:
By understanding the time between properties, with the help of HubSpot Reporting, you’ll better understand ways to improve your business’s marketing and sales processes.
If you don’t quite understand which of your marketing activities generates the most revenue, it is probably a good time to start considering attribution reporting. Through the use of HubSpot’s attribution reporting tools, you can attribute areas of your activities in marketing to areas achieving the most revenue for your business. Those with Marketing Hub Enterprise can click here to learn more.
In addition, HubSpot recently rolled out a few new features for attribution reporting:
Once you’ve effectively managed your data and have a means of visualizing it, it’s time to start accessing it easily through HubSpot Reporting dashboards. With the help of dashboards, you can organize your reports to tell the data stories you need to relay to sales and marketing.
If you haven’t had an opportunity to build reports using dashboards, taking advantage of this offering is vital to your teams success. Reports can be easily downloaded into a PDF, or perhaps even displayed on a screen in your office to further show where your teams are on the road to achieving your goals.
In addition to the already amazing advantages to using HubSpot Reporting dashboards for your team, HubSpot has added exciting new features to be aware of:
The new year is finally here, and great things are upon us. With these new offerings for your data and reporting, you can tell data stories better than ever before. Not choosing data-driven marketing is like driving a car with your eyes closed: The outcome will never be favorable. This year, set an intention to make smarter decisions for your marketing.
If you’re interested in learning more about HubSpot Reporting and dashboards, check out our latest SmartTake Webinar featuring SmartBug and HubSpot experts to help you go further with your marketing!