Reporting-related releases have been part of the major product updates HubSpot launches every quarter.
While HubSpot hasn’t always been associated with having enterprise-level reporting, they’ve invested heavily over the past few years, so now companies can see the level of reporting they’d want from an enterprise-grade CRM.
The HubSpot CRM platform includes five Hubs: Marketing, Sales, Service, CMS and Operations.
The Operations Hub’s data quality automation features improve the quality of your reporting, and HubSpot’s reporting features enable you to do in-depth analysis on the work you do using the four other Hubs.
Out-of-the-Box Reports
Marketing Hub
Within Marketing Hub, you can report on every tactic you run through HubSpot: email, ads, social and conversations (plus some of your website analytics and conversion rates if you use HubSpot landing pages, CTAs and forms, but host your website on a different CMS, like WordPress).
Their email health tool provides insight into the effectiveness of your overall email strategy. It tells you your overall open rate, click-through rate, bounce rate, unsubscribe rate and spam rate, and puts those percentages in the context of benchmarks, so you know if you need to focus on improving them or not. This tool will also call out your highest and lowest performing emails over time, so you can easily determine what’s working well and what isn’t.
In addition to the email health tool, HubSpot also has out-of-the-box reports covering email engagement, delivery rates, performance by device type and performance at the individual email level.
When it comes to ads, a major benefit of HubSpot is that it pulls your ad data into the same platform where you’re running the rest of your marketing efforts.
Since you’re spending money on advertising, you need to get as much bang for your buck as possible. So, you want to be able to monitor what happens to the traffic and leads that are sourced from ads. Historically, that’s been challenging, but HubSpot solves for this with their reporting features and integrations with ad platforms.
You can report on your advertising efforts holistically with their out-of-the-box analyze dashboard, which includes:
- Conversion rate from impressions to clicks to contacts to spend
- Total ad spend and ROI
- Ad spend over time
- Campaigns by high and low cost per click
- Campaigns by high and low cost per contact
You can also see similar information at the individual campaign level, which enables you to optimize your spend by understanding which campaigns led to the most customers and what ads have the best ROI.
For social, HubSpot’s reporting allows you to look at audience, engagement metrics and website sessions generated from social media. While you can get more in-depth insights within each individual social media platform you use, reporting through HubSpot allows you to analyze your social media strategy across platforms and see how it’s contributing to the rest of your marketing efforts.
CMS Hub
While HubSpot’s website reporting isn’t a full replacement for Google Analytics, it can provide you with the majority of the insights you need to optimize your website strategy.
Out-of-the-box website reports include:
- Traffic by source, topic cluster, page, UTM parameter, device type, and country
- Landing page total views and form submissions
- Blog post total views and bounce rate
- Website view totals by sessions per day
- Session totals by day with new and returning contact breakdowns
- Website visitor engagement rates
- Session bounce rate, average duration and page view totals by source
- Blog post total views over time
- And more
Sales Hub
Improvements to the Sales Hub in 2020 have led to its analytics features being on-par with those of a standalone pipeline management tool.
There are out-of-the-box reports at the team and individual rep level so sales leaders can better manage pipelines and conduct sales coaching. Plus, individual reps can gain insight into how their efforts compare to the rest of the team.
Some of the reports available include:
- Contacts created and worked totals with deals created and won totals
- Deal pipeline waterfall
- Deal pipeline
- Weighted forecast
- Activities by rep
- Call outcome by rep
- Lead response time by rep
- Average deal size by rep
- Deal loss reason by rep
- Deal velocity by rep
- Push rate by rep
- Quota attainment by rep
Service Hub
HubSpot’s Service Hub reporting capabilities center around the three features of the Hub: Tickets, knowledge base and customer feedback.
You can see the average ticket response time, ticket totals over time and tickets closed by rep to understand how your support team is assisting your customers.
For knowledge base, you can see similar analytics to what you’d look at for a website to understand what content is being leveraged and by whom. The out-of-the-box reports include information like knowledge base views over time, most viewed articles, most searched terms, article views and average time on articles.
The customer feedback reports will synthesize the responses you receive through your feedback surveys so you can understand your NPS and CES scores, response rates and any qualitative feedback you receive.
Build Your Own Reports
The power of HubSpot’s reporting features extends beyond what you get with out-of-the-box reports. You can also build custom reports on the data you have in HubSpot.
There are five types of reports you can create: single object, cross object, custom, funnels and attribution.
Single object
Single object reports allow you to analyze objects you use in your HubSpot portal using the properties those objects have. The objects you can run single object reports on include:
- Contacts
- Companies
- Deals
- Activities
- Tickets
- Line items
- Feedback submissions
- Conversations
- Custom objects
For example, you can create a report on companies using the “industry” and “number of decision-makers” properties to gain a better understanding of how your sales process needs to be adapted across verticals.
Cross object
Cross object reports are similar to single object reports except they pull in data from two different types of objects instead of just one.
You can build cross object reports using:
- Contacts
- Companies
- Deals
- Activities
- Tickets
- Line items
- Feedback submissions
For example, you can build a cross-object report between companies and deals using the “industry” and “amount” properties to understand which types of companies have the highest and lowest deal values so you know how to prioritize your targeting.
Custom
With the custom report builder, you can go even deeper than with cross object reports. You can use up to five data inputs from across the Hubs you leverage, and you can include custom objects, which you can’t do in cross object reports.
Funnel
Funnels allow you to see conversion rates across activities and events. The initial use of these was to see the progression through contact lifecycle stages, but you can now also build them around deals and events too.
Funnels enable you to identify where points of friction occur within your processes. For example, a funnel report on contact lifecycle stages would show where you have opportunities to improve your acquisition motion based on which lifecycle stages leads are getting stuck at. If you’re seeing a low lead-to-MQL rate, that can indicate that you’re targeting poor-fit audiences. If you have a low MQL-to-SQL rate, that can indicate issues with the marketing-to-sales handoff.
Attribution
There are three types of attribution reports you can create: revenue, contact create and deal create. They allow you to understand which channels and assets contributed to the generation of that object.
Revenue attribution has been a hot topic in the marketing community for so long that it’s almost become a myth. With this tool, HubSpot has made it a reality — and one that’s easy to do for yourself. The report builder walks you through what revenue attribution reports can do, and provides presets for some sample reports including:
- Which channels closed the most revenue
- What interaction sources drove the most revenue
- Which campaigns influenced the most revenue
- Which content types drove the most revenue
- Which content drove the most revenue for my business
- What content influenced our highest value deals to close
You can also configure these reports further based on the data you’re looking for. For example, you can look at just landing pages to see which landing pages were interacted within the buyer’s journey for closed-won deals, what channel initially led to that interaction, where the interaction occurred within the buyer’s journey and how much revenue is associated with it based on the model of your choosing.
The insights provided from attribution reports can prove the effectiveness of your strategies by clearly tying your efforts to your company’s bottom line.
The Takeaway
When you’re using HubSpot to manage your website, marketing, sales and customer service and to report on those efforts, you’re creating a closed loop. That means you’re not relying on integrations to pull in exterior data and don’t need to worry about misalignment between disparate platforms harming your data quality.
HubSpot’s all-in-one platform leads to more accurate data, and since the insights are located in the same platform as where you’re running your strategy, taking a data-driven approach is also convenient.
