HubSpot Reporting: Best Practices and Things You Must Know

Sales and marketing reports are powerful tools you can rely on when making essential business decisions and planning for the future. Each campaign you launch opens the door to an influx of data that can help you understand the performance and effectiveness of that campaign.

You'll gain insight into the number of new contacts you've generated, whether the leads fit your ideal buyer persona, how impactful your emails and landing pages are at driving conversions, and whether the money you're spending on advertising is getting the results you expect.  

HubSpot's sales and marketing reporting features are unparalleled in terms of quality and user-friendliness. Easy to create dashboards simplify how quickly and efficiently you can share results across your company, reassuring key stakeholders that your efforts are driving the business in the right direction. 

What is marketing and sales reporting?

Marketing and sales are key activities in your business that help keep your audience engaged and interested in your company's products or services. Marketing may play a more centralised business role, creating on-brand content and communication used by your regional sales team to convert leads into buyers.

Reports around these activities are usually timebound –– related to a specific timeframe in which a campaign was executed –– and are generated monthly or annually. Sales and marketing reports will share data on key deliverables ( were they achieved? ) and other metrics that affect the success of a campaign, for example:

• website traffic
• bounce rate
• leads
• sales qualified leads (SQLs)
• marketing qualified leads ( MQLs)
• response time to leads
• opportunity win rate
• customer lifetime value (CLV)
• new sales
• revenue

To summarise, sales and marketing reporting will feature traffic and engagement metrics, conversion metrics, and a detailed summary of how sales and marketing efforts have impacted the business financially.

We have compiled even more digital marketing KPIs for you in our guide.

Basics of HubSpot reporting

HubSpot gives you access to tons of metrics. You can track the number of social media followers you have across different platforms, website visitors, conversions, and campaign-generated leads –– HubSpot places everything at your fingertips. 

But of course, you don't want to struggle with analysis paralysis. That's why you need structured reports that help you tease out the critical information you need to understand your company's performance. To help you get started, we'd like to talk about some of the essential reports you can run and what they can do for you. 

Buyer persona segmented reports

When you segment your reports by buyer persona type, you can use the data to create more effective strategies that target specific parts of your audience. For example, some personas may be more responsive to a particular communication channel and more engaged with the content delivered in a specific format. 

Diving deeper into your reporting and segmenting by buyer persona can reveal insights you may have skipped over when looking at the report in its broader format. 

Uncover the top MQL sources and content types

Where is the majority of traffic to your website coming from? When you track conversions by source – i.e. what's generating marketing qualified leads (MQLs) – you can examine your funnel more objectively and focus on the traffic sources that are getting the best results while optimising the ones that aren't performing too well. 

A step further is to examine the content that's driving your MQLs. Which pages, via which channels are helping you convert the most? You need a good understanding of this because, essentially, it's the content that helps your leads self-educate and move through your funnel. So if a piece of content you created hoping to bump leads into the next stage of the buyer's journey isn't converting, it may be time to evaluate its performance and value. 

Lead generating content - What's getting your leads ready for the next stage?

Before someone becomes a qualified lead, they're just a normal lead – they've somehow come across your content, but you haven't yet profiled them as MQLs. Eventually, these leads will convert to MQLs if they fit your buyer persona, but how do you tease this information out?

With HubSpot, you can create a report that shows which URLs have contributed to lead conversions in order of importance. This type of information allows you to show your leads content that would typically turn them into MQLs and help you shorten the time it takes for them to convert. 

Which content turns your MQLs into customers?

As leads move through the awareness, consideration and decision stages of the buyer's journey, you'll want to pay close attention to which content actually helped you make sales. HubSpot's reporting can help you track which content has been most successful in assisting MQLs to make that final decision to spend their money with you. Once you have this data, you can leverage your highest converting content to make sure you're seizing sales opportunities instead of wasting your energy redirecting them to content that's not as impactful. 

Analyse the actions that your website's visitors take

Knowing whether your website is really working for you is critical. This means you need to scrutinise the effectiveness of your CTAs, the user experience (UX) that your website pages provide and whether the images or videos you use are helping leads convert through your sales funnel. 

HubSpot allows you to build a report that collects data on the actions visitors take before becoming a lead. 

HubSpot reporting best practices

Now that you know about the types of information you can gather and how HubSpot reports can play a key role in maximising results for your business, it's essential to apply standard best practices when you collate and analyse this data using the reports and dashboards available to you through HubSpot.

Create dashboards with purpose

Your dashboard needs to tell a story and make data easy to digest so that the stakeholders most affected by the information you present can take the right steps. To do this, you need to ensure that your dashboards have intent – it must align with the objectives of the teams responsible for the sales and marketing results the dashboard presents. Your dashboard should, therefore, focus on metrics that matter to those key stakeholders. Remember, like all other content you produce, your dashboard has to be focused on the user – curate dashboards that will be understood by the people who are expected to act on the data presented. 

Set the correct date range

It's easy to skew the results when you're looking at inconsistent date ranges. To avoid leading your stakeholders to incorrect conclusions, ensure that your dashboards and reports are focused on the relevant timeframes and closely related to the activity you are tracking and when it occurred. 

Make navigation easy

Although facts and figures form the basis of your business decisions, it's not always easy for everyone to consume and assimilate the data presented in reports. That's why it's important to use text and graphics consistently and create an easy-to-follow format that helps people find the information most relevant to them. Think about the layout of your dashboards and reports, the headings, and the charts you use to communicate information. 

Once you set up your dashboards, don't just forget about them. You can always review and improve them by collecting feedback from users – what do they look at most often? What's most useful? What do they never look at? Are the dashboards having a positive impact on their daily activities?

Conclusion

These are just some fundamental best practices you should look to implement when creating dashboards and generating reports in HubSpot. For a more in-depth discussion, plus actionable steps on how you can customise your reports and get maximum value from your HubSpot dashboards, download our free guide, Best Practices for Gaining Powerful insights with HubSpot Reporting. We'll help you take the complexity out of reporting so that you can use the vital data your business generates every day and use it to make powerful, growth-driven decisions for your business.