When the time comes time to sift through all that data to try and prove your efforts all year have been worth something, you might feel inclined to just give up and bury your head in the sand. Data, analytics, and reporting are often considered to be the “not fun” part of digital marketing – but it doesn’t have to be that way! In today’s article, we’re going to talk about three Hubspot reports, how to use them, and how data and analytics can help you to improve your inbound marketing strategy.
Why is inbound marketing reporting so important?
When it comes to inbound marketing, the marketer’s job is never finished. Not completely, anyway. Even after you’ve rolled out what you think of as a fantastic campaign, you can’t guarantee that your audience will see it the same way (if only!)
Data and analytics gleaned through reporting play a key role in connecting the dots between marketing activities and business objectives. With reporting, you can get a comprehensive overview of your marketing efforts in a given time frame.
This information allows you to draw conclusions, unearth new opportunities, and learn from mistakes to achieve better results and grow your business. When it comes to proving to management that what you’re doing is bringing value, reports can testify to the impact of inbound marketing for generating leads and boosting ROI.
What is Hubspot Reporting?
It’s the practice of evaluating overall inbound marketing and sales progress using Hubspot’s built-in reporting tools as well as additional products.
Once you’ve mapped your flywheel and outlined SMART goals that align with your business objectives, you can use Hubspot reporting to get a better insight into how your marketing, sales, and customer service strategies are performing.
Countless marketing teams from SMBs to enterprise organizations rely on Hubspot marketing software to better understand the measurable impact their marketing efforts have on achieving business goals.
Alongside countless other features, Hubspot provides comprehensive marketing reports that gather and analyze key marketing metrics, which can be used to guide future strategic decisions and pinpoint actionable data that can be used to improve everything from audience targeting to content creation.
So, now you know what Hubspot reporting is all about, let’s dive into three essential Hubspot reports boosting your inbound marketing strategy and boost your business.
Web Page and Blog Post Performance Reports
If you spend your days planning and executing content marketing strategies, you’ll understand how frustrating it can be when all your hard work doesn’t achieve the results you want them to.
With 86% of content marketers using blog content in their marketing strategy, you’ll want to make sure your website stands out among your competitors
With Hubspot web page and blog post performance reports, marketers can analyze how visitors are engaging with their website and its content. They allow you to measure the tangible effects your efforts are having on visitors to your site. You can discover insights about website traffic and SERP results performance all from one handy dashboard.
You can opt to view the overall performance of a specific domain via the dashboard reports. If you want to view the performance of a specific page or blog content post, you can view its metrics to better gauge its performance and audience engagement rates. So what metrics can you find in the performance tab?
- Views: How many times the page or blog post was loaded on a browser.
- Submissions: Number of form submissions.
- New contacts: How many new contacts are made as a result of their visit to this page.
- Number of customers: Website visitors who converted to customers on that specific page or blog post and are currently in the lifecycle stage.
- Bounce-rate: How many people started on this page and didn’t continue looking at your site.
- Time-on-page: How long did someone spend looking at your page or web post?
Armed with this information, you can make data-driven decisions regarding your content strategy and editorial calendar, as well as increase your website optimization efforts. Below are some ways that using analytics reports from Hubspot can help to boost your inbound strategies.
Create more engaging content
By tracking content marketing metrics like bounce-rate, time-on-page, and conversions you can better understand which topics and types of content are performing best. For example, if you discover that a piece of video content drew more views and resulted in more conversions than your previous blog post, you might consider implementing more video marketing into your strategy.
Identify which elements of your strategy aren’t working
Did your last blog post get barely any views? Did it also have a high bounce rate? You might want to rethink what you’re writing and how you’re writing it. Moreover, if your pages aren’t resulting in further actions being taken by customers, you might consider working on your call-to-actions or optimizing your website for voice search.
Make informed strategy decisions
Data and analytics are the keys to understanding whether your efforts are having measurable results. You can use this information to optimize your website for different devices (mobile-optimization is crucial!), inform your local marketing campaigns, or implement an SEO strategy based on SERP performance.
Email Marketing Campaign Performance Reports
So you’re written captivating email copy, settled on an eye-catching layout and design, and gathered your contact list. All that’s left to do is send those emails, right? Not quite…
Did you know that 59% of people agree that marketing emails influence their purchase decisions? With this in mind, you must understand what the recipients are doing with the emails once they receive them. You need to analyze the performance of each sent email to see what you’re doing well and identify areas for improvement.
Once you’ve sent and published your marketing emails, you can head to your Hubspot reports dashboard to review trends in your campaigns, and gain deeper insights into the deliverability and engagement of each email. Email marketing campaign performance reports are included in all Hubspot plans.
You can get a comprehensive overview of email engagement in the performance tab of your Hubspot account, and find a more granular breakdown of each recipient in the recipients tab.
With this Hubspot report, you can access a detailed overview of key metrics for tracking email campaign performance. These include:
- Open rate: Percentage of people who opened your email.
- Click rate: How many people clicked on a link inside your email.
- Deliverability results: List of the number of successful deliveries, bounces, unsubscribes, spam reports, etc. Seeing as 16% of all emails never make it to the inbox, these metrics can help you to whittle down your email lists to the contacts that matter.
- HTML click map: Provides a visual breakdown of all clicked email links.
- Top clicked links: Details which links were clicked most in the email.
- Top engaged contacts: Contacts who opened or clicked the email.
Marketing Hub Starter, Basic (Legacy), Professional, and Enterprise accounts also provide you with access to additional email performance data like:
- Time spent viewing email: You can see whether people actually read your email, skimmed it, or merely glanced at it.
- Engagement over time: A graph showing email opens and clicks over time, which can help you to better understand when to schedule your emails.
- Opens and clicks by client: Graph showing open and click data as well as devices used.
You can leverage the information gleaned from these analytics to inform your decision making when it comes to budgeting email campaign spend, improving written email content, or segmenting audiences based on key metrics and behaviors.
Landing Page Performance Reports
So you’ve sent out nurturing email campaigns with links to high-quality content included, but you’re still not seeing the conversions you dream of. What gives?
Landing pages are the spots where your customers are directed to when they click a link on an email, social media post, or elsewhere that provide the next steps to keep them moving through your sales funnel. There could be plenty of reasons why you’re not getting contacts from your landing pages, and Hubspot reports can help you to outline, understand, and address them.
You can set up a Hubspot report page to track the performance of each of your landing pages. It’ll allow you to assess how well your landing page is doing within a given period. You’ll be able to track all of the on-page metrics we mentioned above in the “web-page and blog post” section.
Of course, the one that matters the most here is conversions. Remember, this doesn’t always have to mean a money transaction. It could mean someone landing on the page and signing up for a newsletter, downloading a free resource, or initiating a trial period. Use reports to understand how people are engaging with your landing pages, identify problem areas, and reevaluate your strategies based on actionable insights.
Next: Turning your Hubspot Reports into Actions
Analytics and reporting are an essential part of any inbound marketers’ job description. Hubspot marketing software is a trusted platform that provides dashboard-style reporting. It’s easy, accessible, and pretty darn useful!
Once you’ve read and understood what all that information means, it’s time to turn it into action. Always remember that your business, whichever particular part, needs to be nurtured just like your customers. So keep on top of website trends, track your inbound performance, and continue to attract, engage, and delight those customers!
Want to know more about Hubspot reporting and how it can help to boost your inbound marketing strategy? Get in touch and book a free consultation today.
