One of the many useful aspects of digital marketing is your ability to track their performance. You can see how many people opened your emails, how many clicked through to your website, and how many took a desired action — such as subscribing to your blog, enrolling in a webinar, or downloading a lead magnet.
Knowing all of these metrics sets the stage to make data-driven decisions moving forward. You keep doing whatever works; or reassess and pivot when something isn’t. As a result, you can ensure everyone is working in the most efficient way possible, as well as get a better ROI.
But how, exactly, can you track a campaign’s performance on HubSpot? Why should you create campaign reports? And how can you determine what to include in them?
Campaign reporting is the process of tracking the performance of marketing campaigns over time. This information can be used to make decisions about future campaigns, as well as to track the overall success of your marketing efforts.
There are a number of different factors that can be tracked through campaign reporting. Some of the most common include:
Having this information available is crucial to know how to best allocate your resources.
While every business has different goals (and thus, different metrics to track), there are several common denominators as to why creating campaign reports is so fundamental.
It’s tempting to think that you can more or less gauge these numbers simply by looking at how much money you’ve invested on each campaign, and how much are you generating back. But just as you’re likely to forget something when you go to the grocery store without making a list, taking the time to create campaign reports helps you identify trends that may otherwise fall through the cracks.
There are many elements that come into play in a marketing campaign. Who’s your buyer persona? What stage of the sales funnel are they in? Have you created content for each stage? What’s your editorial calendar? What are your workflows? Do you have any drip campaigns in place? Are you implementing lead nurturing best practices? Since each component is so labor intensive, you want to weed out what’s not effective, so that your marketing team can focus on what does — or at least implement A/B testing to make tweaks.
Relying exclusively on guesses will always leave you with mediocre results, at best. You want to know exactly what works, which variables were in place, which types of leads did what. No matter what you’re tracking, knowing down to a certainty that certain verbiage, colors, layouts, formats, etc… compelled your prospects to move along their buyer’s journey so that you can replicate it and leave behind what wasn’t effective.
What goes into each campaign report is very specific to your circumstances and what you’re trying to accomplish. Before deciding on which metrics to track, make sure to:
Not all campaigns serve the same purpose. Maybe you’re trying to get people to enroll in a course. Maybe you’re promoting an event, launching a new service, or redesigned your website. The more specific you get with your goals, the clearer it becomes what to track. For example, say you’re creating an email marketing campaign to get people to sign up for a new free promotional service. Within that context, open rates, clickthrough rates, and conversion rates become your priority.
By the same token, if you’re launching a pay-per-click campaign, you want to track the number of people who clicked on the ad, the cost per click, and the quality score.
Alright. This one goes hand in hand with determining your campaign goals; but it requires getting more into the details. Let’s say your goal is to increase website traffic by 30% by the end of the quarter. You want to know a lot more than just how many people are visiting your site. You’ll want to flesh out all the details: what are the sources of traffic? What’s the time on site? How many new visitors? How many returning visitors? What’s the bounce rate for each page? How are they interacting with your site?
Similarly, if you’re trying to grow your social media audience, you’ll want to elaborate on everything that points to moving in the right direction: how many likes are you getting? How many shares? How many comments? What’s the reach? How many people are clicking through to your site? Sending you messages?
Take each campaign and think of every single element that will help you piece together the bigger picture.
Different audiences have different needs when it comes to reading and understanding reports. A computer geek who could take over the world coding and looking at complex data will make sense of something that would leave a CEO or Board of directors confused. Likewise, different job roles require paying attention to different metrics. So when you’re preparing campaign performance reports, always make sure you’re displaying information that’s relevant to the job role and in a way that’s easy to understand for whoever’s reading it.
If you're looking for campaign reports that are easy to read and provide all the information you need, HubSpot's campaign analytics tool is a great option. Here's how to set it up:
If you are looking for more customizable options, you can browse through HubSpot's knowledge base.
We know that HubSpot is user friendly and has significantly improved business processes for businesses of all sizes around the world. However, it also comes with a steep learning curve — especially since there are so many different features. Let us help you figure out whether you’re using the most out of the platform. We’ll perform a free HubSpot audit and prepare a list of actionable steps to optimize its performance.