Weidert Wednesday: The 3 Most Helpful HubSpot Reports and When to Use Them

You put a lot of insight, creativity, and hard work into your inbound marketing program. So, once your work is out in the world, how can you tell which efforts actually engage your prospects? How do you know which email subject lines are the heavy hitters, and which web pages or blog posts bring in the most traffic? Wouldn’t it be great if HubSpot provided an easy way for you to derive useful marketing metrics to assess your performance and make improvements in your programs?

Great news!

In this video, you’ll get to know three of the most useful types of HubSpot marketing reports. Learn where to find them in your portal, when to use them to get meaningful data on the different components of your marketing program, and who can get the most benefit from the information that each different type of report provides.

Transcript: The 3 Most Helpful HubSpot Reports and When to Use Them

Looking for ways to assess your inbound performance? Lucky for you, there are a number of reports in HubSpot that help you continually improve your program and ensure optimum results. I’m going to cover 3 of the most useful types of reports, tell you where to find them in your HubSpot portal, when to use them, and who will get the most out of them.

Tool-Specific Reports

The first type of report is the Tool-Specific Report. Every key tool in HubSpot has its own report and, as the name implies, these reports are used to improve the performance of specific HubSpot tools. You might, for example, want to improve your email subject lines, improve social posts, improve your blog headlines or improve your landing page copy. These reports will help you do just that.

• WHERE to Find Them: In each individual tool in HubSpot you’ll find a report associated with it – for email, social media, landing pages and blogs. 
• WHEN would I use tool-specific reports? Tool-specific reports are used to understand how a tool as a whole is performing, or how something in the tool is performing. For example, if you’re wondering how your landing pages are performing – or how your newest landing page is performing – you’ll use this tool to give you the data.
• WHO should use tool-specific reports? Tool-specific reports are most useful to HubSpot “doers” — the people in your organization who are using the tool most, such as content strategists and perhaps your sales reps and BDRs. It allows them to keep close tabs on the information that’s most important to them as they look to understand the level and quality of prospect engagement with your email, social media, blogs, landing pages, and sales sequences.

Traffic Analytics Reports

The second type of report is the Traffic Analytics Report. These reports are used to understand trends and overall portal performance, the key elements of which are website traffic, contacts and customers.

• WHERE to Find Them: Traffic analytics tools can be found by going to the Reports menu, then to Analytics Tools in the dropdown menu. In the tool you can filter down to see how traffic, contacts and customers look for a specific source.
• WHEN would I use tool-specific reports? Use Tool-specific Reports when you want to understand how website traffic, contact conversions and customer conversions are trending, and what your best sources of each are to the site.
• WHO should use Traffic Analytics Reports? These are most useful to HubSpot “doers” and managers — the people who manage the overall program and who are in some way responsible for overall program performance. The data will give them a clear picture of the people visiting your site so you can focus your efforts and refine your approach to attracting your best prospects.

LEARN MORE: 6 Great HubSpot Features You Might Not Know About

Custom Reports

Finally, let’s look at Custom Reports. More complex ways of looking at your HubSpot portal require something more than just the Tools or Analytics Reports — they require the Custom Report tool. Keep in mind, though, that only Pro and Enterprise licenses have access to Custom Reports, and the limit on the number of Custom Reports you can create depends on your license tier.

• WHERE to Find Them: To find Custom Reports, go to the Reports menu and click “Reports” in the drop-down. You can also get there from any of your dashboards by clicking “Add Report.” 
• WHEN would I use Custom Reports? Some examples of custom reports you can build include those focused on a single data point, such as “contacts that reached out on a Monday; specific visuals, such as all contacts by city; and funnel reports, such as a view of all contacts currently in the Proposal deal stage.
  
  You’d use a Custom Report if, for instance, you wanted to see all customers by country who came through social media and who’ve spent more than $5,000 on their last deal within the last 6 months. See what we mean? This is a complex request so a Custom Report is needed.

Custom reports get very nuanced, so it’s best to dive in and play around to find out what’s possible. We also recommend checking out the HubSpot Academy, where you’ll find a lesson specifically on creating custom reports.

You can add any report you build, or that’s pre-built in the library in your portal already, to a Dashboard. This allows you to see a group of reports at a glance and know how things are performing. For example, we use Marketing, Sales, and Web Analytics dashboards:

• WHO should use Custom Reports? Custom Reports are useful to everyone on your team, and for many different purposes. That’s the beauty of this capability — nearly anything you want to understand can be revealed through a Custom Report.

Well, there you go: 3 of the most useful HubSpot Reports. The differences among these reports is in the “view” they provide. Tool-specific Reports give you a narrow and magnified view; Traffic Analytics Reports give you a sort of “whole picture” view of program KPIs; and Custom are for complex views.

HubSpot reports give you the ability to review data to help you understand how effective your program elements are today, and to identify ways to continue to build inbound momentum and boost results.

Learn more about using HubSpot reports and how to use them to monitor, demonstrate, and improve the effectiveness of your inbound program. Register today for the virtual Appleton HubSpot User Group on August 25, 2020!