HubSpot's New Analytics Tool: What's Useful? [VIDEO]
HubSpot's reporting and analytics tools (if you don't buy the add-on), have always been good for the basics: visits, leads, and customers by source. When you try to go a level deeper, however, you'll quickly find yourself doing workarounds.
But HubSpot has a new set of "Analytics Tools" in beta, and they're trying to give you a deeper level of reporting. Here's what you need to know about the new tools, what is important, and what you can ignore.
We’ve written a transcript of the video, too, which you can find below. (But seriously, who reads when they could watch?)
It's fair to say that if you're trying to look at some deeper reporting than your most basic stuff, HubSpot's been kind of frustrating to use. But it looks like they're trying to change that.
HubSpot's always done a very good job of summarizing your marketing and how it's preforming. So, if you look at the current sources report, it does a great job of showing you where your visits are coming from, where your contacts—or what we'd call leads—are coming from, where your customers are coming from, all by source. These are all the different ways someone could find your website, and then visits, how they convert into contacts, or leads, and then how they convert into customers.
It's a great tool at a high level, and it should always be your starting point (and then you can get deeper from there). The problem has always been, in HubSpot, if you try to get deeper than this highest level, it's a challenge. You find yourself reporting out of lists, which shouldn't be used in that way. I find myself exporting things a lot, sometimes twice in order to try to compare multiple time periods. If you try to get a little bit deeper, HubSpot reporting really falls off.
As I mentioned earlier, it looks like they're trying to fix that. So, I want to take you through some of their new analytics tools. Again, the first is a new rendition on the sources report. So, if you go to Reports - Analytics Tools you'll see it's new in beta, and you can look at sources. This is all the same, as you'll see on the original sources report, and I'm not too concerned about that. I am interested in two key numbers they've decided to add, which is great. To my knowledge, they've never had these numbers in HubSpot before in your basic included reporting package, and they're super important.
SEMrush—and I'll jump over here quickly, I'll share this link as well—put together a study of the factors, in order of importance, that get a page to rank in Google vs. another. It's kind of Google's secret algorithm analyzed. You'll see the time on site and bounce rate; these are really key metrics, both in the top four. Like I said, HubSpot never had them before, to my knowledge, and now they've added them. How long you spend on the site and the bounce rate are two important metrics if you're going to try to dig to that deeper level and figure out how are things performing. These are going to be clear indicators of why one page ranks and another doesn't, so I'm glad they added that.
The second tool I usually rely on is Page Performance reports. This tells you how individual pages are pe
rforming with views, keywords, and links. That's been a pretty useful tool, and it looks like they're updating it with, in my opinion, some good additions and some bad omissions. So, that would be pages under the Traffic Analytics tool here, under reports.
Again, what you'll see here is average time on site, bounce rate, exit rate, etc., which are key metrics to determine how individual pages are performing, and why they are performing that way. My takeaway would be to take a look at these tools. If you've been previously reporting out of Google Analytics on these things, which would be my guess, and you've been piecing together a manual spreadsheet on them, you probably don't have to do that anymore. You can get all your data in here, which is really important.
The downside I referred to earlier is that the old page performance report had keywords: the specific keywords ranking on that page and who links directly to that page. This is very important: They've removed that from here, and when you go to edit columns you can't add it as well. My hope is that, because it's still in beta, they will add those back in, because the whole picture is what's important, not just parts of it.
I'd say, on the whole, check HubSpot's new analytics tools out, and start playing around with them. They're finally starting to work on that second level of reporting that's important to all of us.
