The Best Practices for Reporting in HubSpot  

You might feel like you’ve only scratched the surface of what HubSpot can do with your data and reporting. Maybe you’ve done a great job of keeping up with tracking, but now it’s time to examine the data to identify trends and make more informed decisions about your business. 

Leveraging your data in HubSpot allows you to better understand your customers and anticipate their needs while delivering a personalized experience at every touchpoint.  

But how do you do that? Before we dive into best practices for reporting on HubSpot, let’s first understand the why. 

Why is Data Important to Grow Your Business? 

In a customer-driven market, intuition and guesswork are no longer enough to stay competitive and grow quickly. 

The data you track and collect helps you get to know your customers. From understanding what email content they’re most engaged with to examining website traffic and conversions from ads, you can use data to build customer personas. 

The data reveals a customer’s interaction with your brand, and the analytics tools help to uncover a story. This can inform and help you create a strong buyer’s journey across your touchpoints. 

You can better anticipate and meet your customers’ needs and offer a more personalized and seamless buying experience. Predicting customer behavior is one of the best ways to use data. This will make them more likely to become loyal customers and advocates for your brand.

You can also:

• Segment your audience and personalize your marketing
• Optimize your sales and customer support processes
• Measure the impact of your campaigns and make adjustments as needed

Now that you know why data is essential—let’s jump into the best practices to scale your growth and drive more revenue.

HubSpot CRM Reporting: Start With ‘Lists’

To increase the impact of HubSpot, start with organizing your “lists,” which is a tool to keep track of your contacts.

Lists aren’t just for marketing segmentation. They also: 

• Help identify and manage your CRM contacts: Segment contacts based on their demographics, interests, and behaviors. This allows marketers to send targeted messages to the right people at the right time.
• Provide your sales team with information: This helps to prioritize leads with the most promising ones. Lists can also be used to track the progress of leads through the sales pipeline and keep their data clean. 
• Give account managers insights to retain clients and upsell: Valuable customers are identified, and AEs can make sure this group is getting the best possible support. Lists can also identify customers at risk of churning so AEs can take steps to retain them.

As your contacts are updated and removed, keep them organized by using folders, which makes it easier to find contacts. 

How to Create and Manage Your Dashboards

Dashboards are a way to organize custom and standard reports into a single view. 

The great thing about dashboards is the ability to be tailored to the needs of different teams with the specific reports that are most relevant to them. For example, you could create a web and email performance dashboard for your marketing team or a sales productivity dashboard for your sales team. You can also embed external content on a dashboard to include data from outside HubSpot.

By creating the right dashboards for the right people, you can better understand how to communicate and act on the data and increase the likelihood that the dashboard will be well-received. 

Reports from dashboards can be scheduled to be sent to your users regularly, or you can share them via email or Slack. This makes it easy to inform everyone of the latest data and trends. Here’s a quick checklist of dashboard best practices for HubSpot:

• Start with a clear purpose. What do you want your dashboard to achieve? What questions do you want it to answer? Once you know your purpose, you can start identifying the specific metrics and reports that need to be included.
• Organize your dashboard logically. Group related reports together and use clear and concise titles. This will make it easy for users to find the information they need.
• Use visuals to tell a story. Dashboards are a great way to visualize your data and identify trends and patterns. Use charts and graphs to make your data more engaging and easily understood.
• Keep your dashboard up-to-date. Make sure to refresh your dashboard regularly so that users always see the most recent data.
• Share your dashboard with the right people. Only share your dashboard with people who need to access it. This will help to ensure that the information is kept secure and that users are only seeing the data that is relevant to them.

Create Custom Reports

HubSpot custom reports allow you to dive deeper into your data. For example, you can use a custom report to further analyze your data, compare activities, and more.

Custom reports let you analyze various objects and integrations in one place. This means you can have all your data sources integrated quickly into one place. No more manually managing and updating confusing Excel sheets built from scratch to build a report from another software. Remember these best practices for creating custom reports: 

• Use the correct report type. HubSpot offers a variety of report types, including standard reports, custom reports, and tool-specific analytics. 
• Use filters to narrow down your data. Filters allow you to focus on specific subsets of your data. This can help identify trends and patterns that might not be visible in the overall data.
• Use drill-downs to get more detail. Drill-downs allow you to click on a data point in a report to see more detailed information. This can help understand the underlying causes of trends and patterns.
• Use visualizations to tell a digestible story. Visualizations can make your data more engaging and easier to understand. Use charts, graphs, and tables to display your data in a visually appealing way.
• Share your report. HubSpot allows you to share reports via email, and Slack, or embed them in a dashboard.

To get started with creating a HubSpot custom report, you need four things:

1. Your data set: This includes contacts, products, companies, activities, etc.
2. Properties: These are the properties of your data set objects.
3. Filters: You can set filters to get more specific. For example, you can filter contacts by their city.
4. Visualization: This is how you will display your data in an area graph, pie chart, or table, among many other options.

Once you’ve created your HubSpot custom report, name and save it to your reports list or dashboard. You can also export it to keep it on your device.

Best Practices for Data Storytelling 

Data visualization is key to telling a compelling story with your data. Throwing a bunch of graphs onto a dashboard will not be effective. Instead, you need to carefully consider how you lay out your data and weave it together into a narrative that is both informative and engaging. Share why you believe the results occurred and provide context for what happened at the time or factors that might’ve affected the outcome. 

Even if your results are poor, present these findings with future actionable and meaningful improvements to make. Don’t just spin a narrative that suits your agenda. 

Here are some tips for telling a data story effectively:

• Start with a clear goal. What do you want your audience to learn from your data story? 
• Use visuals to support your story. Visuals are a great way to make your data more accessible and engaging. 
• Tell a human story. Find ways to share your data in a way that is relevant to your audience’s experiences and interests.
• Be honest and transparent. Even if it’s not what you or your team wants to see, use the data to create actionable next steps for improvement.

Using Analytics and Individual Tools on HubSpot

HubSpot also offers a robust set of standard analytics tools that show data on sources of traffic, contacts, and customers, lifecycle stage reports, and more. These reports allow you to track sales or service activity, understand which campaigns drive results, and track changes in your recurring revenue.

HubSpot also offers reports that come standard with each individual tool. For example, the following tools have reports that cover insights around common metrics, such as impressions, open rates, conversions, etc. 

• Sequences in Sales Hub
• Social or Traffic Analytics in Marketing Hub
• Knowledge Base in Service Hub
• Website Pages in the CMS Hub 

These insights can help determine which assets perform and drive traffic and conversions.

Here are details on each and how you can utilize the reporting that comes with it: 

• Sales Hub: Use the Sequences reporting dashboard to see how many leads are entering your sequences, how many are opening and clicking on your emails, and how many are converting into customers.
• Marketing Hub: Use the Social Analytics report to see which social media platforms drive the most traffic to your website and which content resonates with your audience.
• Service Hub: Use the Knowledge Base Analytics report to see which articles are most viewed and which are helping customers solve their problems.
• CMS Hub: Use the Website Pages Analytics report to see which pages on your website get the most traffic and which convert visitors into leads or customers.

Conclusion

Your HubSpot CRM provides a comprehensive reporting solution to help you make better decisions for your business.

The only way to make better use of your data is to create dashboards in HubSpot, check it daily, and assess your reporting and analytics so you can see what needs improvement. Maybe you start with the pre-made dashboards, and as you get more familiar, make adjustments to fit your team’s needs. Remember to outline your goals so you can collect and analyze relevant data. 

If you need more guidance, you may consider investing in training to onboard your team and other stakeholders. The Automation Company is HubSpot certified and can help you with this or any of your HubSpot needs. Reach out to us today.