HubSpot has recently made big changes to Marketing Campaigns to make them more useful to marketers, and we are very bullish. We can tell that Campaigns has been an area of product investment for HubSpot (which they have needed to compete with other Enterprise CRM Marketing solutions). Frankly, Campaigns were of little value previously, and we never trained clients on using them. Recent product improvements are excellent, but, no shock, we have complaints. Here is the 4-1-1.
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HubSpot Campaigns are a way to connect marketing assets that belong to the same marketing endeavor.
A typical campaign includes the landing page, CTAs, submission forms, webinar signup pages, emails, downloads, social posts, newsletters, lists, event information and any other piece relating to one marketing effort.
HubSpot Campaigns enable you to connect these assets across channels to report on their performance in one consolidated place. Using the Campaign reporting section, you can see how each email, landing page, workflow, ad, etc is performing towards achieving your goal. And compare performance across campaigns.
The HubSpot Campaign feature should be utilized whenever you want to group marketing assets and report on their performance as a whole and compare various initiatives to one another.
Here are the things we love about HubSpot Campaigns
We are big fans of using intelligence in campaign names. We like the new fields HubSpot provides with start & end dates, owner, goals, etc.
Our naming convention is (loosely):
YYYY-MM-Type-Description
We start with YYYY-MM for data sorting purposes. And you can give your campaign a color dot to make the reporting cute.
Being able to store Campaign Goals is excellent too.
Static Lists (e.g. tradeshow lists) and Marketing Events (e.g. Zoom Webinars) are two of the latest twists to campaign assets that we really dig.
Metrics within the campaigns themselves are pretty helpful.
These metrics allow you to understand the performance of each of your asset types and then dig down even further.
You can easily compare between campaigns:
Let's get to it. Metrics and analytics for campaigns drive us crazy.
You can add static lists to campaigns. YAY! This was a substantial positive change only recently rolled out. But these contacts attached through lists only count as “Influenced Contacts,” not First Touch contacts. WHAT? Have you never heard of a third-party webinar list, HubSpot Development Team? Or perhaps you are unaware of Tradeshow Booth Scanners? These lists can only be attributed to the Campaign as an “Influenced Contact” not a "First Touch Contact.” Despite the fact the contact was created when the list was imported. (We ignore the great debate on First Touch vs. Last Touch marketing attribution. You can read more and pick your poison. We are picking First Touch.)
The List SNAFU means that your First Touch Contact statistics for some of your campaigns are 100% wrong. And to add up the First Touch contacts that your campaigns created, you HAVE TO GO MANUAL in Excel or Google Sheets to add these various metrics across all your campaigns, which renders cross Campaign Reporting instantly useless.
Suggestion for HubSpot Product Development: How about when we upload Lists, we can select a campaign to attach the contacts to so that anytime a contact is created with a list upload it is a First Touch Contact for that list rather than Influenced.
At this point, it is essential to quote from HubSot EXACTLY what an Influenced Contact is:
A contact is influenced by a campaign when any of the following conditions are met:
Although "Influenced Contacts" is a fun cocktail party fact, showing that your content and marketing efforts are wildly successful, it doesn't do much for revenue attribution. Meaning, can "Influenced Contacts" lead you to the answer to the magical question: "What did this campaign do specifically to drive revenue?" "Influneced Contacts" cannot. Only "First Touch Contacts" or "Last Touch Contacts" (depending on your religious marketing preference) can do that.
"Influenced Contacts" is, frankly, kind of a BS metric. We simply don’t use it.
And the HubSpot TOTAL fail. Campaign Revenue Attribution. Since Hubspot bases revenue upon “Influenced Contacts” (see above for why "Influenced Contacts" is a BS metric), the Revenue/Deal numbers in the campaign reporting are BS too. (Note: these comments all apply to HubSpot Marketing Pro Subscriptions, which nearly 100% of our Clients have; HubSpot says this will be fixed in Enterprise in June-2023, which doesn't help Marketing Pro).
This metric measures the number of closed won deals associated with "Influenced Contacts." For a deal to appear in this report, it must meet both conditions:
Dumb metric based on "Influenced Contacts" which we have already proven, is dumb.
This metric measures the total revenue of closed won deals associated with "Influenced Contacts." The total is from the sum of the Amount property of closed won deals. Only influenced deals will contribute to this total.
Again, silly metric is based on "Influenced Contacts," which we have shown is silly.
Based on items 1 and 2, you can't do marketing revenue attribution “out of the box” using HubSpot Marketing Pro. Let us repeat: using your HubSpot Marketing Pro CRM, you cannot easily attribute close/won deals to your marketing efforts. This is actually a somewhat shocking sentance.
HubSpot will run an intervention and tell us the HubSpot Marketing Enterprise product has correct revenue attribution metrics. And I present this report below from our single customer who has HubSpot Marketing Enterprise.
WTF does it all mean? I couldn't tell you how .43 of this compares to .32 of whatever.
What a typical JOE/JANE MARKETER wants to know is:
Where, dear HubSpot, can we find this?
We can see in our customer's Enterprise account that there is a note: "From June 12, 2023, influenced revenue changes to “attributed revenue,” and replaces the “influence” metrics." We don't know if this solves the list upload problem in that lists added to campaigns ... all contact are named as influenced. We doubt it solves this key problem.
It could solve the problem of first or last-touch contacts and revenue attribution and perhaps negates some of our complainings, however, it brings us to our fourth and final ridiculous point.
Enterprise HubSpot Cost is the point that chaps us the most. Enterprise HubSpot is 100% out of reach of our typical B2B SaaS clients, as the pricing is challenging. Enterprise is 4.5 times more expensive than Pro. And you don't get 4.5 times the value. Custom Objects and Hierarchical Teams are the best things in Marketing Enterprise; you can grab those by buying HubSpot Sales Enterprise (a much better value). And honestly, we have explored the out-of-the-box revenue attribution reporting in Enterprise and are NOT seeing what is needed. YET. Maybe after June 12, 2023 we will.
Suggestion for HubSpot Product Development: Allow attribution of Deals and Revenue based on First Touch or Last Touch contact as out-of-the-box metrics in HubSpot Marketing Pro instead of leaving it at the fake "Influenced Contact" metric which does no one any good.
HubSpot Marketing Pro is not cheap, and it is a little unbelievable that accurate revenue attribution metrics are unavailable until you pay for HubSpot Marketing Enterprise. Revenue attribution will not incent anyone to buy up to Marketing Enterprise and will only serve to frustrate your customer base due to manual reporting workarounds.
Read Next:
Part 2 | 🤪How to Create Marketing Campaign Attribution Reports Using Hubspot
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