Much-Needed HubSpot Campaign Updates Make It Easier to Get Info You Need

Marketing campaigns are essential to breaking up a long-term strategy into manageable, connected efforts.  

Because a typical marketing campaign exists across multiple customer touchpoints, it’s essential to have an easy way to measure performance both separately for each asset, and together for a high-level view.

This process provides a strategic yet focused approach to achieving marketing goals, breaking up big projects into smaller, more easily digestible chunks, and allowing you to celebrate the small wins along the way.

HubSpot’s Campaigns Tool has always aimed to offer an easy way to associate assets and analyze overall performance in one place but had a lot of room for improvement.

Luckily, HubSpot recently updated the tool, making it consistent with the look and feel of the other HubSpot tools we’re used to seeing today and also adding several new improvements that can make campaign creation and measurement easier than ever before.

What’s New in the Campaigns Tool?

All-New Campaign Details

With any marketing campaign, the more data you can get your hands on, the better.  

So, HubSpot came through with this update by adding in some new campaign details that help marketers understand how their campaign helped impact a business’s bottom line.

It can often be easy to get caught up in traffic or conversion numbers and lose sight of the bigger question: what did these visitors or conversions end up doing engaging with your campaign? How did this campaign actually contribute to revenue goals?

To be clear, it's not for lack of caring about these long-term goals — it’s that they can be difficult to track, especially for longer sales cycles. Until now!

HubSpot’s update includes four new data sets that provide clarity into how a campaign contributes to these longer-term business goals, including:

• New & Influenced Contacts - Improved contact attribution allows you to see not only how many conversions your campaign received, but also how these conversions could/can be sorted  into one of these categories:
• New Contacts: These are new contacts whose first-touch with your website led to this conversion. (Note: This slightly differs from “New Contacts” you’d see in other HubSpot reports. New contacts in the system whose first-touch were outside of this campaign won’t be represented here)

• Influenced Contacts: These are new or existing contacts in the database whose first-touch were outside of this campaign.

• Closed Deals: Syncs with HubSpot’s deals and shows how many closed deals engaged with the campaign prior to closing. This can help you understand how this campaign influenced gaining new customers in your organization.
• Influenced Revenue: Similar to closed deals, this metric displays how much revenue you can tie back to this campaign, providing a more accurate ROI

• Campaign Influence Over Time (by Contacts) - This shows a timeline of when your contacts are engaging with a campaign. This has various use-cases depending on your needs. For example, you can see if there is any seasonality affecting when contacts are most engaged with these assets, or if a campaign is no longer relevant.

So, if you have any higher-ups in your organization who aren’t sold on inbound marketing, these metrics can significantly help tie your efforts back to the results they care most about.

Easily Scan High-Level Metrics

When you’re evaluating overall campaign performance, it’s best to see a holistic view of the high-level results before digging into the details.

To enable marketers to evaluate campaigns more easily, HubSpot added the ability to scan/collapse each info card to avoid one data set from hogging the entire screen.

These info cards will be collapsed by default, and they will display a set of aggregated metrics for each channel.

If you want to view more info about a specific set, you can click into it to expand and see more details.

HubSpot also added an “expand all” and “collapse all” feature to make it even easier to navigate.

Additionally, each campaign will remember which cards were expanded/collapsed when you last visited the analytics page so you won’t need to repeat the process each time.

This feature may seem small, but it really does allow you to get a more complete view of all campaign metrics at a glance, enabling you to better connect different areas — and this makes areas for improvement more obvious.

Improved Reporting for Tracking URLs

In the old campaigns tool, HubSpot allowed you to add in custom tracking URLs that were built to evaluate campaign performance.

However, HubSpot creates tracking URLs automatically for several things like emails, so shouldn’t we see all traffic with the campaign’s UTM code?

Now you can!

Beyond URLs you create in HubSpot’s URL Tracking Tool, you can see any traffic analytics associated with your campaign.

You can view all tracking URLs that match the campaign’s UTM code easily by clicking “View tracking URLs” in the upper right-hand corner or, if you want to create your own, you can do so easily by clicking “Create Tracking URL.”.

Any URL matching the campaign’s UTM code will be tracked here, regardless of whether the tracking URL was created in HubSpot.

This will help better connect your analytics if you’re using different systems for your campaign.

Streamlined Process For Adding/Removing Assets

If you’re a HubSpot user who rarely uses the Campaigns tool, it’s probably because adding/removing assets can be such a cumbersome process.

Associating different assets like emails, blog posts, or landing pages, used to have to be done one at a time, either in the individual page settings or by searching each individual asset in the campaign builder.

For multi-asset campaigns, that process could take a significant amount of time.

Realizing this was a point of friction for people using this tool, HubSpot has updated this process to make adding and removing campaign assets much simpler.

Now, you can associate or disassociate multiple assets at once on one screen.  

To do this, click “Add Assets” in the top right of the campaign details page, and you’re brought to the window shown above.

From there, you can select/deselect assets from different areas of HubSpot to add them into your campaign.

This is great for building out the initial campaign, and it also provides an easy way to check if everything is linked up properly and nothing is missing.

Get Started With HubSpot Campaigns

All new HubSpot portals have access to the layout of the campaign tool updates by default.

If you’re an existing Marketing Hub Professional or Enterprise user, however, you’ll need to turn on the new design from your current campaigns tool, as pictured below.

So, for your next HubSpot-run campaign, turn to the updated campaigns feature to keep all your assets in one place, and gain a better idea of campaign performance overtime.