Many campaigns vs asset object? Confused on how to track multiple dimensions across blog posts.

Marketing & Content Hub Tips, Tricks & Best Practices
1

Please help us understand and resolve an internal debate about how best to track various attributes of assets.

Say for example, that you want to track the performance of blog posts assets across multiple dimensions. I’ve heard advice to create a campaign for each dimension, but that seems messy over time, and not the right tool.

Take this scenario:
You write a blog post associated with a black friday incentive, and it features product 3 and 5 of your suite, and it’s TOFU position, and it mentions your new AI feature that’s a big deal, and it has a freelance contributor that you want to track but they are not to be listed as the author.

It’s been suggested that I need to set up a campaign for all of those elements, separately, as they can each span other posts, other campaigns, etc.

So, a campaign for
-Black Friday
- TOFU funnel position (to see how that’s doing vs MOFU or BOFU assets/topics)
- AI topic, so we can see if our blog discussing AI are performing better than those without.
- for product 3
- for product 5
- associated with freelance contributor X

If there were an asset object, we could set up any properties we want to associate with it, and check them off when the blog is created. But there is only one campaign field. So, it seems like to track the various dimensions, after posting the blog post and picking one campaign, I would have to go back and find all the campaigns associated, and add the asset to them. And would have to do that every time I post a blog, to get the full picture of some aspects across all blog posts, like funnel position, or product mention. And that would also mean I’d need a campaign selected for every blog post, which doesn’t seem to fit with the general idea of a campaign, or the examples listed in the KB article about campaign types.

Seems like if I could add a property field to a blog asset, similar to the blog tag property, then I could create the fields to track for the asset, vs many campaigns to keep adding assets to.

Educate me? Thoughts?

2

Hi @donrua,

This is a very interesting topic, thank you for posting!

I wanted to invite a couple of subject matter experts to this discussion to get their thoughts and suggestions.

Before I do that, I wanted to ask you for additional information that could be relevant:

  • Is your blog hosted on HubSpot?
  • Which version of HubSpot are you working with? (Professional, Enterprise?)
  • How would you like to measure the performance of individual blog post assets? Number of clicks, influenced revenue?

Thank you,

Mia, Community team

3

Yes we our blog is hosted on HS.
We are on Pro for Marketing, Enterprise for Sales I believe.
We want to measure blog content in a number of ways. The most important is ROI. Did they contribute to the funnel movement of an eventual customer. Did they drive leads to the MQL stage, or into a Deal pipeline. But we also want to know if they are the original source for an MQL. We want to know the traffic, the CTR on the CTA there, etc. But back to the bottom line: what is the ROI of the asset. The challenge of my original post addresses many conversations and issues though, in how I track whatever attribute I wish to across assets, it’s funnel stage, what products it talks about, etc.

4

Got it, thank you for the additional information @donrua!

Hi @Phil_Vallender, @danmoyle, @Crystal_Hopper, do you have any best practice advice for @donrua on how to measure ROI and performance of different marketing assets in a blog post? Thank you! :star:

Mia, Community team

5

If it helps, my HS admin is suggesting that we need to create an uber-campaign and attach every blog post we create, to best track the ROI of blog posts. That feels like the wrong tool for the job, and not really a campaign to me. It seems like there should be ways to track the performance of blog posts without needing to add every one to a campaign to do so.
How are others showing the ROI of blog posts, without going all the way to Enterprise. This seems like a basic need, not a luxury. Helpful when deciding budgets, to we pay to write more blog posts, or spend the money on some other asset/channel?

6

@donrua for almost any content page in Hubspot you can go there and deep dive into Analytics regardless of campagins.

Crystal_Hopper_0-1701887151450.png
Crystal_Hopper_0-1701887151450.png946×285 45.2 KB

Here I’m on the Blog page (we have 4 blogs) I can choose a blog or just analyze them all using the Analyze button in the upper right. Once you are analyzing you can further filter your results in various ways, one of them be by Campaign. But you don’t have to. You can do this same kind an Analyzing with Emails, Webpages and Social Media.

7

Unfortunately, I don’t see a way to analyze the blog posts via that method,
by revenues generated, contacts that ended up in active deals, etc.
Also, I don’t see a way to connect the blog with new contacts created,
unless I want to create a form on the page. We’ve used CTA’s to drive
action, to get an immediate demo request, and many of those turn into
contacts, but I don’t see that reflected in the blog analysis.

8

Agreed @MiaSrebrnjak - this is a very interesting scenario. @donrua I’m going to give this some thought and chat with the team I work with about it. Hopefully I can give some advice or insight to inspire a solution.

9

@donrua yes, this is interesting and something I’ve wished to do on occasion also. Once idea I can offer is the use of Tracking URLs. If any asset can have a URL associated to it, then that URL could be built in Tracking URLs and associated to a different campaign. This could work for visuals, links to other contributor sites, etc.

So for example, your blog is a “Black Friday” campaign blog. But there’s a visual inside the blog serving as an ad. Attached to the visual is a Tracking URL built using your “Product Reference” campaign.

Yes, still a fair amount of campaigns. I have several campaigns that never end. They are my “ALL TIME” campaigns. These are where I store assets that will live a long time and be reused, such as product references and visuals.

Hope that gives you another idea to consider and maybe sparks a thought in someone else who can add to it. Also, obviously there are some limitations to this system that you’ll have to live with for now. Discussing this with your team and using what is avaialble and choosing what matters most to you all, can certainly help narrow down the focus. Make a wishlist of future enhancements that your team would like to see and put them on the Ideas Board. You never know when Hubspot will fulfill a wish.

Best of luck!