[closed] AMA - Reporting Tips & Tricks with Josh Curcio

[Josh]

Reporting can be tricky. You can usually describe what you want to see in a report, but you aren’t always able to accomplish it. I’ve worked with hundreds of B2B companies over the past several years to help bring their reporting ideas to life in HubSpot. I want to hear your questions about HubSpot reporting, but here are some important things to consider.

Data In, Data Out

This is two-fold. First, the data must be there if you want to report on something in HubSpot. What does that mean? Here are some examples:

• I want to report on how many deals were created last year for a specific business line.
• Great! Are you tracking the business line on the deal record?
• I want to understand how many sales activities our reps completed last quarter.
• OK. Are the reps logging their sales activities in HubSpot?
• We want to see a pie chart breakdown of the favorite animal of every executive in our client base.
• Cool. Are you storing the favorite animal on the contact record? Are you using a property to track anyone at an executive level? Are you labeling your customers?

You get it…you can’t pull something out into a report if it doesn’t exist to begin with.

The second thing to consider is that your report quality and accuracy are only as good as the data and information that’s being entered. You’ve heard the adage: garbage in, garbage out. Well, it’s true.

Reporting Can Be Finicky

When building reports across multiple objects and property types, it can get complex. When this happens, people usually just walk away with an unfinished report or find some sort of workaround that’s just good enough. I’m not saying that HubSpot’s reporting tools can create every possible report and variation that exists…but for most situations, it’s usually possible with some planning and work.

Why that Report?

Before diving into report creation, ask yourself why. What's the end game? Is it actionable, and how often will you use it? Clear objectives help avoid clutter—no one needs a portal drowning in one-hit wonders.

Your Turn!

I want to hear from you. What are your reporting struggles?

Here are some example questions that I could answer on an AMA.

1. What are your favorite reports to add to a dashboard for sales rep usage?
2. What are common pitfalls to avoid when setting up reporting in HubSpot?
3. How can I use datasets to create more complex reports?
4. Are there any new features or updates in HubSpot reporting that we should know about?

Questions that are too in the weeds will be difficult to answer on an AMA, so please try and generalize a bit. Here’s an example of a question I might not be able to answer in an AMA.

We need a report that reports MRR, but only when revenue is realized, and we only want to report this for customers in southwest Nebraska. Oh, also, this has to be shown as a pie chart in all capital letters.

For the best answers, please provide the Hubs and subscription levels that you’re using. (Marketing Hub Pro, Sales Hub Ent., Service Hub Starter, etc.).

Ask away!!

[kvlschaefer]

Thanks for hosting the AMA, Josh! Do you have any tips for the Community on how to create MRR and ARR reports in the custom report builder? 

I'd also like to invite @trevordjones, @Jnix284, @louischausse, @johnelmer, @Shadab_Khan, @OPerek-Clark, @NicoleSengers, @Brenner, @Tesore to this conversation. 

Thank you,

Kristen

[Josh]

Hi @kvlschaefer,

This is a wonderful question!

First, the BEST way to do this is by using the recurring revenue tracking functionality that is available on Sales or Service Hub Enterprise. 

I also understand that not everyone has the luxury of the Enterprise tools. You can report on these values in the report builder, but it will take some additional maintenance to report accurate numbers. 

Using the report builder you can compile reports using the properties of Annual Recurring Revenue or Monthly Recurring revenue as long as the line items on those deals have a billing frequency applied to them. 

When building the report using the information in deals it will pull the values for all time unless other filters are applied. This won't account for churned revenue or changes in a contract, such as upgrades and downgrades, which can result in inaccuracies in numbers if they aren't managed well.

Another thing we've done to accommodate recurring revenue reporting for those that don't have enterprise is to record the ARR and/or MRR on the company record and build reports from that property. When using this as well as contract start/end dates or customer status you can manage churn a bit better. This still will take manual effort to keep up with contract dates, upgrades, downgrades, etc.

As another option if you have Enterprise but not Service or Sales Enterprise is to create a custom object for the subscriptions and manage it all there. In my opinion this is more ideal than the company record, especially if a customer can have multiple subscriptions , different start/end dates, different seats for different subscriptions, etc.

Thanks for the question, @kvlschaefer!

[AKasler]

Hello @Josh ,

We are currently working on adding some new custom properties to our company contacts. There will be a drop down menu with the most popular options available to choose from. For those that will not be represented in the drop down menu (the "other"), is there a way to report those out? Or do you recommend adding all options to the drop down menu, even if it's as we go type of thing? (Let me know if I need to be more specific!) 

Thanks in advance,

Annie 

[Josh]

Hi @AKasler,

First, I'm happy to hear that you're reporting on data populated using dropdowns and not text fields. You're already on the right track. 😉

My answer to your question is, it depends on how you want it represented. It might look a bit clunky if you attempt to use a bar graph or pie chart and pull the most popular options into it as well as the other options.

However, if you want to view this as a table, it would be pretty easy to show the first dropdown answer in one column and the response to "other" in a secondary column on the same report.  

If you're going for more of the visual graph or chart, I would recommend creating one report with your primary dropdown responses and one report for the "other" responses.

Thanks for the question, Annie!

[AKasler]

Thanks @Josh! This makes sense! 

[Anton]

Hey @Josh, 

thank you for the AMA! 

Since I know a few people (including myself) who got a (growth suite) starter package - what are you're recommendations when it comes to

• extending the reports by external tools like Hotjar
• building "perfect" dashboards for website and marketing reports?

Thank you!

best, 

Anton

[Josh]

Hi @Anton! 

• Extending the reports by external tools like Hotjar
  • My answer to this would be different depending on whether or not the tool integrates and sends data to HubSpot or not
    • If it does send data to HubSpot, it won't likely send "reports" to HubSpot so you'll want to utilize the other data points to build the reports based on what data is available. If you can send data directly to records you can use that data to then build the report accordingly. In other scenarios, you might have to find workarounds to use, such as list membership. Several 3rd party tools allow you to build an active list based on the integration data, in turn, you can use that for reporting.
  • If the tool does not integrate with HubSpot, I do find it helpful to embed the reports right into a HubSpot dashboard. It's ideal to look at all of your information in one place. Some 3rd party tools will provide you with a share link or embed code that makes it very easy to embed into a dashboard.
• Building "perfect" dashboards for website and marketing reports?
  • I can't get incredibly specific here because the perfect dashboard for one person or team isn't going to be the same for another. The biggest piece of advice when creating dashboards is to allow it to tell a story and have a purpose. It's really easy to throw together a dashboard that has 20 reports on it, but if they aren't relevant and don't help you understand the data it just adds to the noise and eventually gets ignored. When creating the perfect dashboard, ask yourself...why do I need this report/KPI, what am I going to do with what it's telling me? If you don't know why or can't use the data, it shouldn't go on the "perfect" dashboard. That doesn't mean it shouldn't exist...but it won't be front and center.

With the free and starter tools there will be some limitations on how advanced your reports can get. Once you have access to the custom report builder on Pro and Enterprise, the capabilities expand greatly!

Awesome questions, Anton. Thank you for participating!

[Qualic]

How do I automatically exclude certain contacts from all traffic analytics and reports (i.e. internal staff)? Without asking everyone for their individual IP addresses.

Currently the in-built reports for landing pages, form submissions etc cannot be relied upon.

It's time-consuming to set a filter and maintain a list, so should there be an option to do this on the contact record?

I see there was a post confirming this was being worked on in 2020 with a lot of clients requesting this, but no update since then.

[Josh]

Hi @Qualic,

I do not believe that it will be possible to exclude traffic from internal people without their IP address. 

Regarding your comment on the form submissions report. Can you elaborate? This has been a very reliable report for me, historically.

Also, please elaborate on your comment regarding the filter/maintaining list from the contact record. Can you provide a link to that post from the Ideas board?

Thanks! 

[sharonlicari]

Thank you for hosting this AMA @Josh 🙂 I'm curious to know if there are any new features or updates in HubSpot reporting that we should know about.

Also, I'd like to invite to this conversation @danmoyle @Jake_Lett @jolle @GrantCarlile @HubSpotMaster

@MrJustinGivens @Ben_M @Mike_Eastwood 

Thank you

Sharon 

[Josh]

Hi @sharonlicari,

I'm very excited about the AI reporting functionality. It's going to make reporting and data analysis so much easier, especially for folks who aren't too savvy with the report builders.  It's pretty impressive already, I can't even imagine where it will be 12-18 months from now.

I really like the funnel report builder that's now in Public Beta. Historically there were always challenges when stages were skipped, now we have the ability to see a full funnel report with optional stages. 

You can now format numbers and currency in the custom report builder, which is a really nice addition as well vs unformatted numbers. It's much more clear to people that just want to glance at KPIs.

Overall the reporting tools have expanded a lot in the past couple of years and are much easier to use. Sure, there's a learning curve like anything, but it's much easier to use than some reporting tools out there.

Thanks for the question, @sharonlicari!

[Bryantworks]

Hey @Josh, thanks for putting this on!  I personally still struggle with datasets mostly because I don't have too many clients that use them, but I also don't have enough time to play.  Maybe this is something you can help me get my head around:

I'd like to make a report that shows me how many contacts at a company have a value in X, but I want to show that as a percentage.  So if 10/15 contacts have a value in X but only if they were created the year. I  nearly get there, but then it's always something like the date that screws me up.  

I'd like this to be in a data set as I have other custom calculations running that'd I'd want to show on the table as well.  Let me know if I need to explain a bit further, much appreciated!

[Josh]

Hi @Bryantworks,

Great question! Datasets are tricky, especially if you don't use them often. This may not be 100% accurate, but I tend to think of datasets as a way to organize and manipulate data before building a report...almost like creating a pivot table in a spreadsheet and then from my pivot sheet data creating further formulas to extract the information I actually need. Datasets will allow me to do that without continually building the pivot table time after time and it will allow me to use it in multiple reports.

To get back to your specific example, here's an example from a test portal I have with some dummy data. I created a report to show the % of contacts with the name of Josh, but only for contacts created in the last 2 years.

In this first screenshot I am creating a field to pull the count of people named Josh in the system and I'm also telling it to only use contacts created in the last 2 years. This field can be used on my reporting KPIs. In your scenario you could tell your dataset to count the number of contacts with X value or the number of contacts without X value.

In this second screenshot I am doing the same thing, but in this scenario I am counting the contacts NOT named Josh, but also only those created in the last 2 years. 

You mentioned having some hiccups when it comes to things like dates. You also have the option to apply date filters on the filters settings vs the way that I incorporated them on my specific formulas, as shown in this next screenshot.

The last screenshot shows how I would utilize this particular dataset in a reporting format to show the % of contacts in my system that are named Josh, but only in the last couple of years.

There are so many use cases for datasets, especially if you're using the reporting tools and can't quite get the exact output you were looking for. Using datasets and formulas can help step it up a notch and help you get the desired outcome for the report needed. Another use case is creating datasets for team members that utilize the reporting tools but aren't quite as fluent with the HubSpot tools overall. You can create the datasets in advance for them to use in later reports so they won't have to worry about pulling in the correct properties or creating formulas on their own.

One last piece of advice...use the AI assistant when building your formulas. It's an incredible time-saver!

Thanks for a great question to kick us off!

Josh

[PamCotton]

A big shoutout to @Josh for generously offering to share his expertise in the upcoming AMA on "Reporting Tips & Tricks with HubSpot." We're thrilled to have such a professional guiding us through the intricacies of reporting.

Josh's experience in assisting numerous B2B companies in realizing their reporting visions within HubSpot is truly invaluable.  So, let's make the most of this opportunity!!

Do you have burning questions about HubSpot reporting? Wondering how to optimize your reports to glean actionable insights? Interested in learning some advanced tricks to elevate your reporting game?

Drop your questions below!!

Pam