Break down ad cost/metrics by lifecycle stage (MQL, SQL, etc.)
At the moment, this is confirmed as a function that isn't possible in HubSpot.
Allowing users to report on ad spend by lifecycle stage, would allow us to quantify the impact of ad spend at the lifecycle level, which would be extremely helpful for ROI reporting and strategization moving forward.
I’m Katie Koenig, the Senior Product Manager for HubSpot’s Ads tool.
I'm very pleased to announce that this feature has been Delivered to all Marketing Hub Professional & Enterprise customers. You can find these by clicking on "Manage columns" in the Ads tool.
We could not have built this feature without your help. Thank you all for taking the time to submit, vote and comment on this Idea.
I’m Katie Koenig, the Senior Product Manager for HubSpot’s Ads tool.
I'm very pleased to announce that this feature has been Delivered to all Marketing Hub Professional & Enterprise customers. You can find these by clicking on "Manage columns" in the Ads tool.
We could not have built this feature without your help. Thank you all for taking the time to submit, vote and comment on this Idea.
In my humble opinion the calculation is incorrect. In order to correctly calculate the the true cost per MQL you need to include the contacts in the susequent stages in the lifecycle such as SQL, Opportunity, customer and in our case, other as well as we use that for clients.
ditto with cost per SQL, you need to include opportunities, customers (and other) in order to get a true cost.
I thought this was a mere oversight seeing this is marketing 101 however when I raised it with my rep I was told that is how the calculation is done. Is it just me or does anyone else agree that the calculation is wrong?
I agree with @russstephens, the current functionality is limited in that it does not take into consideration all the contacts that have hit each lifecycle stage. This is due to contacts progressing and reverting from each lifecycle stage.
There should be a view that takes into consideration all leads that have become an MQL, SQL, etc. That way, we could easily capture the true cost/MQL, cost/SQL, etc. to evaluate the performance between channels, campaigns, ads, etc. Right now the cost per MQL/SQL/Opp/Cust data is temporary and less useful, especially for historical analysis. Further, I have not yet been able to build an effective custom report as I am unable to pull in the ad costs against some of the custom properties we have built to retain the lifecycle stage data.
In the end, the only way to look at this data is to manually pull this data into Google Sheets/Excel to compare the ad costs against the total number of MQLs/SQLs/Opps/Customers created.
I agree with the others. We're currently manually adding contact counts for numerous lifecycle stages together in order to gather the data we desire for previous lifecycle stages. If we spend $100 to get 100 MQLs and convert 99 to customers, then we definitely wouldn't consider our cost to be $100 per MQL... we would consider it to be 100x lower. Given that lifecycle stage is a progressive/funnel property, it's frustrating that this report treats it otherwise.
Fixing this report would absolutely turn it into the most powerful report our company uses.
Hi @katie_koenig , I agree with the feedback from @russstephens and @Hfoster1 , -- I'm needing to get a reliable estimate of cost per Lead, MQL, SQL, etc., but it appears things like my cost per lead and MQL go up and they move on to lower funnel lifecycle stages.
Thanks for your time on this!
Also, please add tracking for Reddit, Microsoft Ads, and Twitter. I understand if you can do actual ads management but building in tracking for these other ads platforms is really important to me. TY!
It looks like the ads cost / lifecycle stage will always be a moving target 😞
Here's the response from support:
I checked our KB here on this and in relation to Cost per MQL, SQL or Lead, it is advised it is the money spent on the ad divided by the number of attributed contacts that currently have that specific lifecycle stage. Since it specifies that is it for attributed contacts currently in that lifecycle stage, the data would then be subject to changes if the attributed contacts are not in the stage anymore.
From what you mention, it seems that you would like to see the cost for contacts that have ever been an MQL, SQL or Lead, rather than contacts that are currently in that stage.
The data in the Ads campaign performance is automatically generated by HubSpot and I am afraid that there isn't any setting where this can be changed.
Agreed with everyone on this thread. The current cost metrics per lifecycle stage in Hubspot are misleading/wrong -- they fail to account for contacts that had previously been in the specific lifecycle stage, making the metrics irrelevant for use.