HubSpot Ideas

DanFromCF

Bring back the Report Showing Cumulative Number of Blog Subscribers

Who: content marketers; especially those working on the blog

Goal: be able to measure success and visualize how the number of subscribers to the blog has grown over time

Example: a previous version of HubSpot

 

There used to be a report that showed how the number of subscribers to the blog has grown over time as shown in a previous post to the community.

 

Now, it's no longer possible to view the data that way in the blog analytics, nor is it possible to create an equivalent custom graph. 

 

When I couldn’t find the default report referred to in the community post, I tried making my own custom report, but all the combinations of filters and properties I’ve tried don’t show exactly what I’m looking for: how the total number of subscribers has grown over time. It seems like two key properties from the old graphs are no longer available: blog subscription date and number of blog subscribers.

 

The closest I could get was creating a list of all contacts filtering for "blog subscription is known" and creating a report that just shows the count of contacts in that list, but that loses the context of seeing in what month/week the number went up and it seems like I can’t set the date range I want to compare without another issue coming up. There's an option to view “this year” vs “last year” but I assume that’s the calendar year and our company’s fiscal year starts on Oct 1 and ends on Sept 30.  When I set a custom date range to compare, it no longer shows the total number of subscribers, but the amount of new subscribers from within that timeframe.

 

Can you bring back the old subscriber count report shown in the thread linked above or at least make it possible to choose "blog subscription date" or "date of first submission" for a specific form as properties in the custom reports tool?

7 Replies
djholbrook61
Member

Please implement

hdelcarpini
Member

Yes. This is a necessary metric.

hjohnston
Member | Elite Partner

I agree! It seems silly to me that you can't build a report with time as the x-axis. Isn't that the most common metric of measurement??

emehdi
Member

How to imagine that a blog management tool does not allow to know the evolution of the number of subscribers?

JoeMayall
HubSpot Alumni

Hi folks!

 

Thanks for taking the time to leave us your feedback on this thread. For context, this report was sunset a while back due to some data-processing issues that our team could no longer support. 

 

We don’t have plans to rebuild this capability at this time. That being said, this is something that'S on our radar, and we hope to revisit it later down the line when our data-systems allow. 

 

I’m switching this to “Not Currently Planned”, but I’d like to stress that this doesn’t mean we’ll never build this feature, just that it isn’t on our immediate Roadmap. 

 

Best,
Joe

Ideas Forum Manager

JemmaLegg
Participant

Hi,

 

 I hadn't realised this had been removed but I have come up with a workaround that works for me so I thought I'd share in case anyone else found it useful.

 

Here is what I did to get the cumulative number fo blog subscribers in my Dashboard. This automatically updates as new contacts are added to the subscriptions.... FYI Class Measures Blog is new 😁

JemmaLegg_0-1613063115091.png

 

  • Make sure that when someone subscribes via a form that the ‘Blog Subscription Frequency’ is known/ triggered, as this is the identifier we will be using. If it's not, you can set up a quick workflow to populate this property for current and future contacts. You could use other blog properties like ‘Became a subscriber date’ but I found this worked best for me. Essentially pick a property that is already or can easily be assigned to all blog subscribers.

 

At this point, you could go ahead and make a cumulative report based on blog subscription frequency, as per below. But as this query was about total cumulative subscribers, I will carry on with that.

JemmaLegg_1-1613064364265.png

 

  •  Create a new contact property. I called mine Active Blog Subscriber. As we have multiple branded subscriptions, I used a multiple checkbox field type. This way I could see if someone was an active subscriber to blog 1, blog 2 or both. If you just have 1 blog, you could use a single text field option instead.

 

  • Create a workflow to apply the Active Blog Subscriber property to existing subscribers and any future ones. For example.
    • Enrolment trigger – blog subscription frequency is known or any of x,y,z
    • Set property value – Contact.
    • Property to set – Active Blog Subscriber (or whatever you name it)
    • Active Blog Subscriber = Blog 1 or Blog 2 etc

If you are using this to track multiple branded blogs, then be sure to select ‘Append to current value(s)’

 

  • In reports go to Add report - Build a new report - single object - contacts.
  • In Required filters, select ‘Create date is all time’.
  • The in Other Filters, select ‘Active blog subscriber’ is Blog 1 or Blog “or both etc
  • Switch to Properties and select ‘Create date’ and ‘Active blog subscriber’.
  • You should see three columns now, name, create date and active blog subscriber.
  • Go to visualisation and configure your choice of chart like below

JemmaLegg_2-1613064543302.png

 

  • Then choose the chart type ‘Summary’ to get your cumulative view. You can then add this to the dashboard of your choice.

 

I appreciate there's a bit work involved to make this, but now I have it set up I find it so useful especially when combined with 'became a subscriber' date data. 

kwilhelme
Contributor | Diamond Partner

Yes, please bring this back! # of new subscribers and total # of subscribers are KPIs for our content marketing.