How do you manage your CTA proliferation?

[donrua]

We have a few dozen CTA's (not all active). I'm working on clean up, but still if you built a CTA, the design/CSS, the purpose for a newsletter, email, page, etc, you might want to use it again in the future.
Or it may have data connected to its run and you want to preserve that.
However, I see no way to create any folders in the CTA interface, to park, organize, or archive numerous old CTA, or CTA not currently attached to any HS locations.

How are you guys managing the growth of CTAs? Do you just delete them and their data after a time period? Do you have policies to limit them? 

[donrua]

Thanks, Jacob and Dan. I upvoted the feature, though a bit disappointed that it's been requested since 2016, and it's a pretty vanilla dev job. They should never want users to have to pull in/insert something, and the dropdown list be enormous/confusing.

I'm with you on the naming, just necessary in lots of use cases, reports, forms, lists, etc. One advantage to naming conventions is using it to sort/filter when list and report building.

[jolle · Accepted solution]

Hey @donrua, thanks for sharing! This is a really good question, and I don't feel like I've heard much discussion around it.

Surprisingly, HubSpot doesn't currently offer folders for CTAs like you said. However, I think there are two ways you can help keep your CTAs organized:

1. Standardized naming convention

This holds true for pretty much all HubSpot assets, even the ones you can sort into folders. Something at the very beginning of the asset name should tell you exactly what it is/where it's used. For CTAs, I typically begin the name with the actual placement, then add in the CTA text so it's easy to search for if find it within a specific asset. The name might look something like:

• "Warm Nurturing Email 1 - Schedule a Meeting CTA Button"

And when a CTA button or other HubSpot asset is no longer in use, I'll bookend the title with something like:

• "ARCHIVE Warm Nurturing Email 1 - Schedule a Meeting CTA Button ARCHIVE"
• "DON'T USE Warm Nurturing Email 1 - Schedule a Meeting CTA Button DON'T USE"

As long as your naming convention is consistent, you can use whatever labels make the most sense to you internally.

2. Use campaign associations

The closest we're able to get to foldering CTAs currently is the Campaign dropdown filter. CTAs can be tied to one HubSpot campaign at a time, so that could be an effective way to categorize them (and feed more data into your campaigns). If you have campaigns for your email nurturing drips, ongoing newsletter, digital ad campaigns, etc., you should be able to tie in the respective CTAs (and create campaign-specific versions). Doubled up with your naming convention, CTA buttons should be easily searchable.

This of course all assumes that you need to preserve your CTA button data. But if there's no real use for it, there shouldn't be a need for you to keep unused or inactive CTA buttons that you won't need to reference or clone in the future. You can decide on the timeline for removal that makes the most sense for you, but just keep in mind that you'll need ot be 100% sure that the CTA buttons aren't still live somewhere. I think that's the reason that most people will keep them around, especially when they're embedded on non-HubSpot assets, like a non-HubSpot website page.

Hope this helps!!

[danmoyle]

@donrua in addition to @jolle's ideas, I'd suggest we all go to this HubSpot idea and upvote & comment.  😊

[jolle]

Good call, @danmoyle! Just gave it an upvote!