A New Analytics Engine to Power Your HubSpot data

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You need fast, reliable, and trustworthy marketing data, so you can show the value of your marketing efforts and make better business decisions. With that in mind, over the last few months, we've completely rebuilt the back-end HubSpot analytics engine with the goal of providing you with even more robust and precise metrics.

You saw the first signs of that new system in the last few months, with a new web analytics dashboard that brought bounce rate, time on page, device metrics, and more into your HubSpot portal for the first time.

Over the next few weeks, that new analytics engine makes its way into several other HubSpot tools.

Here’s what you can look forward to with the new engine in place:

• Your data will refresh faster --- updating every twenty minutes on average, instead of every three hours --- so you’ll be able to measure the success of your strategy (and pivot accordingly) that much quicker.
• Your website metrics will more accurately reflect the way your customers actually interact with your website. That manifests itself in several ways. One example: session timeouts. Your visitors read your content in spurts. They’ll come to your site, peruse a few pages, head out to their lunch break, then a meeting, then come back and pick up where they left off. The rebuilt analytics engine in HubSpot accounts for those on-and-off interactions in a much more structured way, with sessions that expire after 30 minutes of visitor inactivity.

Here's everything you need to know about the update, in FAQ form:

What tools will use the new engine, as a result of this change?

• Marketing Dashboard
• Analyze section of website, landing pages, and blog
• Detail pages of website, landing pages, blog, CTAs, and forms
• CTA and form dashboards (views, clicks, submissions) 

Will any data change? If so, by how much?

In most cases, no.

If any data changes, where would those changes happen?

The aggregate data --- totals for views, submissions, clicks, and more --- will go virtually untouched. If any data does change, it’s more likely to occur where those totals are broken down into “buckets.” A prime example: the breakdown by source, in the details of a specific page. Here are two specific ways that data might improve with the rebuilt engine, resulting in an update to the numbers in a page’s source breakdown:

• A visitor finds your site via organic search, reads a few blog posts, then leaves the website. Within 30 minutes, she starts thinking about all that interesting content she just read, goes directly back to the website, and converts on one of your forms. With the previous version of the analytics engine --- which lacked the idea of a thirty-minute timeout on a session --- that submission would have be attributed to direct traffic, even though it originated from organic search. With the rebuilt engine, that submission would be attributed (more accurately) to organic instead. In this case (and similar ones), you might see direct submissions on your landing pages be more accurately recategorized into other sources.
• You import a list from your last tradeshow. One of the people on that list loved the interaction, Googles your company name two weeks later, finds your site, and converts on a form. But, in this particular case, you’ve set that form not to use cookie tracking, so that it creates a unique contact with each and every submission. With that setting in mind, their browser isn’t passing the right data to HubSpot, for our systems to track the pages they’re viewing along the way. In the new way of calculating analytics metrics, we can often infer their last touch source (in this case, Google) from the the form submission itself, even without being able to track the pages viewed along the way. In this case (and similar ones), you might see “offline source” submissions on your landing pages be more accurately recategorized into other online sources.

One other note: with the update, you might notice minor changes to the values in a few analytics-related contact properties. Specifically, Time of Last Visit, Number of Visits, and Average Pageviews may change --- to a more accurate value --- with the new data engine. A specific example of how the new engine might improve the values in these fields:

Let's say a contact visited your site on a Friday afternoon, then left that tab open on his desktop over the weekend, came back to the site on Monday, and explored a separate product line. The "old" engine --- without the concept of a 30-minute timeout --- would see this as a single visit. With that in mind, the "Time of Last Visit" property would show Friday afternoon. With the new engine, the properties would more accurate reflect the visitor's activity. "Number of Visits" would be two (since the visitor did, in fact, come to the site on two separate occasions) and "Time of Last Visit" would show Monday.

When is this change happening?

Starting on June 22nd, the new data engine will begin to be rolled out. You'll see these changes reflected in your portal by the end of July.

Is there any action required?

None at all.