MQL Data Reporting

[sberry11]

I like HS, but I find it VERY difficult to report on the journey through lifecycle stages, such as the conversion rate, the time, the cost investment, the number of activities it takes on average to switch to the next stage, etc. Not every contact goes through every lifecycle stage, which I have found to be a problem in a few current reports.

I'm interested to know what you think the best reports are to actually make informed marketing decisions from. Ideally, I'm interested to see:

• Conversion rate of contacts that were at one time an MQL and turned to customer
• Conversion rate of leads and subscribers to MQL
• Conversion rate of MQL to SQL
• Conversion rate of website traffic to MQL
• Can we get the conversion rate of a MQL (who have downloaded something) to customer?

Something on those lines? Any advice or input here is appreciated. It's hard to guage the effectiveness of our marketing efforts.

[CHawkins]

The "easiest" report is the Contact lifecycle stage funnel with contact totals and conversion rates report and then adding filters based on your needs, for example you could add a filter to that report for "Has fillted out __ form" to see that funnel specifically for who has downloaded something.

More often I find myself creating lists for this and manually doing the calculations. Fo that I use "Date became a marketing qualified lead" is known as the filters because that shows us anyone who was once an MQL. So I might create a few lists:
1) Everyone who has downloaded something

2) Everyone who has downloaded something AND "Date became a marketing qualified lead" is known
3) Everyone who has downloaded something AND "Date became a customer" is known

With those lists, I can easily calculate the precentages.

Using an integration like Supermetrics or Funnel.io can make this a lot easier but if you are working exclusively out of HubSpot, those are where I start.

[sberry11]

This is a good start. Thank you! It seems a bit odd that HS wouldn't have this built in a report since it's kind of their 'thing' of using the sales funnel. Casey, I have a question about the data because mine looks very skewed on a couple of those reports. We talk to a contact and when they convert to a customer we update the company and have a workflow to push the 'customer' lifecycle stage to all associated contacts. That way our sales team knows who they are and can be filtered out. My question is can I do these reports by company? I know HS works moreso in contacts, but I have 6,000 new customers last year and ..... I wish. It's 6,000 contacts associated with new company customers - I'm assuming. I know a company doesn't get contacted and go through the flow either. Do you understand what's making it a bit funny with pulling contact data? I'm assuming it's good practice to turn all contacts in a company to customer when they are?

[CHawkins · Accepted solution]

@sberry11 - Are you assigning lifecycle stages to companies? 

Either way, the lists would be similar, it would just be a company list that says:

1. All companies with contacts who have downloaded something
2. All companies with contacts who have downloaded something AND "Date became a marketing qualified lead" is known

3. All companies with contacts who have downloaded something AND "Date became a customer" is known

You could just choose to use the date field on the related contact record or the company record.

[sberry11]

Thank you in advance for any insight. This is something that is very valuable to all companies so I hope its something that will be made available to smaller (non enterprise) companies as well. Hubspot does a great job of tracking people through the funnel. I'm just trying to understand it and can't figure out how to find the right data. Thanks again for your help. It's really appreciated.

[BérangèreL]

Hi @sberry11,

Thank you for asking the Community!

I am sorry to hear about your experience about the reporting on the journey through lifecycle stages.
Thanks for your valuable feedback, I will share it internally for more visibility.

For information, with the Enterprise subscription, there is this functionality "Create a report with journey analytics" that might be of interest, if you are not already using it.

I'd like to invite a couple of subject matter experts to this conversation: Hi @Jnix284, @danmoyle and @CHawkins, what are your thoughts or advice on these reports, to help @sberry11, please?

Also, if anybody else has anything to add and/or share, please feel free to join in the conversation 🙂

Thank you very much and have a fantastic day!

Best,
Bérangère