Reporting & Analytics

BrodyRhombus
Participant

Subdirectory/Subfolder Reporting Workarounds

SOLVE

We're in the process of migrating our HubSpot-hosted blog from a subdomain to a subdirectory (i.e. switching from blog.website.com to website.com/blog), but unfortunately HubSpot offers virtually no reporting at the subdirectory level--so we'll lose our ability to track blog-driven leads/conversions and won't be able to leverage the Sources report for any blog data. 

 

We've worked with HS support at length on this, and after spending several weeks testing various lists + criteria, the reporting add-on and any other HubSpot functionality we could think of, it appears that we will absolutley lose important pieces of our reporting when we execute this migration. 

 

Does anyone have experience or potential workarounds we can leverage to avoid creating gaps in our reporting after our blog is living as a subdirectory? We are able to use Google Analytics for traffic/visits, but where we're running into issues is around conversions and unique leads generated via the blog. 

 

Thanks in advance for any help. I can provide more detail if needed and will share any solutions here as I'm betting this is something other HS users have run into at some point!

0 Upvotes
2 Accepted solutions
ndwilliams3
Solution
Key Advisor

Subdirectory/Subfolder Reporting Workarounds

SOLVE

Moving to a subdirectory, you definitely lose the ability to track it as a separate website asset. However, you should still be able to track blog related CTA conversions via the  "Top Posts by Conversions" report on the "Analyze" tab on the blog tool.

 

Also, if you haven't already created these, here's a few list's I use for blog attribution where it may not be a direct conversion via a blog CTA. 

Customer's that first subscribed to blog.

Lifecycle stage = Customer and First Conversion contains "your blog subscribe form name"

 

Lead's that first subscribed to blog and have a secondary conversion event

First Conversion contains "your blog subscribe form name" and Recent Conversion event does not contains "your blog subscribe form name"

 

First pageview = blog

First Page Seen contains "website.com/blog"

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ndwilliams3
Solution
Key Advisor

Subdirectory/Subfolder Reporting Workarounds

SOLVE

Google analytics is good to track overall conversions, but can't track across Lifecycle Stages. I track conversion goals using a regular expression that looks for the submissionGuid parameter on the thank you page.

 

Regular expression:

.*\?submissionGuid=.*

 

View solution in original post

4 Replies 4
nicolebrenner
HubSpot Employee
HubSpot Employee

Subdirectory/Subfolder Reporting Workarounds

SOLVE

Hi @BrodyRhombus, thanks for your post. 

It sounds like you've had a lot of discussions and done some serious testing with our support team, but I'm wondering if @roisinkirby has any suggestions for people that might be able to provide a different perspective here?

Maybe @ndwilliams3 or @Phil_Vallender have some expertise to share? 

ndwilliams3
Solution
Key Advisor

Subdirectory/Subfolder Reporting Workarounds

SOLVE

Moving to a subdirectory, you definitely lose the ability to track it as a separate website asset. However, you should still be able to track blog related CTA conversions via the  "Top Posts by Conversions" report on the "Analyze" tab on the blog tool.

 

Also, if you haven't already created these, here's a few list's I use for blog attribution where it may not be a direct conversion via a blog CTA. 

Customer's that first subscribed to blog.

Lifecycle stage = Customer and First Conversion contains "your blog subscribe form name"

 

Lead's that first subscribed to blog and have a secondary conversion event

First Conversion contains "your blog subscribe form name" and Recent Conversion event does not contains "your blog subscribe form name"

 

First pageview = blog

First Page Seen contains "website.com/blog"

BrodyRhombus
Participant

Subdirectory/Subfolder Reporting Workarounds

SOLVE

Thank you both! Appreciate the help and insight. The conversion data in the Analyze tab does help, but it doesn't offer quite as clean a view as the Sources report which breaks down visits/contacts/customers in a way that's very scannable and easy to report on (vs. having to tally everything up manually from the Analyze tab, which for us becomes time-consuming as we're blogging daily). 

 

Totally agree with you re: using lists to identify leads generated via a subscribe form, we are using a few lists for that and are also relying on HubSpot's blog reporting (which, for subscriber count, I believe will remain intact after we migrate to a subfolder). 

 

 

We're doing some more work in Google Analytics that looks like it may help bridge the gap for us, and will likely move forward with the migration soon as the value from doing that IMO will outweigh any of these small reporting gaps that may be created as a result of it. I'll post back here to close the loop if we find anything else that could be helpful to the community. 

 

Thanks again for your responses!

ndwilliams3
Solution
Key Advisor

Subdirectory/Subfolder Reporting Workarounds

SOLVE

Google analytics is good to track overall conversions, but can't track across Lifecycle Stages. I track conversion goals using a regular expression that looks for the submissionGuid parameter on the thank you page.

 

Regular expression:

.*\?submissionGuid=.*