Why does HubSpot no longer track pages visited on a company level in the Prospects tools? That was one of the most valuable parts of the Sales platform, and without that tool I am less likely to recommend Sales to one of our clients. I will send them to Leadlander instead - as they are still offering this information.
HubSpot could easily work around the GDPR but it appears that they are more interested in internal ease then building a product that continues to fulfill the needs of customers. This is the second time in two years (technically the third, if you count the Events beta that never worked right) that HubSpot has stripped down the Prospects tool. Why is HubSpot so against smart prospecting? Are they trying to push sales back into the cold-calling dark ages for new customer prospecting?
Thank you both for your feedback and your patience as I followed up on this with the Product Team.
Decisions like this aren't easy, so I wanted to provide some additional context on what went into the change.
First, a quick summary: last week, the recent activities feature, which shows pages viewed by anonymous visitors in the Prospects tool, was removed. Prospects still shows aggregated analytics about companies, and you can still view the individual pages that your known contacts have viewed from the contact record.
A lot of factors go into a decision like this, but here are a few that were high on the list:
- User feedback. Over time, the feedback on this feature has been mixed at best. While that doesn't take away from the fact that some users find it useful, it gives you some context --- when it comes to prioritizing features, we look holistically across our users, and build the features that will add the most value to the largest set of our customers.
- Usage data. In addition to anecdotal feedback, usage was very low. Less than 6% of all prospects users viewed that section of the sidebar every month --- and, in full transparency, that represents 6% of the fraction of all HubSpot users who use Prospects at all. Again, that doesn't take away from the fact that some find it valuable, but it gives you some insight into the data we take into account when making a decision like this.
- Recent regulations. The GDPR was enforced in the EU starting last week. Under the GDPR, storing IP addresses requires consent. The removed feature didn't play nicely with that requirement.
When taking all these data points into account, it comes down to this: where can we allocate our resources, to best solve for our customers? The work required to enable the feature to support GDPR compliance as well as the ability collect IP addresses without consent would have been an outsized engineering effort compared the value for the entire customer base.
Quick Update: We found an amazing program called Leadfeeder that has built their entire software offering around this functionality. It also has a native integration with HubSpot to get the website visits into HubSpot from Leadfeeder. This tool is better than Prospects ever was. Unfortunately, it's not free/cheap depending on your budget - but provides immense value. You pay for the tool, but get unlimited accounts - so everyone in your organization can have access.
Best of all, the company if Finnish - so they're fully GDPR compliant and have documentation to prove it. They use Google Analytics to track visitors by company. You can pivot around pages - even down to the utm tracking. I can't back it up enough how amazing it is. And the HubSpot integration is flawless. Our sales team loves the tool so much that even if HubSpot brought Prospects back, we would still pay for Leadfeeder instead of basically using Prospects for free (we're never getting rid of Sales Pro).
Removing the pages viewed has made this tool completely useless to us. Sure, we can see if a new company visited our page, but we have NO perception of what services they are inerested in - making it impossible to vet out who could be a potential customer and who is not.
I agree with others on this post. HubSpot initially claimed GDPR regulations as the basis for this change and then follow-up a week later with the post about "Low Usage" and "Mixed Feedback" as a way to further justify the change. I fail to understand how "Low Usage" is quantified, and even then, how difficult it would have been to leave the feature in. If GDPR applied to the customer or they didn't want to see anonymous traffic HubSpot could have used a toggle switch to enable or disable instead. That way we can decide if it is important or not.
As a comany, we recently made the decision to invest in Hubspot sales and marketing and move to the platform. The prospects tool was a key feature for us as we had also been looking at platforms such as lead forensics which provided a similiar service, IP address tracking and the ability to view which pages have been viewed, however, we went for Hubspot as this feature was included in the platform.
This has now been removed and cites that due to data privacy laws they can't show activity of 'individual contacts' in the sidebar. I appreciate that personal activity not being shown is due to GDPR, however, Hubspot have removed which pages they have visited at comapny level so we can't even see which pages have been visited even if the contact is anonymised. This would not fall under GDPR. The tool is now completely worthless as it gives zero insight.
Hunspot's generic repsonse is not satisfactory. They used this feature to sell in the platform and have now removed it.
I'm so disappointed. We're currently testing HubSpot and this was one of the coolest "Wow" features that got our leadership team even interested in considering spending the money on HubSpot. It seems to be an incredible piece of info that you can use to make an introduction into an account. Sad to see it go and I hope that HubSpot will consider bringing it back.
Thank you both for your feedback and your patience as I followed up on this with the Product Team.
Decisions like this aren't easy, so I wanted to provide some additional context on what went into the change.
First, a quick summary: last week, the recent activities feature, which shows pages viewed by anonymous visitors in the Prospects tool, was removed. Prospects still shows aggregated analytics about companies, and you can still view the individual pages that your known contacts have viewed from the contact record.
A lot of factors go into a decision like this, but here are a few that were high on the list:
- User feedback. Over time, the feedback on this feature has been mixed at best. While that doesn't take away from the fact that some users find it useful, it gives you some context --- when it comes to prioritizing features, we look holistically across our users, and build the features that will add the most value to the largest set of our customers.
- Usage data. In addition to anecdotal feedback, usage was very low. Less than 6% of all prospects users viewed that section of the sidebar every month --- and, in full transparency, that represents 6% of the fraction of all HubSpot users who use Prospects at all. Again, that doesn't take away from the fact that some find it valuable, but it gives you some insight into the data we take into account when making a decision like this.
- Recent regulations. The GDPR was enforced in the EU starting last week. Under the GDPR, storing IP addresses requires consent. The removed feature didn't play nicely with that requirement.
When taking all these data points into account, it comes down to this: where can we allocate our resources, to best solve for our customers? The work required to enable the feature to support GDPR compliance as well as the ability collect IP addresses without consent would have been an outsized engineering effort compared the value for the entire customer base.
Any user who is accountable for multiple products and doesn't find this useful, doesn't understand marketing. From the response here it appears that Hubspot doesn't either. This feature could be used by all users except those marketing only one product.
2. Usage data.
Usage was very low. Probably because the data is meaningless as it is presented. If Hubspot provided meaningful data about prospects and communicated how the data could help marketing usage would soar.
3. Recent regulations. The GDPR was enforced in the EU starting last week. Under the GDPR, storing IP addresses requires consent. The removed feature didn't play nicely with that requirement. THEN FIX IT.
Wouldn't it be good to revamp the Prosoect tool with the introduction of Target accounts (ABM). I don't think it should be a GDPR problem since we just need to track compmanies.
Hello, we just signed up with Hubspot and being able to be informed which companies (with static IP addresses) was a key driver for our decision to sign up for an annual contract. This requirement was clearly communicated during the sales process.
Do we understand correctly that HS does NOT display the name of the COMPANIES with fixed IP addresses? The only information we can find is data of the ISP - which is useless.
I really hope we don't understand the prospect tool correctly!
Before implmenting Hubspot, we used Leadlander, which shows prospects, page views and individual pages visited in a drop-down menu for about $299 per month (on a month-to-month basis). This feature was stressed as one of our must-haves and our Hubspot sales person gauranteed that all LeadLander functionaility AND MORE was included.
I got support on the line today (03/27/19) and was informed this was removed in 2018.
So, my rep either didn't know or just flat-out lied... either way, this is incredibly bad form.
Jun 27, 20189:49 AM - edited Jun 27, 20189:53 AM
Contributor
What happened to Prospects?
SOLVE
I am also disappointed that the page views are gone in prospects. Like the rest of the feedback you are getting, I am really tired of HubSpot taking away features that we use ALL the time. Another example was the ability to go to a website and see demographic data on the company based on the domain.
Hubspot is making the software less attractive to me by the day. When I am asked if we want to use our corporate platform of Act-On and Dynamics CRM, I have less reasons to stay with Hubspot.
We use SalesPro and it still does not work. In addition, Prospects in the new menu format does not load ANY data on our account.
Hi. As you can see, we all have the same problem and they took it away because of the GDPR. As I indicated in my previous publication, this has an easy solution with the GDPR. But I think they're afraid to activate it.
Tracking visitors is the main reason we use HubSpot. We have a paid account, and this has been a very powerful tool.
HubSpot folks: I have been a brand advocate for you, recommending you to many of my own customers, who are also business people seeking business solutions. This has been one of the main features that brings value. I will start working with our marketing company to find an alternate now, but if you bring back this piece, it will make our life easier.
