Best Reporting practices for a startup with Marketing Pro?

[BobWalsh]

HI,

There's a ton of reports within HubSpot; anyone have any best practices on which reports are most meaningful to a startup? I don't want to drown in data!

[JorieMunroe · Accepted solution]

Hi @BobWalsh ,

As @Phil_Vallender mentioned, the best reports to use will largely depend on your marketing, sales, or services strategies and the metrics you're using to measure their success.

That said, the way I think about the the different reports tools is as follows. 

Before you go about setting the goals for this month, quarter, or even year, it can be helpful to understand the forces and frictions of your flywheel. This blog post does a great job at walking your through how to simplify the way you think about your business and determine what's working and what's not.

For this type of exercise, I find the analytics tools (my favorite are the Traffic Analytics Sources/Pages reports for tracking marketing initiatives) the most helpful, because they work as exploratory tools.  You can drill down into different aspects of your data, depending on what matters most for your business. What's more the majority can now be pinned to your dashboard, so you can continue to monitor and benchmark your progress.

Keep in mind, each dashboard comes with a set of default reports. These are based on marketing, sales, and services best practices. You can find an explanation of what each of these do in the articles below:

• Marketing Default Reports
• Sales Default Reports
• Services Default Reports

As your dashboard should help you monitor key points in your business, it's likely it will need to be customized. This article walks you through how to work with your dashboards in depth.

Before diving into the realm of custom reporting, I recommend giving the reporting library a look. HubSpot has created a variety of different reports there that can be customized to fit your needs, based on your goals. This can save you time, rather than trying to build a report from scratch. 

Keep in mind, your dashboards should contain the information you find the most useful. So while you can fit up to 10 reports per dashboard, you may find you don't need to use that when you're first starting out. @Champion 's lesson on running campaign in HubSpot features a look at his dashboard, and I believe he only uses four, because they track the metrics that matter most. Check that lesson out here.

Should you be interested in learning about the world of custom reporting, we also have a lesson that covers how to do that here. 

Happy to help in any way I can! Let me know if you have any additional questions.

Best,

Jorie

[Phil_Vallender]

Hi @BobWalsh 

That's a very difficult question to answer with out know more about the marketing and sales strategies of the business, who is looking at reports and what matters to them. 

If it's of any use, I personally like to look at trends related to the metrics I am trying to drive and the levers I am trying to pull. Custom trend reports that show traffic, leads, qualified leads, opportunities, etc. I also like to use side-by-side funnel reports to compare current conversion rates with previous periods. 

I wrote a bit about these reports and a couple of others here: 8 Essential HubSpot dashboard reports for the reporting add-on

And there was a great discussion about this topic on here: What are YOUR favorite Reports in HubSpot?

Hope this helps.