HubSpot is a powerful tool that many marketers and agencies use to help take their marketing efforts to the next level. HubSpot gives you the power to really engage with customers and control your messaging in one, user-friendly area. But a lot of times people aren't utilizing HubSpot to its full potential; this leads to gaps and missed opportunities.
In this article, we will walk you through four easy steps to self-audit your HubSpot portal. As with everything, if you aren’t confident or find yourself confused, it’s always best to seek out the advice and expertise of experts. Luckily, digitalJ2 offers a completely free HubSpot portal audit. But we’ll get into that later.
Step 1: Make Sure All Your Data is Entered
To make sure the reporting and tools of HubSpot are all working correctly, you have to first make sure that all of your data is entered into HubSpot and entered correctly. This will help as we utilize sources, landing page analytics and the dashboard tools.
This means making sure these tools are reporting correctly when contacts are being created. Once you’ve made sure you’ve entered in any data that is relevant to your company’s portal, move on to the next step.
Step 2: Let’s Dig Into The Data
Ultimately, marketing is in charge of generating leads for the sales team. If your marketing efforts are not sending enough leads to sales, there are two key pieces of data to analyze to determine potential gaps in your funnel: website traffic and lead conversion data.
Interpreting Your Website Traffic
When you first look at this data, what are your first reactions? Does the data align with what you expected to see? Were you shocked by the results in a good or bad way?
To dive deeper into your website traffic, go to the ‘Traffic Analytics’ report in your HubSpot platform.
When looking at the data, is it consistent or are there lulls? Do you see spikes in days or even weeks with little to no traffic? Or are your results consistently low? Take a minute to really dig into the data that you see and try to answer what questions arise.
Look at where the majority of your traffic is coming from; what trends are there? Next, look at the top three sources: organic, social media & referrals. These are the hardest yet usually lead to the most success in leads converting and in providing qualified leads.
Make sure to compare your results to your past results. Look over what the past few months have looked like. Compare them to what your traffic was last year at this time. This will help you narrow down what does and doesn’t work.
Maybe you realize that posting content at a certain time made a huge difference or where you posted the content. This can help you focus more tools to a particular source if you see there is one that is stronger and providing more value than the others.
Lead Conversion Data (Visit-to-Lead Conversion Rate)
Your lead conversion data is the percentage of your website visitors who have become contacts in your contact database; you can see this data in your 'Traffic Analytics' report and by selecting 'Contact conversion rate.'
What this report shows you are the visit-to-lead conversion rate per source against a specific period. Are there sources converting better than others? If so why? Are there specific periods that converted at a higher rate? If so, what was down differently during that time?
Another great report to use is HubSpot’s combination report. You can gain access to a combination report by toggling the report style to 'Combination' in your Traffic Analytics report. From there, you should see traffic in columns and the visit-to-lead conversion rate as a line.
This report shows you your overall trends in your traffic vs. your visit-to-lead conversion rate. Look for trends. Has your conversion rate steadily increased? Was there a particular week or month that conversion was particularly high? Looking for these types of anomalies can uncover ways to drive your conversion rate upward.
But the conversion rates you see here are simply the result of your many conversion efforts taking place on your site. What if you want to find what specifically drove conversions over a certain period? To do that, let's go to our final stop at your landing page report.
From the landing page report, you can identify which landing pages are converting at a healthy rate and the landing pages that are not. Sort your landing pages by views, submission rate, new contacts rate, and much more to observe the impact of your different landing pages.
Are there pieces that are doing well in converting? If so, take a look at your landing page. Is there a certain landing page that’s converting more leads than others? Why is that? What language does it use? Is the form at the top or the bottom of the page?
Then look at landing pages that aren’t doing so well and compare the data. See what does and doesn’t align between them and narrow down the trends. This can help you as you optimize landing pages and as you build new landing pages in the future for other offers. Always look at the trends by comparing the past.
Step 3: Identifying Your Gaps
The first step is to determine whether you have a gap in your website traffic or in your lead conversions. If you aren’t sure, ask yourself, “is my website converting a healthy percentage of web traffic into leads?” The average visit-to-lead conversion rate among HubSpot is 0.93% which means about 1 out of every 100 visitors converts into a lead.
We at digitalJ2 shoot for a visit-to-lead rate of 1-3%, a landing page view-to-submission rate between 10-30%, and a 1-3% call-to-action click-through rate. Read these HubSpot statistics and more here.
What’s your visit-to-lead rate? Is it at or higher than the above-stated data points? Do you feel that you are converting a healthy percentage of your traffic?
- If yes, then your site is converting at a healthy rate. Meaning, your primary focus point should be increasing your site's traffic rather than focusing on increasing your conversion rates.
- If no, then your primary focus should be increasing your visit-to-lead rate. So instead of focusing on drawing more traffic, focus on actually converting your existing and consistent traffic.
Overall, determining your conversion rate is the key in auditing. This is what tells you what is doing well and where you have gaps.
Step 4: Create a Plan to Improve Your Results
Once you have dug into all of the data and analyzed it to narrow down where your gaps are, the next step is to actually make a plan to improve your results and fill in any gaps.
We find that setting SMART goals help create a clear focus for your marketing teams, which you can learn more about how to do so here. As a refresher, here's what a SMART goal means:
- Specific
- Measurable
- Attainable
- Relevant
- Timely
Here's a great example of a SMART goal: To increase Q1 website traffic by 30% in Q2. This goal is specific because it focuses on one area of marketing, measurable by using HubSpot, attainable through content optimization, relevant in its relation to your current gap, and timely by including a specific time frame for completion.
Review your findings from your audit. Do you need to increase your website traffic or do you need to increase your site’s conversion rates? Whatever it is, set your own SMART goal.
Now that you've picked your goal, here are a few suggestions for how to reach it.
Tactics for Increasing Website Traffic
- Increase your blogging frequency. Use HubSpot’s free blog topic generator to get started.
- Increase your social media promotion. Here's HubSpot’s free editorial calendar for planning your social posts.
- Start tracking and optimizing for relevant long-tailed keywords. Enjoy HubSpot’s free class on improving SEO with your Keywords tool.
Tactics for Increasing Website Conversion Rate
- Add CTAs (call-to-action) to your five most visited website pages. Here are 50 free CTA templates for you to use.
- Optimize your thank you pages for additional conversions. Learn how in this great blog post on using thank you pages.
- A/B test a few of your landing pages. Enjoy a helpful guide to A/B testing.
If you take the time to follow all of these steps to audit your HubSpot portal, you’ll be able to really identify some gaps you may have missed before. This can help you convert more traffic leading to higher conversions, more qualified leads and in the end, more revenue.
If you’re feeling confident and pleased with your results, congratulations! However, if you find yourself confused and frustrated at any point during or after your audit, it’s a good time to turn to the experts. As mentioned previously, digitalJ2 offers a free HubSpot audit where we will do all this and way more as well as offer you solutions and suggestions to help fix your gaps.
During our evaluation, you and your team will work with a growth engineer who will take the time to learn about your goals and needs, audit your account, and will provide you detailed recommendations on how to align your HubSpot platform with your goals and needs.
If you find yourself needing our expertise, all you have to do is fill out a quick form and we’ll be in touch in one business day. Check out the details and unlock your free HubSpot Audit here.
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