How to Find Your True Paid Ads Performance with HubSpot Reporting

While HubSpot's reporting capabilities are incredibly powerful for marketing analytics, the out-of-the-box reports for paid ads have some big limitations. 

In the webinar from Hub X OS and the blog below, we explore the issues around paid ads analytics in HubSpot and how you can fill in the gaps to uncover your true return on ad spend.

Blind Spots in HubSpot’s Native Paid Ad Reports

What are the limitations in HubSpot reporting?

Picture this: you've just connected your ads account to HubSpot, and you're expecting to have a wealth of information available to you. You go to your ads analytics page and, unfortunately, what you find is a little underwhelming.

And the reason for that is there are a lot of things on the ads analytics page that look like they should be helpful, but in actuality are not. 

• Lack of insights into who is clicking on your ads. If you look at your clicks, you can't actually see what contacts in your database are doing those clicks. You have no visibility into where those are coming from. 
  
  
• No visibility into what campaigns should be attributed. You can click into contacts created but it won't show you the different campaigns that they interacted with. So you can see who was created, but it takes a little bit more legwork to find out the campaign that they were interacting with and came from.
  
  
• Oversimplified ROI reporting. HubSpot also has an ROI report, which seems helpful on the outside, but if you dig into this number it’s calculated based on an average deal amount that you put into your settings in HubSpot. It's just an estimate based on that. So in truth, it isn't that helpful.

Why is this an issue?

This is a big issue because according to HubSpot and Salesforce, it takes an average of 8 marketing touch points to make a sale for B2Bs. That’s a lot of touch points that could be a paid ad that wasn’t credited.

It takes on average 8 interactions and marketing touch points to make a sale for B2B's. So if you're only looking at your last touch and your first touch, that's 6 or more opportunities where ads could have  been a pivotal moment in that person's journey that you're not crediting. It's not getting counted and and you have no visibility into that. 

Here are a couple of scenarios where you would have no visibility into certain ad interactions and the ad would get no credit if you're just using the out-of-the-box HubSpot reporting.

Scenario 1: An Ad Interaction Doesn’t Lead to a Conversion

In this scenario, someone clicks on your ad. This takes them to a landing page and the contact learns more about your brand, but they don't convert yet. They may be thinking about your brand and however much later, they come back when they're ready to take the next step with you. Let's say they search for you on Google, they go to your landing page again or your website, and they convert.

In HubSpot, this will show as an original source of organic search. The ad interaction will only live on the contact record timeline. Unless you're digging manually through all of your contact records to try to find these ad interactions, you're not going to see them anywhere.

Scenario 2: Ad Interactions Happen in the Middle of the Journey

Let's say you have a contact that converted a long time ago. They've been sitting in your database in HubSpot. It could be for any length of time. 

You then run some retargeting ads and they click on it. That takes them back to your website or a landing page where they learn more and they leave. A few days later or a little while later, they'll search you on Google and they will then convert from there.

That middle-of-journey ads interaction will also not be reportable in HubSpot because the first touch attribution was something completely different.

Your original source is not going to include ads, and your latest source is going to be organic search.

So in both of these scenarios, you're losing out on a lot of credit that ads should be getting but aren't visible in native HubSpot reporting.

To overcome these limitations, you need to build custom reports that capture all touch points—first, middle, and last—that ads have with your contacts throughout the buyer’s journey. HubSpot’s recent introduction of custom ads data sources and the ability to track "ad interactions by campaign per contact" is a step in the right direction. But there’s still much more you can do.

Creating a System for Capturing Paid Ads Influence in HubSpot

Here’s how to build a system in HubSpot that provides better visibility into your paid ads performance. After following the steps in the guide below, you'll be able to create an amazing Paid Ads Influence dashboard like the one pictured below. 

You can get the pictured dashboard and system set installed in your portal for free with one of our HubSpot experts.

Step 1: Create Custom Properties

The key to unlocking better ad reporting in HubSpot lies in setting up a few custom properties. This will allow you to track not just the contact creation source, but all ad interactions along the way. Here are the two main custom properties you’ll need to create:

• First Ad Interaction Date: This property records the first time a contact interacts with any of your ads. This helps you track how long it takes a contact to move through your funnel from initial ad interaction to deal closure.
  
  
• Campaign Interaction Tracker: Set up a multi-checkbox property for each paid ads channel that lists all your campaigns. Every time a contact interacts with a campaign, this checkbox is updated automatically through workflows, ensuring no interaction goes unnoticed.

Step 2: Automate Tracking with Workflows

Once you’ve created these custom properties, you’ll need to set up workflows to automate the process of populating them. For example:

• When a contact interacts with a paid ad, the workflow should stamp the first interaction date in the "First Ad Interaction Date" property (if it hasn’t already been set).
• A second workflow should update the "Campaign Interaction Tracker" checkbox with the name of the campaign that the contact interacted with.

These workflows ensure that every interaction is tracked accurately without manual intervention, giving you more reliable data to work with.

Step 3: Deep-Dive Reporting on Contacts and Deals

With these custom properties in place, you can now create more detailed reports that provide deeper insights into how your ads influence both contacts and deals:

• Lifecycle Stage Reports: Track how ads influence contacts at different lifecycle stages. This allows you to see whether your paid ads are generating leads, converting leads into Marketing Qualified Leads (MQLs), or moving MQLs further down the funnel to become Sales Qualified Leads (SQLs).
  
  
• First Ad Interaction vs. Contact Creation: Most of HubSpot’s native reports focus on when a contact was created. But with your custom reports, you can look at when the first ad interaction happened, providing a clearer picture of how long it takes a contact to convert after seeing your ad.
  
  
• Campaign-Level Analysis: Break down your ad performance by campaign. See which campaigns are influencing the most contacts, driving the highest deal value, or moving contacts through the buyer's journey the fastest.

Step 4: Attribution on Deals

Contacts are only one part of the equation—what about deals? You also need to know which deals were influenced by paid ads and how much revenue those ads are generating.

To do this, you can set up workflows that copy the "First Ad Interaction Date" from the contact record to the associated deal record. This allows you to compare the deal close date with the ad interaction date. If the deal was closed after an ad interaction, you can attribute that revenue to the ad.

You’ll also need to create a custom property on the deal record, such as "Influenced by Paid Ads," and set it to "Yes" for deals that meet this criterion. This lets you filter deals in your reports, ensuring you’re only attributing revenue to ads that truly influenced the sale.

This unlocks a world of options for reporting on actual pipeline value that was influenced by paid ads. 

Advanced Reporting Options

Once you’ve set up the basic dashboard, you can take your reporting even further. Here are some advanced options to consider:

• Target Account Reporting: If you’re using an Account-Based Marketing (ABM) strategy, create reports that show which of your target accounts have been influenced by ads.
  
  
• Custom Return on Ad Spend (ROAS): Instead of relying on HubSpot’s built-in ROAS metric, which uses an average deal size, create a custom report using actual deal values for more accurate insights.
  
  
• Pipeline Stages: Create reports that show which pipeline stages have been influenced by ads, helping you identify bottlenecks and opportunities to optimize your campaigns further.
  
  
• Weighted Pipeline: Use weighted deal amounts in your reports to better forecast the potential revenue from deals influenced by paid ads, based on the probability of closing.

The Power of Holistic Paid Ads Reporting

By creating a custom dashboard HubSpot that tracks every ad interaction throughout the customer journey, you gain the insights you need into:

• Proving the ROI of your paid ads with real revenue data.
• Understanding which campaigns are driving the most valuable leads and deals.
• Identifying opportunities to optimize your ad spend by focusing on campaigns that move leads through the funnel faster.

Ultimately, this approach helps you make more informed decisions about your paid ads strategy, ensuring you maximize the return on your marketing investments.

Get the Free Dashboard in Your Portal

We're giving away free installations for this paid ads influence dashboard and system! Click below to claim your free installation with one of our HubSpot experts.