Accelerate your thought leadership by contributing to our blog. Join our community of experts now!
HubSpot has several default reports that can help you analyze data better and use the knowledge gained to make better business decisions.
But oftentimes a default report isn’t enough since it is not tailored to your requirements. And this is where a HubSpot custom report becomes super helpful.
Don’t know what a HubSpot custom report is? We’ll cover that and more in today’s post so that you can make the most of this feature.
Let’s get started:
Default reports in HubSpot can help you with surface-level activities for business reporting.
A HubSpot custom report, however, enables you to dive into the details. For instance, with a custom report, you can further analyze the data at hand or review it in-depth, compare activities, and more.
As Edward Mellett of WikiJob puts it, “Custom reports are for questions that aren’t covered in the standard reports.” For example, “What are the effects of certain lists on our content? What impact did our campaigns have on revenue? What impact did certain pages have on your contacts as they progressed through the funnel to conversion?”
Commenting on how custom reports in HubSpot differ, The Drum Ninja’s Diego Cardini says, “Custom reports provide you greater control over how you analyze items and actions in your HubSpot account. The custom report builder differs from other HubSpot reports in that it allows you to display data from sales and marketing in addition to objects.”
Therefore, with custom reporting, you can analyze various objects and integrations in one place. This means you can have all your data sources at one spot rather than having to join data in Excel from scratch for building a report on another software.
Custom reports in HubSpot don’t only offer more variety in functionality, but also in display types. However, which types of custom reports and how many of them you can build depends on your subscription plan.
To get started with creating a HubSpot custom report, you need to have four things in place:
Once you’re done making your HubSpot custom report, you can name and save it to your reports lists or dashboard. You can also export it to save it on your device.
That said, compared to default reports, custom reports in HubSpot are a lot more popular too.
Our survey found that 79% of business folks rely on custom reporting while only 21.1% do so on default reports.
Related: 13 HubSpot CRM Custom Fields You Should Setup
Now that you understand what a custom report in HubSpot is, let’s move on to some helpful custom reports:
Like most marketers and marketing managers, you want to know how well your efforts are translating into results each month. Which sources generate the most traffic and leads? Creating a comprehensive report takes time and a lot of data combining, but with our free dashboard, you can have it ready in just a few clicks.
Our HubSpot Leads by Source Dashboard includes data from HubSpot Marketing with key performance metrics like:
New Contacts by Source – identify your most effective lead generation channels by digging into the number of new contacts acquired from various sources within a defined period of time with this plug-and-play free HubSpot Leads by Source Dashboard.
You can easily set it up in just a few clicks – no coding required.
To set up the dashboard, follow these 3 simple steps:
Step 1: Get the template
Step 2: Connect your HubSpot account with Databox.
Step 3: Watch your dashboard populate in seconds.
Giant Partners’ Steven Page talks about a pipeline forecast report his company created in HubSpot that has been their most helpful so far.
“The report we made for our company Listgiant is a Pipeline forecast break down based on the deal stage. This way we are able to see the value of deals in the pipeline and what stage they are in at a high level.”
Such a report can be quite helpful for keeping an eye on which deals have been closed, which haven’t been closed, which are on-going and so on.
Page shares an example of the usefulness of a forecast report, explaining, “if we noticed large amount of deals in contract sent or completed demo but not closed yet, we can have our team take action to follow up with those people and give them an extra push to become customers.
This can include something with urgency like offers, incentives, bonuses that have an end date to give them the extra nudge to become a client.”
Page further elaborates on the significance of this report saying, “Without this report we wouldn’t be able to optimize our bottom of the funnel as quickly and as effectively.”
Pro tip: Did you know you could combine HubSpot and Databox to forecast your sales potential for next month, quarter, or beyond? Watch this video to learn how to set up and track your HubSpot CRM data to forecast your sales more accurately.
A custom report in HubSpot can also let you know which of your offerings are contributing the most to your revenue. As Fay Hau of shares, “Using Hubspot, we have implemented a revenue attribution report to measure which assets, sources and dealings had an impeccable impact on revenue.”
Discussing how a revenue report can be helpful, Fay Hau of Cloom observes, “Creating a multi-touch revenue attribution report allows you to effectively understand the revenue generated through marketing and sales activities.”
Fay also gave tips on how you can create a such a custom report in HubSpot. “A couple of things this deal should include is to create date and close date attributes. While configuring the revenue report, you need to manage these properties – Chart type, Deals, Deal close date, Deal owner, Deal pipeline, Companies, Campaigns, Interactions, Content types, marketing and sales interactions, and Dimensions. You can choose one from the bunch of attribute models.”
Have you recently offered a downloadable goodie such as an ebook to your audience? Pretty sure you must have shared it on several platforms from your website to your social media channels.
You might even have Google ads to promote it. If the downloadable is performing well though, the real question is: which source is driving the most downloads?
A HubSpot custom report can help you find this. “We built a custom report that allows us to track how people discovered a downloadable we created and what source they came from,” mentions Casey Paxton of Parlor.io.
“From there, we were able to optimize our ad spend and target specific areas that were bringing in the most leads,” Paxton adds.
Related: Google Analytics and HubSpot: How to Use Both to Track Your Website Analytics Effectively
Marketing reports give you an edge over your competitors as you can learn what you’re doing right, where you can improve, and learn the same about other companies in the field.
For a website, for example, a marketing report is beneficial as it shows how many people are clicking on your site link, the bounce rate, traffic, and other such details.
In this regard, Olivia Tan of CocoFax says, “I created a marketing report that allowed me to see my customer database as a bespoke report. I was able to see a wide range of details like:
Editor’s note: Get a complete view of your marketing performance with this HubSpot Marketing dashboard template. With it, you can track all your essential metrics such as traffic, traffic source, and more on one screen.
Contact generation or lead generation reports help managers track how many leads have converted in a set time period.
Talking about the contact generation report they created, David Aylor of David Aylor Law Offices comments, “In my line of work, contact generation is one of the most critical performance factors in lead generation, so I use a custom report to build a more in-depth report than the one on Hubspot’s dashboard.”
“I split the results by original source to measure contact generation trends and which marketing channels are most effective for lead generation,” Aylor adds. You can create a similar report to see where you need to market your services more to be able to get the most leads.
Related: 24 Best B2B Lead Generation Tools for Getting More Targeted Leads
As mentioned above, you can create a HubSpot custom report to learn how many leads you have converted. Such a report can also help you see warm leads that are at the verge of conversion with a little push.
Clovr’s Areyo Dadar calls such a report the “most useful.” “My most useful report is one that helps me visualize the pipeline for a specific deal (or deals) I’m working on,” opines Dadar.
Such a report “uses a combination of criteria, such as industry, deal size and stage of the deal to show me how many leads have been coming in, how many have been converted to opportunities and how many opportunities have entered each stage of the sales process. It then shows me forecasted opportunities so I can take steps to nurture prospects and bring deals through the pipeline to a close.”
With HubSpot’s custom reporting feature, you can use data available to create reports that are specific to your business requirements. This is exactly what Nextiny did for a client.
Bryan Gorman of the marketing company narrates, “We work with a self-storage company that owns two facilities in Colorado. They implemented HubSpot to get a better understanding of their digital attribution and to prove ROI on specific efforts. We were able to help them set up a deals pipeline to close the loop on contacts closing as customers.”
“A metric that is really important for self-storage is that of Price Per Square Foot. Using both deal and contact properties, we were able to create a custom report that calculated the average price per square foot (monthly rental unit price % square feet of rental) and measured that against the original source of the deal/contact,” continues Gorman.
Thanks to this report the team has been able “to understand not only which digital effort is bringing in business, but which digital effort is bringing in the highest margin of profit for each facility. That information helps us justify budget on specific efforts.”
Discussing a HubSpot custom report that has been super helpful for them, ClearPivot’s Maia Wells explains, “As a busy marketing and website development agency that serves five main industry verticals, we needed a way to see which of our own marketing programs were working best to bring in new contacts in which industry.”
To this end, they “built a very helpful data visualization called ‘Total New Contacts by Focus Industry,’ a custom contacts report in HubSpot.”
This particular report has helped ClearPivot “see new contacts, color-coded by vertical,” Wells goes on. “This allows us to shift attention to verticals where we’d like more business or see our campaign success in verticals where we’ve invested marketing resources.”
Wells further states that this report has also helped the agency see how investing in marketing to the SaaS industry affects their business. “Using this report, we can see that our contacts in the SaaS industry have grown from 43 in the month when we first started focusing our content and investing in ads to now over 250 monthly on average.”
Pro tip: Watch this video to learn how to properly track New Contacts Conversion rates in HubSpot Marketing so you can understand the reasons behind every peak and valley that appears.
Our product experts will show you how to use Databox to:
Kristen McGarr of Adroit Insights opines that looking at multiple reports at once is of more value than a single report can be.
Talking about a particularly helpful report that they created, McGarr shares, “A singular report I created using custom fields related to strategic accounts has helped our business development team to narrow down the top strategic company accounts, pinpoint areas of need to grow the relationship further and highlights the next action to be taken.”
Going on about the benefits of this report, McGarr elaborates, “this report allows our executive team to quickly assess where we are with our biggest accounts and those with the most long-term potential. It also allows us to keep an eye on those accounts we feel as a company are most important to our growth strategy and ensuring the BD personnel is taking appropriate actions in a timely manner.”
To sum up, a HubSpot custom report allows you to get in-depth business insights that a default report doesn’t offer.
The type of report you create for your business, and the reporting software you choose for building it, however, depends on what you’re looking to monitor and improve. Perhaps you want to look at how your marketing efforts are doing, how many leads are converting, or where the most revenue is coming from.
At the end of the day though, you can create a handful of helpful custom reports in HubSpot to get a birds-eye view of how your business is performing.
Masooma is a freelance writer for SaaS and a lover to-do lists. When she's not writing, she usually has her head buried in a business book or fantasy novel.
Get practical strategies that drive consistent growth