Selected Readings: HubSpot Campaign Documentation

This is a collection of quotes and notes I’ve collected from HubSpot’s campaign docs. I’ve been getting a lot of questions about how HubSpot campaigns track contact influence, revenue impact, and ad campaign traffic so I figured I’d do some research and pull this together as a reference. I’ll add more notes to this doc as I learn new quirks of how this system works.

Analyze Campaigns

“Revenue: this revenue includes closed-won deals.
• The revenue is evenly spread across all the interactions leading up to a deal closing.
• The campaign gets credit for any interactions with assets the contact has interacted with.”

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“This number is based on interactions of associated contacts before deals are closed.”

• The attribution window seems be “a campaign gets credit if a contact engages before the deal is closed,” AKA no concept of touchpoint expiration or the significance of a given engagement

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“When analyzing your revenue attribution report, do note that the data in this report does not include data from static lists or workflows.”

• Influenced Contacts associated with a Campaign solely via Static Lists don’t count toward Campaign Revenue Attribution reporting. This means that in-person tradeshows without digital touchpoints, for example, won’t gain attributable revenue in HubSpot attribution reporting. Right?

Understand Your Campaign’s Influenced Contacts

“For a contact to be considered an influenced contact, they must meet at least one of the following conditions:
• Interacted with an associated social post.
• Submitted an associated form.
• Opened or clicked an associated marketing email.
• Enrolled in an associated workflow.
• Added to a static list that’s associated with the campaign.
• Attended a marketing event that you associated with the campaign.
• The following page view conditions:
• Visited a URL with a corresponding utm_campaign parameter.
• Visited content associated with the campaign, such as associated website pages, landing pages, or blog posts.
• First page view has a referral keyword associated with the campaign.
• Clicked or viewed a CTA (legacy) associated with the campaign.
• The following CTA interactions:
• Viewed an associated CTA that does not include a form
• Viewed an associated CTA that includes a form and submitted the form”

• This is an incredibly generous definition of influence, especially given how this definition of influence gets fed into revenue attribution

Campaigns FAQ

“HubSpot campaigns may include traffic that is tagged with utm_campaign parameters, but not all utm_campaign parameters are necessarily related to a HubSpot campaign.”

• HubSpot won’t automatically create a new Marketing Campaign when it sees a new utm_campaign but any traffic with utm_campaign values that match an existing Marketing Campaign will associate that Contact with that Marketing Campaign

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“HubSpot campaigns: this refers to a group of related marketing assets and content, under a certain marketing campaign.”

• Explicitly in the docs, HubSpot campaigns are more about grouping assets and content than they are about tracking membership — that’s not their intended purpose but rather an outgrowth of the asset grouping. This has a lot of implications for how and why HubSpot Campaigns differ from Salesforce Campaigns and Marketo Programs; they weren’t built to do the same kind of thing.

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“Each individual blog post, form, call-to-action, email, landing page, website page, social post, paid search campaign, and tracking URL can only be associated with one campaign in HubSpot.”

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“Contacts (first touch): the number of newly created contacts, attributed to the campaign that directed them to your website for the first time. These contacts will be counted under New Contacts (First touch) when either condition is met:
• The first page they visit has a URL containing utm_campaign parameters.
• The first page they visit is associated with the campaign.”

• My assumption is that, in cases where this differs from ‘Last Touch’, it’s often because the first touch is pulled from track-back identification of previously anonymous web visits
• Importantly, visits from an Ad Campaign (AKA Google Ads, LinkedIn Ads, etc.) won’t ever get ‘credit’ for these contacts in revenue attribution reporting unless the Ad Campaign is mapped to a HubSpot Marketing Campaign within the platform
  • At least that’s my read at this point in time

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“Contacts (last touch): the number of newly created contacts, attributed to the campaign that led to their conversion. These contacts will be counted under the New Contacts (Last touch) when either condition is met:
• They convert on a page where the URL contains utm_campaign parameters.
• They visit a page or submit a form that’s associated with the campaign before converting, during the same session.”

• Equivalent to Marketo Measure’s Lead Creation (LC) touchpoint logic

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“Influenced contacts: contacts that have engaged with one or more campaign assets in a given HubSpot campaign. For example, they may have visited a page or opened a marketing email associated with the campaign.”

• Extremely generous definition of influenced, especially given how unreliable email opens are in the year 2024. It also doesn’t seem like there’s any ability to change these definitions based on business logic so if you’re unhappy with this approach to influence you don’t really have a better option. This is a bit troubling, especially since this ‘influence’ definition drives a lot of the revenue attribution reporting elsewhere in the platform

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“Contacts with revenue* (Marketing Hub Professional only): the number of associated contacts with closed-won deals, that have interacted with assets from this campaign.”

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“For deal data to be included in a campaign’s reports, the deal must meet the following requirements:
• The deal must be associated with a contact that has been influenced by an asset or piece of content in the campaign.
• The deal needs to have been associated with the influenced contact before the deal is closed.”

• To paraphrase, the way attribution works with HubSpot Campaigns is as follows:
  • If a Contact has “engaged with one or more campaign assets” and the Deal is “associated with the influenced contact before the deal is closed,” that Deal’s revenue is attributed to all of the Campaigns that Contact is associated with
  • There’s some conception of revenue distribution within the Attribution Reports section of the platform, but aside from the “Time Decay” attribution method I’m not seeing anything about timing windows or expiration for campaign influence. As long as the Campaign Engagement (which can be as ‘light’ as an Email Open) happens before the deal closes, that Campaign gets revenue credit

Analyze Ad Campaigns in HubSpot

“It’s not recommended to compare HubSpot-specific metrics to metrics in other ad platforms, as the platforms cannot calculate them without visibility into your HubSpot account. The following metrics include: Total contacts, Cost per contact, Customers, Leads, Marketing qualified leads, Sales qualified leads, Opportunities, Deals, and Revenue.”

• This is totally fair. All of these metrics are HubSpot-side metrics so there’s no reason they’d map to Ad Platform metrics without some method of Offline Conversion tracking in place

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“Total Contacts: the number of HubSpot contacts attributed to each ad during the selected timeframe. Attribution is defined by the selected attribution report. Calculated by HubSpot.”

• Ok, but how is that association created? Form submissions with that utm_campaign present in the session? What’s the expiration window?
  • Based on docs around cookie tracking and the 6-month expiration window flagged there, I’d assume that’s the track-back here too but I’m not finding anything clear in the docs around this point
  • Form submissions with that utm_campaign present seem like the most likely way that this works

Associate Assets and Content With a Campaign

“Ad Campaigns: ad campaigns can only be associated with campaigns from the campaigns tool.”

• So without manually creating this association none of your Ad Campaigns are tracked in the same way as Marketing Campaigns — make sure to manually associate Ad Campaigns every single time you use them to promote an asset

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“• Marketing events: marketing events can only be associated with campaigns from the campaigns tool. If you’ve connected an integration with marketing events, associate these marketing events with a HubSpot campaign to keep track of the event’s performance and contributions to your campaign.
• Only marketing events created from connected integrations can be associated with campaigns, manually created marketing events cannot be associated with campaigns.
• Attribution reporting with marketing events is only available for accounts with a Marketing Hub Enterprise subscription. When doing so, you cannot create Contact create or Deal create attribution reports. You can only create revenue attribution reports.”

• If you have an events tool creating Marketing Events in HubSpot, there’s an extra manual step each time to associate that Event with a corresponding Marketing Campaign
• Additionally, there’s not a whole lot of benefit to manually creating Marketing Events in HubSpot since they can’t be associated to Campaigns and receive the corresponding attribution/revenue credit
  • Offline Events seem like a weakness of HubSpot Campaigns in general and there aren’t great solutions to that within the platform

Manage Campaigns

“You can clone an existing HubSpot campaign, including its associated assets.”

• I didn’t realize this was possible until today (2024-02-07) and it’s actually a huge win for HubSpot. This means you can build out the same kinds of templated programs that you’d build in Marketo and clone them each time you need to launch something new
• This documentation doesn’t call out whether all of the internal relationships among these assets are maintained when this cloning occurs but based on what I’ve seen elsewhere in the platform I’d be surprised. So Marketo still has a leg up here, but HubSpot’s not as far behind as I thought

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Written by Jack Segal. Shoot me an email with questions or comments, and if you'd like to support my writing, you can send me a tip using Stripe!

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