Does Hubspot’s analytics measure up?

I’m now in the second week of my 30-day free demo of Hubspot’s marketing software. I’m using the demo to see if Hubspot’s all-in-one marketing software would make a good fit for some of my clients.

In these first two weeks, I’ve used the tool kit thus far to develop keyword lists and begin optimizing my website with their “page grader” tool.

The two applications have been simple to work with and provided some excellent insight. The keyword tool works essentially the same as Google’s, which you most likely know, is free to use.

This however, should not be your main reason for buying Hubspot’s software – and to be fair with Hubspot, they do recommend Google’ tool in their free-to download reports and papers so it’s not like they consider their keyword tool a major KSP.

What is unique about Hubspot’s tool is how it helps you incorporate your keywords into your content – from blog posts, SM, emails to landing and website pages. It enables you to incorporate and evaluate your use of keywords in your content.  I’ll get into this in a later post as I begin to explore the lead generating capabilities in the software.

Page grader makes the grade

So far in my demo, I have especially appreciated the input the page grader has provided. This is truly an SEO optimizer for dummies – like me.

As I mentioned in my last post, the page grader basically walks you through what you need to correct on your website pages to optimize SEO influencers:

• Page title
• Meta description
• Meta keywords
• URL
• HI
• Image tags
• Ranking
• Link analysis
• Inbound and internal links

With each of the categories above, the page grader tells you what needs fixing, stopping short of actually rewriting your text for you.

Getting down to the numbers – analytics

Having gathered two weeks of data from my blog posts, social media and website analytics, I’ve begun comparing the data with Google’s and from my blogging publisher (blogspot).

Screenshot is from the “Visits for All Sources” analytic

This chart from Hubspot gives a terrific and one-stop overview of the sources driving traffic to your site. If you incorporate your social media publishing – LinkedIn, Twitter, Google+, FB etc…  as well as your blog posts in your Hubspot account, they will track them all in this data .  You can then see how well they, and the other usual suspects: organic & paid searches, direct traffic – drive visitors to your site.

This is great insight for pinpointing what works.  Although you could find the same stats by using other tracking and many times free software, Hubspot neatly puts the info into one easy-to-review chart instead of having to visit your different tracking sites like Hootsuite etc.. .

For me it was eye-opening to discover that more than 50% of the traffic to my website was being driven by my blog, LinkedIn and Twitter.

As I had been preaching to customers to step up their content creation, my stats provided statistical proof for them to get off their butts.  In fact, I immediately shared the data results with one client to try and convince them to be more active with their blog and SM channels.  Let’s hope they listen.

As a footnote, I’m guessing that Hubspot is already looking into how to incorporate “Pinterest” and any other relevant SM players into their analytics.

Look who’s lookin’

This is where things begin to get interesting, especially when you compare Hubspot and Google.

Hubspot gives you the high level stats like Google: page views, time on the page, visitors, but some of Hubspot’s other details I find very exciting.

Hubspot identifies the company that was visiting you site (not just the city like Google).  This is extremely interesting but also problematic. The company/visit is identified by its IP address. Because of this, the results can sometimes get skewed. For example, some of my results were just the internet service provider and not the actual company making the visit.

What is cool about this tool though is in addition to hopefully identifying the visitor by company name, they also give you a link to the company’s employees on LinkedIn so you can mine that for leads or names – saving a step or two in building lists. You could obviously do this on your own when targeting companies but again, this is helping you target those visiting your site.

Unlike Google, Hubspot does not include “bounce” or some of the other valuable Google stats but if you include Hubspot's other tools like the “page grader” etc… with your overall analysis, you should be able to put together more than enough insight to know who’s visiting your site and how well it is performing. 

Out of curiosity, I did compare the site visit data with Google’s and Lol, they matched exactly.

Incidentally, like Google, Hubspot also enables you to filter your own IP address from the reporting.

You can also hide irrelevant visits when you review or download reports. These might include the before-mentioned ISP addresses etc…

Daily mail follow up

Hubspot also sends a “Daily Prospects Digest” email (depending on the frequency of reports you choose) with your results. It provides the stats from your most recent visitors – nice to wake up to.

Major discrepancy – My first complaint

In terms of my blog stats, Hubspot gave me some very strange results.

Hubspot has its own dedicated blog analytics tool that works by you pasting their code into your blog template, if you’re not using their blog CMS tool.

For some reason, when I go to my Hubspot “Blog Analysis” chart and look at my last post’s stats, it says that I have only had 6 page views over the past week.

If I go to Hubspot’s “Page Views” analysis chart, (which analyzes all my pages including blog and website) it says that I have had 30 page views for the very same post over the same period.

And, if I go to Blogspots’ (my blog publisher) own analytics, it says that I have had 44 page views for the very same post. Plus, I know that blogspot is definitely excluding my URL from visits, which Hubspot analytics hasn’t been instructed to.

These are major differences that I need to get to the bottom of!

I have searched Hubsot’s help section unsuccessfully for an answer. I will chat with them later today to hear more. This will also give me a chance to demo their “help desk.” 

Don’t want to get all gushy but…

I just got off the phone with Hubspot’s help. Having lived in Europe for the last 20 years, I forgot what it’s like to have a friendly voice on the other end of a help line. The woman was very informative and enthusiastic. She noticed that my blog tracking was not working correctly – aha... She also recognized that I had placed Hubspot’s tracking code in my individual posts as opposed to the blog template – she thought this might have screwed up my results as well (not in those words). We’ll see how it works with this post.

Needless to say, it was very refreshing to speak with their help desk. It kind of felt like the classic marketing scenario: customer gets turned from a complaining moaner to your product’s biggest fan. Although I wasn’t really complaining, it is a free trial after all.

Next up, I’ll begin looking at the lead generating tools….

BTW, here’s a link to Hubspot’s latest paper on working with analytics

Memo: Ditch the SEO consultant, we’ve got Hubspot

If you don’t know it, Hubspot gives you a 30 day free trial of their marketing software. I decided to use the free demo to see if it would make a good fit for some of my clients.

After about a week of fiddling around with it, the benefits are becoming obvious.

I’ll be reviewing the whole pack throughout this month. But for now, this post will concentrate on the SEO tools.

In terms of SEO optimization, the Hubspot Dashboard recommends that you first create a keyword list. Hubspot suggests keywords for you based on your present keywords or a URL.

I found the tool worked fine and gave similar results to Google’s AdWords. Once your list is created, you can filter it by making different campaigns and assigning your keywords to a particular campaign. You can also export the lists to Excel sheets - standard.

Out of curiosity, I tested the “get (keyword) suggestions” tool on a Danish language website to see how it would do. The results were fine.  (That is, if you speak Danish)   

After creating the list, Hubspot like Google, ranks the keywords according to CPC and searches. They also advise you, as they do in the SEO-focused eBooks they publish, to target long-tail keywords. 

They recommend that you go for the low-hanging fruit or keywords with a higher number in the Searches column and a lower number in the Difficulty column.  You can organize your keyword list by these criteria.

As with the other steps I’ve demoed, they basically hold your hand and walk you through the process, which is always nice. They also offer lots of tutorials to help you move along.

Low Ranking Keywords

Interestingly,when I tried to get keyword recommendations based on my keywords I was given this message:

Problem: Your keywords are ranking in search results, but only barely. If you make it to page one, your visits may improve dramatically.

How to get there:

1. Get inbound links: Generate more inbound links to the pages ranking for these keywords.
2. Improve on-page SEO: Click on each keyword to see which pages the keyword is ranking for, and to fix the SEO bits that need improvement.

This makes perfect sense as my website was created without these present keywords and I have never utilized any inbound linking strategies.  

Because I am using my site for this demo, I will begin integrating the keywords and optimize my site according to their SEO recommendations.

Screenshot of the "Page Optimizer"

Optimizing my website

 

Hubspot’s website optimizer is a great tool for your SEO. Upon reviewing my website’s pages the “optimizer” pointed out the many SEO problems existing on my site.

These included everything from a lack of using my keywords (we know why), to meta descriptions missing, “alt” texts on my various images, inbound links as mentioned, and much more.

All very standard operating procedures in terms of inbound marketing strategies but nice to have them catalogued and spelled out, so you can go through your site step by step to fix them.

Again, as part of this demo, I will follow their recommendations on my pages and report what happens.

Should you take the SEO consultant for a ride?

I don’t want to put anyone out of business but this is a pretty robust tool. I worked with an SEO expert with one of my clients and he basically provided the same info that Hubspot is giving me – albeit at a slower, more costly pace.

Does that mean curtains for him and his colleagues?

After I make some of the changes and incorporate some of the keywords I’ll get back to you. There are also many other features in Hubspot’s toolbox to investigate so my aim here is to consider the ROI on the whole pack, not just SEO – although I’m already impressed.

There’s also plenty of other SEO do-it-yourself kits out there if you are just looking to ditch the SEO consultant. But again, I’m not interested in putting anyone out of business and every organization has their own needs.

About Andrew Singer

I provide cost effective communications and inbound marketing services to a wide variety of Danish companies that do business globally. From hi-tech firms like Siemens and TrackMan to more mainstream organizations like Carlsberg, Coloplast, Novo Nordisk and the Confederation of Danish Industry, I deliver strategic creative development and English copywriting expertise.

Check out examples of my work on my website www.andrewsinger.dk or online portfolio.

Day 1 in my Hubspot demo. I’m in

Today I signed up and started my 30 day free trial of Hubspot’s all-in-one marketing software.

I feel like a kid again on Christmas day waking up early to unwrap my presents.

First impression 

Log in worked great. Hubspot sent me an immediate confirmation mail with easy to follow tips for getting started or contacting help.

Once logged in, I arrived at the “trial Dashboard.”

Simple enough so far, the dashboard is neatly organized into four sections: Get started; Get found; Convert and Analyze. It seems like they’ll walk me through all the processes – nice. The first section, “get started” guided me through setting up my website for analytics. Basically just pasting Hubspot’s tracking code on my site – same as you do with Google’s tracking code. Then clicking a button to test the tracking code to make sure it was working, which it was.

Multiple accounts? 

If anyone is considering using Hubspot to monitor multiple clients’ performance, you can unfortunately, only enter one domain. Hubspot does however suggest contacting them, which I guess keeps the option open to creating multiple accounts. 

Here’s their help section’s response to that particular question:

Can I have multiple domains or multiple sites within one HubSpot portal?

Answer (Hubspot’s)
While it is possible to point multiple domains or subdomains to a single HubSpot portal, you are only allotted one page to point your base domain (represented in most file systems as '/') to.

This means that if you point multiple domains or subdomains to your HubSpot portal, you cannot point each domain at the base, root  level to a different page - each will resolve to the top page in your list in 'Create -> Website Pages'.  You can only have one page at the root level, and have to specify any other page by it's path in the HubSpot file system.
If you require a large number of sites, please contact us directly to discuss your situation.
Hopefully, their answer makes sense to you.
 
From here I quickly jumped past ”steps 2 & 3 to the ”analyze” section to see how it the tracking code performed - all seems well.

During my month long demo, I’ll make sure to compare Hubspot’s results with my Google analytics to see how the numbers match up.

Get Found

After checking out my analytics I went back to step two, “Get Found.”  This involved three steps: Creating keywords; Writing a blog story (creating content) and synching my social media accounts with my Hubspot account.

I quickly put together a keywords list and moved on to creating a blog entry (this is it).

Create a blog entry

Interestingly, when I initially went to this section (create a blog entry) my only option was to create a blog within Hubspot’s own CM system. This immediately depressed me because I thought that maybe I had missed something or had not realized that Hubspot was just another CMS system after all. Was I that dumb?

My initial thought was that all my content creating during this trial, blog entries or landing pages, would have to go through Hubspot’s CMS – oh well...

As this was just a test, I figured I might as well go with it and quickly put together a blog using their template. I planned to post this entry in it. 

Things change quickly

Worked called so I logged out and did some client stuff.

Later, when I logged back in to get to create my (Hubspot) blog entry, I was first prompted instead: if I would be using my own blog or domain – strange that this didn’t happen initially.

I followed the steps, entered my blog details, created a feedburner account and was off. Now my own blog was part of their system.

The process was easy to do and very well explained. I didn’t need Hubspot's CMS system after all!

I can now post this entry on my blog - as you can see.

For companies without the resources or know how to create their own blog, Hubspot’s CMS blog might be a good start - as it is already set up for analytics, easy to work with, etc…

Social Media

My next step was to connect my SM accounts and blog to their social media analytic and publishing tools. This was easy to set up. I like how they hold my hand.

This is all I have time for right now, I’ll post this entry and we'll see what happens.

About Andrew Singer
 I provide communications and inbound marketing services to a wide variety of international companies, ranging from hi-tech firms like Siemens and TrackMan to more mainstream clients like Carlsberg, Coloplast, Novo Nordisk and the World Youth and Student Travel Conference. Check out examples of my work on my website www.andrewsinger.dk or online portfolio.

Does Hubspot bring your whole marketing world together? Let’s find out

For the next month I’m going to demo their software and tell you what I think.

If you are into inbound marketing and social media, you probably have heard of Hubspot.

Hubspot produces an all-in-one marketing software kit that enables you to manage your SEO, multichannel analytics, lead nurturing and much more. In their words: HubSpot brings your whole marketing world together in one powerful, integrated system.

The company is also one of the most respected and my favorite online resource for marketing and communications tips and reports, in addition to being very generous in sharing their insight and knowledge.

As an avid reader of their content and reports, I thought it might be interesting to demo their software and find out what it’s all about. If the software is as good as their insight, I’ve got clients that will certainly benefit from it.

And anyway, they allow you to try it free for 30 days, so why not try?



For the next month, I’ll blog as often as possible about my test. I’ll try to give you as much insight as I can: from how it works, the reports, the ease of use…to how good their online help is (if needed).

I’m probably the perfect guinea pig for this.

I’ve been working in marketing forever, but not so much on the analytical side – so I’ll be learning too.  Together, we’ll at least discover the software’s usability and dummy quotient.I’ll use it when I blog, so we’ll really see how well it functions there too.

This should be interesting. Stand by. I’m going to push download now.

About Andrew Singer

I provide communications and inbound marketing services to a wide variety of international companies, ranging from hi-tech firms like Siemens and TrackMan to more mainstream clients like Carlsberg, Coloplast, Novo Nordisk and the World Youth and Student Travel Conference. Check out examples of my work on my website www.andrewsinger.dk or online portfolio.

Conferences: are you taking advantage of these two simple ways to market your event?

Let’s face it. The goal in the marketing of any conference is to increase awareness and thereby, grow attendance. The more people that come to your show, the more money it makes. 

There are plenty of ways to increase attendance like developing mailing lists and direct mail campaigns; advertising in industry-related trade magazines or getting press coverage from journalists that cover your sector.

I'd like to share two inbound marketing strategies that worked great for me.

A few years back I worked with an industry b2b conference. I used these two inbound strategies which ended up being amazingly cost efficient and successful in accomplishing the above two goals: building awareness & attendance.  

While they both require a hands-on resource to manage the campaigns, they cost virtually nothing to implement. I am fairly certain that your conference’s marketing department could handle the additional workload without stressing anyone out, especially, if you have a dedicated social media person.

#1 - LinkedIn Group

The first idea was to create a LinkedIn group for the industry the conference served. Importantly though, I chose not to brand the group around the conference. 

The reason for this was twofold. One, to allow us to monitor who was out there – getting a bird’s eye perspective on what the industry was talking about, and two, to have the group not made up of only conference attendees who might join the group simply because they attend the conference. I wanted to attract prospects we never heard of and those who never heard of us!

We knew anyway that as the season rolled along and we started gearing up for the event that there would be plenty of opportunities to market the show to the group. But the great thing about the LinkedIn group was we could mine it to target specific group members directly based on their relevance and decision making status just by checking their LinkedIn profile. 

In other words, the group provided us with a clean, screened and obviously very interested database/mailing list to market to and mine.

Of course, as with any inbound marketing/social media channel, we were careful not to abuse our relationship and position. 

As the conference and also a group member (not the group manager) we would post relevant industry stories, tips and seminars. This served to get our name out, position us as an industry authority and drive traffic to the conference’s website. We could also slip in important dates here and there. But again, as a group member, we adhered to the 10% rule for self promotion. 

As the group’s manager, we were able to promote and support the conversation. Even talk about the conference as a third party or allow rival conferences go get in on the forum. And as the group’s manager, we could always warn rivals not to use the group as just an advertising platform. Being king does have its privileges.

The result is the group is still growing. In fact it is almost as large now as the conference in size - with only about 50% of group members actually made up of conference attendees.  

In essence, we have reached professionals from our industry from around the world: Prospects that we may never have discovered or found us. And despite these past few years of doom and gloom economy, conference attendance has remained steady and/or grown depending on the year, basically due to the new blood that now attends. 

If your sector is not already served by a LinkedIn group or even if it is, I highly recommend creating your own targeted group to the types of individual/companies your conference benefits. In fact I suggest you drill down your LinkedIn group to your targeted attendee’s sector as much as possible. For example, form a LinkedIn group for “dog walkers specializing in poodles” rather than just “dog walkers,” even if your conference is for dog walkers.

#2 - Industry News Blog – flattery will get you everywhere

The second initiative I created was to make an industry news blog.  The idea behind this was obvious, to make the blog/conference website, the place to go for industry professionals looking for the latest industry-related news.

The results were bigger and better than we could have hoped for.

Using a content collator we picked and published industry news/stories daily.  

Now I need to backtrack for a minute. At the time we created the blog (4-5 years ago), I was new to blogging and didn’t realize that it was bad manners to just clip and paste posts, not to mention copyright infringement. In my defense, I did link to the original stories. 

My ignorance resulted in some of the publishers (newsletters and bloggers) writing me to complain and quickly set me straight. This was actually a blessing in disguise. All of a sudden I was building relationships (albeit off the wrong foot) with some of the leading journalist that covered our industry.     

They now started covering and even wanting to ATTEND our conference for the first time in the conference’s history. 

I also discovered that by just excerpting their stories (as I should have in the first place) and linking back to the full story on their site I accomplished the very same result. 

Through analytics, they knew who was publishing their content and wanted to learn more about us, which again, lead to them wanting to cover us. 

In other words, by publishing others’ content you get their attention and in most cases, favor. Flattery does get you everywhere.    

Now back to our original intention for the blog: be the #1 resource for industry related news.

This happened, and it happened quickly. Within six months we ranked #1 on Google when you searched for X industry news. 

The conference’s website visits grew and conference buzz improved significantly.      

Obviously the blog’s popularity also greatly influenced our SEO results when searching for anything to do with our industry and not just news about it. We jumped to the top of the Google heap. You can credit content creation marketing. 

Today

Since these initiatives were first put in place, the conference changed ownership and headquarters location. 

I kept the LinkedIn group and gave it to a leading consultant serving the industry. She now uses it as a platform to successfully promote her own business and serve the industry.

The blog, they got lazy and stopped updating the content and broke the 10% rule. It’s slowly dropping down the Google charts.

Interestingly, the conference’s marketing manager that took my spot when it switched owners and moved, left her position and is now using my ideas for a rival conference. She is currently creating a new LinkedIn Group and industry news blog. 

I’m flattered. 

It would be great if you can use these ideas to help grow your conference. They work!

If you do, please write and tell me if they are as successful for you as they were for us.  

About Andrew Singer
I provide communications and inbound marketing services to a wide variety of international companies, ranging from hi-tech firms like Siemens and TrackMan to more mainstream clients like Carlsberg, Coloplast, Novo Nordisk and the World Youth and Student Travel Conference. Check out examples of my work in the categories to your right or on my website www.andrewsinger.dk.