Building HubSpot Custom Reports: 2 Easy Methods

Any successful business understands that Reporting is crucial to its success. You may use it to track what’s working, rectify what isn’t, and grow your brand. The Reporting tools and Custom Reports provided by HubSpot allow you to view all of your data in one location. Thus, HubSpot Report makes data-driven decisions easier than ever before.

Custom Reports can help you monitor high-level trends as well as dig into the details with the metrics that matter the most. HubSpot Reporting makes your data easily accessible to everyone on your team, ensuring that everyone is doing their job correctly.

This article will walk you through the process of building HubSpot Custom Reports from scratch. It will also provide you with a brief introduction to HubSpot and its key features. You will also get to know how you can get insights from the custom reports in further sections. Let’s get started.

Table of Contents

• Prerequisites
• Introduction to HubSpot
• Key Features of HubSpot
• What is the HubSpot Reporting Dashboard?
• Top 7 Features of HubSpot Reporting Dashboards
• The Benefits and Limitations of Native HubSpot Reporting
• Methods to Build HubSpot Custom Reports
  • Method 1: Building HubSpot Custom Reports Manually
    • Step 1: Create a New Custom Report
    • Step 2: Choose the type of object on which you want to create a report
    • Step 3: Add a filter to segment your records
    • Step 4: Edit the Deal Stages if Necessary
    • Step 5: Visualize your report
  • Method 2: Building HubSpot Custom Reports using Custom Report Builder
    • Getting Insights from your HubSpot Custom Reports
• Best Practices for Building HubSpot Custom Reports
• Conclusion

Prerequisites

You will have a much easier time understanding the ways for building HubSpot Custom Reports if you have gone through the following aspects:

• An active HubSpot account.
• Working knowledge of CRM Softwares will be an added advantage.

Introduction to HubSpot

Hubspot is a Marketing, Sales, and Service software that allows you to store all your business development data like Leads, Contacts, Deals, Activities, etc. on the cloud and run analytics on it. 

HubSpot can be considered as an all-in-one tool for Content Creation, Lead Generation, Social Media Sharing, Customer Relationship Management, Workflow Automation, Sales Funnel Mapping, and Performance Tracking. Thousands of businesses use HubSpot products for their company needs because of its easy-to-use user interface and reasonable price options.

Key Features of HubSpot

HubSpot has gained significant market share in the past few years. A few of the key features of HubSpot include:

1. All-in-one tool: HubSpot integrates marketing and sales activities into one platform, making it easier to manage all elements of client relationships. Moreover, it provides other features like Sales Funnel Mapping, Performance Tracking, Workflow Automation, and much more.
2. Free CRM: Small businesses can use HubSpot’s ability to grow and expand their operations without spending any money. It contains Sales, Marketing, and Customer Support features in addition to basic CRM functions. HubSpot has an infinite number of users and can store up to a million records.
3. Social Media Management Features: HubSpot integrates with LinkedIn, Instagram, and Facebook, allowing users to link multiple accounts and effortlessly plan and schedule updates across networks.
4. Customer Segmentation: HubSpot’s business users can categorize their consumers depending on their age groupings, professions, interests, demographics, or preferences. You can provide your consumers with a customized product experience based on their preferences with Customer Segmentation.
5. Automated Workflow: HubSpot’s Workflow Automation solution automates your Marketing, Sales, and Service tasks, allowing your team to work more efficiently. You may automatically enroll records and conduct Actions on your contacts, companies, deals, quotations, and tickets by setting enrollment criteria.

To know more about HubSpot, visit this link.

What is the HubSpot Reporting Dashboard?

HubSpot Reporting Dashboard is the main workspace that allows you to monitor and keep track of all your Marketing and Sales activities. It helps in visualizing all the Marketing and Sales data to provide a holistic view of all the business activities, returns, and other metrics. You can also check our detailed article about HubSpot attribution reporting.

The data is provided by HubSpot CRM that contains data on buyer personas, customer’s stats, deal stages, etc., and visualized on customizable dashboards.

Top 7 Features of HubSpot Reporting Dashboards

HubSpot Reporting Dashboards offer many features for Marketing and Sales. The top 7 features are listed below:

1) Sales Report

Sales Report helps users visualize the stats related to conversions and Sales along with the time. 

Some of the metrics that the Sales Report includes in the Dashboard are listed below:

• Sales made by day, week, and month
• Abandoned cart
• Recovered abandoned carts
• Contact conversion pages and blogs
• Customer conversion pages and blogs
• Sales performance
• Most converting landing pages

2) Marketing Reports

Marketing Report allow users to get an overview of all the running Marketing Campaigns in a single place. It helps you measure the Marketing efforts and their effects on the charts. Users can change the view of the graph according to the data interpretation such as bar graphs, tables, pie charts, or other visual methods. 

Some of the common metrics of Marketing HubSpot Report are listed below:

• Page performance
• Traffic analysis from Marketing Campaign 
• Active Marketing Mampaign
• Social Media Marketing
• Contacts by source, title, and day
• First conversions
• Traffic on landing pages, blogs, and other website pages
• Top landing pages, and blog posts

3) Assess the Performance

HubSpot Report allows you to assess an overview of Marketing and Sales performance for a specific period. It showcases the number of deals you closed, deals that customers canceled, etc, and also tells you about the contacts that have been assigned and worked by reps on your team.

4) Deal Forecasting

HubSpot Report not only visualize data but also comes with intelligent AI-featured Data Analytics that help you predict the trend and forecast the future possibilities based on the present data. It helps your forecast reports which reflect the amount of revenue for deals in each stage.

Deal Forecasting helps you stay up-to-date and ahead in the competition. HubSpot Deal Per Order plugin provides that simplicity to break the shop orders into stages. HubSpot Report allows track deals individually concerning the contact.

5) Productivity Assessment 

HubSpot Report allows users to study the effectiveness of the Marketing efforts you are putting in. It is essential to know how your Marketing budgets and strategies are working. Productivity Assessment helps in accessing the number of calls, emails, notes, meetings, and tasks your team has logged in the selected time frame and compares it with the outcome of your Marketing and Sales performance.

6) Deals Closed vs Goal

HubSpot Reporting Dashboards tell you about the number of deals closed by your team members concerning your team’s share. You can customize the HubSpot Reporting Dashboard for closed deals, closed contacts, and set the period, accessibility, and other properties. 

7) Recent Activity

Users can easily track the recent activities and measure the recent E-Mails, meetings, calls, notes, and tasks logged by your team. HubSpot Report helps users stay updated with the activities happening on the Dashboard.

The Benefits and Limitations of Native HubSpot Reporting

The benefits and limitations of Native HubSpot Reporting are listed below:

Benefits of HubSpot Reporting 

• HubSpot Reporting Add-on allows you access to central dashboards that help in bringing Marketing and Sales data in one place.
• Using Marketing and Sales data in HubSpot, you can track, measure, and monitor the customer’s journey on one platform.
• It comes with an interactive and user-friendly interface that allows you to create reports and customize dashboards for marketers that don’t need to get too granular with their data.

Limitations of HubSpot Reporting 

• Unlike other platforms, you can not import data from other sources into HubSpot from other Marketing tools directly. That means you are limited to the data already present in HubSpot.
• You can not club data from more than one HubSpot portal which makes it difficult for Marketers to manage multiple accounts.
• HubSpot Reporting features sometimes make it difficult to analyze the numbers in depth. The only solution then comes is to export the data into spreadsheets and analyze it out of HubSpot.

Methods to Build HubSpot Custom Reports

Hubspot offers simple default reports and allows you to create your custom ones as well. Before building your reports, you must ensure that your data is trustworthy, complete, and up to date. Incomplete or erroneous or out of the context data can lead to wrong decisions. Below are the methods to build HubSpot Custom Reports:

• Method 1: Building HubSpot Custom Reports Manually
• Method 2: Building HubSpot Custom Reports using Custom Report Builder

Method 1: Building HubSpot Custom Reports Manually

In this method, you will get to know how you can build HubSpot Custom Reports manually. You can follow the below-mentioned steps to build your first HubSpot Custom Reports.

• Step 1: Create a New Custom Report
• Step 2: Choose the Type of Object on which You Want to Create a Report
• Step 3: Add a Filter to Segment your Records
• Step 4: Edit the Deal Stages if Necessary
• Step 5: Visualize your Report

Step 1: Create a New Custom Report

You can follow the below-mentioned procedure to create a new HubSpot Custom Reports:

• Navigate to “Reports” in your HubSpot account.
• Click on “Create custom report” in the upper right menu bar.

With this, you have successfully created your new custom report.

Step 2: Choose the Type of Object on which You Want to Create a Report

In this step, you will have to choose the type of object on which you want to create the HubSpot Custom Reports. Follow the below-mentioned procedure:

• Firstly, select “Single object” from the left panel as shown by the image below.

Single object reports can be built for the objects like Contacts, Companies Deals, etc. as shown in the above image.

• From the above-mentioned objects, you can select the desired object. 
• Next, in the left panel, click Add [object type] Property to browse and select the properties you want to report on.
• Properties displayed will be relevant to the selected object. You can also drag the properties UP/DOWN to rearrange them. 

Step 3: Add a Filter to Segment your Records

Next, in this step, you must add at least 1 filter to your report else no data will appear. This filter will segment the records that will be shown in the report. 

Again, an object-specific list of properties appears, select 1 or more filters from here. You can now specify the JOIN condition for these filters, e.g. AND/OR/NOT logical operators as shown by the below image.

Step 4: Edit the Deal Stages if Necessary

Hubspot gives you 7 default deal stages with preset win probabilities:

• Appointment scheduled (20%)
• Qualified to buy (40%)
• Presentation scheduled (60%)
• Decision maker bought-in (80%)
• Contract sent (90%)
• Closed won (100% won)
• Closed lost (0% lost)

You can edit these from the “Settings” icon in the main navigation bar.

• Click on Objects>>Deals>>Pipelines(to edit)>>Edit Stage(s) 

If your deals are in multiple currencies you can add the currencies filter to include a certain currency only. Also, you can convert all currencies to one by defining a custom filter with calculation. 

Also, you will need to specify the time interval or frequency, say a week, which will set the intervals of time for which the deal properties will be charted. 

• Next, select the chart type. 

• Using “Display options” you can set the comparison logic if you want to compare the object with a target value.

Step 5: Visualize your Report

You will now see your HubSpot Custom Reports in the “Visualization” section. You can export it to the desired file format via the “Export” option in the upper right.

With this, you have successfully created your HubSpot Custom Reports.

Method 2: Building HubSpot Custom Reports using Custom Report Builder

In this method, you will get to know about the use of HubSpot’s Custom Report Builder to create reports with multiple objects and criteria. The “Custom Report Builder” allows you to collect, connect, manage and process data from multiple inputs. Below are the available data sources that you can include in your HubSpot Custom Reports.

You can easily drag and drop columns to their destinations, like X-axis or Y-axis. Drag and drop fields to be included in the report and the processing that needs to be applied to them e.g. drag timestamps and specify the time for which you need the report data to be included. 

This is one of the easiest methods to create HubSpot Custom Reports using the drag and drop feature provided by HubSpot’s Custom Report Builder. Now, you will be looking into how you can get insights from the generated HubSpot Custom Reports.

Getting Insights from your HubSpot Custom Reports

It is essential to acquire insights from your HubSpot Custom Reports after you’ve finished creating them. Here, you’ll learn about a few key insights that most businesses prefer to consider.

• Marketing E-mails that Closed the Most Deals
• Analyzing Industries that are Most Lucrative and Must be Considered
• The Number of Tickets Associated with Recent Deals

1) Marketing E-Mails that Closed the Most Deals

Let’s select the Marketing Email as the data source. The“Custom Report Builder”, or Builder for short, will attempt to join the associated data sources with selected primary data sources. 

If no direct relationships are found, Builder can also try to find alternate paths or add new data sources to create logical associations, such that the chosen path has the fewest number of steps between the associated data source(s) to the primary. 

If the Builder cannot make associations between selected data sources with other unselected options, they are greyed out. Sometimes, you must be careful about the order of the data sources you select. Select the most basic data sources first, e.g. select the “Deals” data source and then “Contacts”, this will show you proper data. 

In case you select the Contacts first and Deals second, your results will have many contacts which are not associated with any deal, adding some noise to your results. Your primary object must be directly related to your question and must filter your data such that it gets closer to the desired outcome OR filters out irrelevant data in the first few steps only. 

Your data sources can further be refined using the inherent properties/characteristics of the constituent data, e.g. you can choose properties like #of page views/# of form submissions/ Emails opened, etc. from your Contact’s properties. 

These can be added to the “columns” of your chart, to show finer details of the contact’s interaction with your brand. You can also specify the join conditions, like OR/AND/NOT, as you would do in SQL, to specify how these filters should be applied as a combination. 

2) Analyzing Industries that are Most Lucrative and Must be Considered

The primary data source will be the Company, the secondary will be the Deals in our scenario. Here, the independent variable will be industry ( as industry info is in the company data source). The dependent variable will be revenue ( hence deals selected )

Now, the X-axis will have “Industry“. Y-axis will have “Amount” in deal properties as shown by the below image.

 Finally, you will see some graphs similar to what is shown below.

You can easily change the Y-axis variable, to get region-wise revenue or revenue by company size. You can always adjust the bar colors, fonts for text/numbers, graph type, orientation, etc. using the designer. 

Similarly, there are filters associated with each data source and property-based calculators/sorters.

3) The Number of Tickets Associated with Recent Deals

This will let you know if your customers require too much support to get started. Deals, Tickets, and Sales will be used for this scenario. The designer is intelligent enough to ascertain the operations you would need on a set of data depending on the type and relevance of the data. It will give you pre-calculated “measures” or default measures to readily include in your HubSpot Custom Reports as shown by the below image.

A visual context easily conveys the significance and gravity of the summarizations being discussed. For example, graphs can uncover hidden trends and interpretations which will not be seen easily in tabular data.

Best Practices for Building HubSpot Custom Reports

Below are few tips, techniques, and best practices that every organization must follow to get the best of the HubSpot Custom Reports:

1. Clearly define your question and why you need an answer for it.
2. Clearly define and boldly display your context as anything comprehensible must have a relevant context, to make proper sense. 
3. Replace text and calculations with graphs, tables, and visualizations. For example, just showing a table of numbers that represent sales per region is boring and unintuitive. 

Conclusion

Overall, HubSpot Custom Reports are excellent tools to analyze your business performance and monitoring high-level trends. Moreover, Hubspot allows you to easily build custom reports and create intuitive visualizations, which can lead to appropriate business decisions. Thus, HubSpot Custom Reports can significantly help businesses to achieve new heights in this competitive world.

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