THE MAGIC OF HUBSPOT CAMPAIGNS: COMPARING, CREATING, AND CUSTOMIZING CAMPAIGNS [HUBHEROES, EP37]
George B. Thomas, Max Cohen, Devin Bellamy, and Justin Givens break down HubSpot's campaigns tool for marketing attribution and organization. They cover how to set up campaigns, compare performance, and customize them for your workflow.
You know what I love about the fact that you guys are being so silly at the beginning of the podcast is that. And this is a little on fact, and it's the first time I'm actually going to bring it out to the world, is that we're putting the video versions of these in the Hub Heroes community. So people have only been able to. People have only been able to listen to the podcast until now. We're literally loading all 36 by the time this goes out. What, 37 episodes of video versions into the community where people can log in for free and watch the shenanigans of stuff that we do. Slightly, slightly edited. Anyway, you know what isn't silly?
I was gonna ask if we were gonna put it behind a paywall, because listening's free, but looking's gonna cost you something.
Yeah, this face ain't free, baby. Well, while we're talking about the community, why don't you just go ahead and plug the URL, let them know about it if they haven't heard about it already.
Well, right now. Well, should I. So here's the thing. Right now, I have alpha users in there. But here's the thing. If you're a listener to the Hub Heroes podcast, I feel like you should be able to get in on the jams of what we're going to create moving forward. So if you go to community.hubheroes.com you'll actually be able to sign it or sign up for free because we have a free section. Will there be a paid wall, Devin, in the future? Maybe. Will the Hub Heroes podcast video version be in it?
Nope.
It'll always be free to look because that's just how we roll. But let's talk about what's not silly. What's not silly today is Justin Givens is with us. Hey, my man.
How are you doing today, gentlemen? Dude, man, I am doing great. You know, the sun's shining. I beat my record for Most days Alive, so I can love it.
Most days Alive. So, Justin, take just a minute before we get into the good stuff here and just tell people kind of who you are, what you do, and then we'll get into the conversation of today.
Yeah. Who I am. I'm Justin Givens. Thanks for that repeat there. But. But with that, I love everything automation. If you ask my family, my wife and kids, I put them through a lot of workflows offline. I live. I almost built a pipeline for tickets for my kids to do the checklist to go through and move it through the stage every Morning. Okay. I love automation and I love process build outs. So that's what I do for a living. I got my own company called Image in a Box. That's what we do. We love helping people, you know, and.
Here'S the other thing. If you wanted to manage the payouts of the allowance, there is this cool app I know about called Zebra that we can.
Oh, my God, are you gonna fit that into every episode?
Seriously?
I think that was like two minutes in and we're already plugging things.
The chief evangelist. He's gotta do it. He's gotta do it.
My gosh, every episode. Anyway, okay, so today I'm super excited because we're actually diving into a tool in HubSpot, a thing that we as marketers sales C Suite, care about, even though we don't know we probably care about it. It is, it's to me, the kind of an engine that drives things. But also I'm excited that we're talking about it today because dang gone it. If it isn't super confusing to most mere mortal humans, when they step into HubSpot, they're like, oh, you mean email campaigns. Oh, wait, you mean ad campaigns. Oh, oh, wait, what? What's an inbound campaign? And then, my gosh, you hit the, like, create a campaign button and there's all sorts of questions that happen, like, oh, I can't use this tool because there's not an end date. No, God help me. So, so I'm excited. We're talking about HubSpot campaigns. And let's just go ahead and get into where I think we need to start. You guys can jump in, whoever wants to go first, and we'll just layer it on top of each other. When we say HubSpot campaigns, what the heck is HubSpot campaigns? And in your mind, how would you tell somebody how it works?
So I have a special relationship with this tool because this is how I was able to get a lot of folks early in my HubSpot career to kind of understand that the output of what you're building in the marketing hub, right, Is generally a collection of all these different, like, assets and pieces of content that you're putting together to achieve a greater goal. Right? So the campaigns tool was great because it was an awesome visual tool for me to say, hey, listen, every time you're creating a campaign, there's generally like a landing page that you're building for someone to convert on and people have to get there somehow. So you're doing all these different social posts and emails and you have to automate a bunch of stuff around it. So you're building all these workflows and writing blog posts and like doing all this other stuff. Right. And so for me, it was a really cool way of getting people to say, like, hey, listen, I'm building all this stuff, but how do I glue it all together, right. And see how it's all working together and get like a. A 10,000 foot view of all the important metrics for all these different things, but not have to jump around to 75 different places inside of the HubSpot tool to see how it's all performing. So for me, it's always been like an aggregator of assets and data and performance and a great way to like organize all of the stuff that you're building inside of HubSpot. Right. I tried to hit the beat button, but I hit the mute button. Yeah. Anyway. But yeah, love it. Campaigns for the win.
Yeah, no, I would. I'm going to piggyback off that. Max. The. It is a place where you can see at a snapshot how that campaign's going to. I'm sure all of us used to live in Google Analytics and that day it was like, cool. Someone misspelled the campaign name. Great. Now we can't run any type of analytics on what just happened. Now we got to remember next year. Crap, we misspelled it. Now we're not doing anything consistently. This is awesome. Yay for marketing execution failure number one today. Okay, the other thing I like a lot too is bringing in not just social, not just email, but your ads. A lot of people are like, hey, George, you hit the head right there saying, boom, it's only email campaigns. Right? But what about your landing pages? What about your webpages that are driving you? And hey, let's not forget the little tool that I love a lot, the Call to actions tool in HubSpot. Okay, let's. Let's keep them all together.
Yeah, there's. Campaigns are a tool in other platforms. Platforms. Like one of the hardest things that I had when explaining the campaigns tool when I was doing onboarding was people would come over for mailchimp and immediately think that I'm talking about email. And it's like, no. Campaigns is the single easiest way for a marketer to justify their existence in an organization. It is immediately reflects the fruits of your labors, especially if you have it tied into. If you're doing the full pipeline reporting, you can immediately and easily track revenue to your marketing efforts.
Can we just talk. Wait, George, before you go into it just real quick talk about how frustrating the word campaign is in our universe just because I've literally had customers that are just like, I need to get this email campaign out the door and we need to do it. And I go, okay, how many emails are you talking about? They go, one. I'm like, why are you calling that a campaign that's just sending out an email, right? Or like other people saying like, hey, can you show us like the campaigns tool in HubSpot? And I go and show it to them and they're like, no, this isn't what we're talking about. And they're talking about like the equivalent of the workflows tool from like a different tools. So like if anyone's listening and like you're confused, we're talking about the campaigns tool in HubSpot, not the idea of what a campaign is. Not the, not like a campaign inside of like Google Ads or something like that. Talking about the campaigns tool. And it's okay that this word is a thousand definitions. Just always, you know, just, just, just be clear when you're talking about campaigns to any of us because it'll, it'll, it'll chap our for sure. Go ahead, George.
Sorry, yeah, if you want to trigger me, man. No, I'm just kidding. I don't really get triggered.
Yeah.
But I love Devin. Well, sometimes. So the thing is we're going to talk about sessions new context, influence context influence revenue in a little bit as we kind of move down here. But really what I want us to do because now we're talking about campaigns, the campaign in HubSpot is I want us to really paint a picture and we kind of going in that direction of why the heck this tool is so important that it's actually in HubSpot itself.
Oh, that was a question. All right, cool.
No, wait, what?
Yeah, I thought there was another statement coming and.
No, no other statement.
Why?
Why in your mind? Let me ask the question. Like maybe a normal human would ask a question. Guys, why in Your mind is HubSpot campaigns tool so important?
Hold on, George. George, ask it like a real human. Try it again. Just kidding. Go ahead, Devin.
And one word. Attribution. The campaigns tool is how you are able to not have to dive through data in order to see the, the effectiveness of a campaign. And one of the reasons why I enjoy the fact that the name of the tool is the campaigns tool is because positions what the word actually should mean to a marketer. It was one thing when you were doing, you know, ads, campaigns and that was, you know, what you did for marketing and advertising, or if you were doing like, you know, just an offline billboard and that was your campaign. What true marketing campaigns are, are integrated omnichannel communications. And what you need to be able to do is to track the effectiveness of that messaging across platforms, both online and offline. And hopefully we'll get an opportunity to incorporate how you can. Or to talk about how you can incorporate your offline marketing into your campaigns tool. It can be done.
I'll tell you how that I think.
Devin, what you hinted on is all your assets in one location to easily organize yourself. So then, because what do we do as marketers over and over again, hey, what worked? And we have no idea. And we're digging and we're wasting so many hours looking through Google Analytics, looking through, even just, hey, what did that ad do? What we're not looking at as a holistic campaign to say, holy crap, this is what worked at this email. Like, we have five emails going out. We had ads, we had landing pages. But what actually drove the number forward, and that's what we do as a marketer every single day, is that our goal is to drive business, not just launch email. I didn't want to say the email campaign word, but that was gonna happen, right? We don't want to do that. So why is this tool so important? One, it gives ourselves organization. We know, hey, this is what's going on. We can easily. And this is one thing I love about HubSpot is you can assign tasks for that specific campaign and keep your team organized. So as you're working on a team that's maybe three or four people, you could be like, hey, Max, quit plugging happily products. Get this ad launched, okay? Like, I don't know why you're sitting back there chilling. I need you to get this ad launch.
Always, always be plugging, right?
Is plug in the same thing as shilling? I guess maybe I don't always be.
Shilling, Always be plugging. Edit that one out. No, so the other, like, when I think, when I. When I think of, when I think of importance, right? Like the importance of the actual campaign stool. A lot of the time I'm thinking of that marketer that kind of went out on the limb to get HubSpot because they said we need to change our ways and start doing inbound, right? So immediately this person's, you know, reputation, maybe job in some instances are on the line because they're the ones sort of championing this, like, new way of doing marketing. Getting away from the door to door, getting away from the just buying ads, getting away from the, the more outbound approach, right? And saying, hey, let's make some content, let's do some demand generation. Let's actually do inbound in like a good way. Right? And then they have to justify why they went out and bought these tools one, but then to justify all the time that they're now spending creating content, creating all of these assets, right? Letting them run, experimenting with them. So what's really cool about that campaigns tool is it integrates with the deals object, right? Because you can see deals that are generated from those campaigns. And that's wonderful. Whether your sales team is working with HubSpot or. Or if they're working in a different CRM that's integrated with HubSpot and it's passing over deal data, right? Really doesn't matter. What's super cool is there's a very easy way now for marketers to say, hey, you see all this time that I'm in money that I'm spending on like creating all this content and doing all this stuff in a different way. Here's the impact it's actually having on sales because we're actually creating deals and we're driving revenue from all this stuff that we're building. Right? So it's a really great way to kind of like prove the success in a very simple way and tie it to something that's a more concrete business result, such as actual sales. Right. Because there's a lot of like metrics in marketing. They're kind of hard to quantify. Sure, yeah, it's great. Oh, you drove some traffic. That's nice. You hear some sessions. Cool. Like whatever. But like when you could actually see that it's like driving sales and like creating new opportunities that weren't there before. That's something that's a little bit, you know, more real life that higher ups are going to be able to kind of understand and appreciate. Right. So it's great for those marketers trying to kind of prove the impact of the decision they made to do inbound and bring in HubSpot to be the tool that kind of let them build that. Right.
So yeah, I love listening to you guys wax poetic on all of this because literally you're like, well, it lets them, you know, prove the performance of the actions that they're taking. Devin, you said attribution immediately, you know, seeing everything together, AKA the assets. And then Justin, you even said, yeah, we can keep people organized with tasks. Which by the way, you Guys listed almost every tab in the HubSpot campaigns tool that people can go to, other than there's a new tab called Budget that actually shows up if you go to your campaigns tool right now. And so literally, if you're worried about performance, attribution, the assets, and being able to see them all in one place, AKA connect the dots of your marketing, have an organized way to build it over time or tweak it over time, and need to know, like, here's the money we spent versus what we gained and all that good stuff, then it totally makes sense. Yes, Max, you have your finger in the air. What's up?
This may be unfounded, but I'm going to take full credit for that budget tab and I'll tell you the story later.
Oh, oh, well, later, like, we can.
Do it right now.
Podcast or after.
You might remember we had a guest. We might remember we had a guest on the show named Deanna Schwartz. Right.
Yes, I do remember that person.
Yep. So at the time, she was. She was basically kind of running the go to market strategy for Marketing Hub. We had a conversation around what Marketing Hub was missing a long time ago, before this budget tool came out. And I told her, listen, the budget field is absolutely useless on the campaigns tool, which maybe people have already kind of realized before I said it. I don't think that was anything groundbreaking. I've been saying that seven years ago when I was first using the tool. But I told her, I said, listen, we need line items in the budget. Right. So I can say I spent this much money on a graphic designer, this much money on a. On fireworks, this much money on an ad, the news, like, whatever it may be. Right. So I can actually line it up. The one big thing that's missing is tying that back to actual revenue and doing some sort of ROI calculation. But I would like to think that that was my idea. I don't know if it was already in the works, but we had that conversation. I. I said we needed it, and a couple months, quarter, I don't know, now it's there and it's line items, and I'm taking credit for it, even if it wasn't me.
Hub heroes, if you believe that it was Max Cohen's doing, go ahead and send him a tweet, LinkedIn, post a message, smoke signals, let him know that you love him. Because in his mind, the Budget tab is the Max Cohen tab in HubSpot.
And if you're the product manager that actually thought about it before I did, I am so sorry. And Love you so much. You still had a good idea.
Just forward all the gifts to the product.
So here's the thing. What's fun about the campaign tool too is I love when we'll do be like HubSpot onboarding and somebody's new the add assets button of the campaigns tool is the most beautiful place to actually teach somebody in a snapshot of what an inbound campaign is. And so being able to go through and actually talk to them about how you have to have an offer which equals a landing page. And of course you want to create your thank thank you page first because your landing page tool is going to ask where you want to reroute them as far as a thank you page and the fact that a form goes to that. And then of course you're going to write blogs that have call to actions that promote the landing page. And you can literally take a walk, walk, step, step, step through this little box that pops up and people are like, oh, oh, that that just makes sense. So I love that. Being able to easily add assets to a campaign is also a great teaching tool for what the heck an inbound campaign is along the way. So let's keep going. Let's think about back in the day or yesterday or maybe even today when you start to build a campaign in HubSpot. What, what should the users, what should we be thinking about when we're building campaigns in HubSpot?
Your goals, you should be thinking about what the goal of your integrated approach is. If are you and I'm not just talking about, you know, financial goals, I'm talking about what is the point of what you're saying? And that way you can group this campaign together because it's really easy to create content for content's sake. But if you have a genuine goal or like a program launch like we we, I literally was just having a conversation earlier this week about accreditations. And for those who aren't familiar, accreditations are for HubSpot partners who are specialists in their field who have reached a certain level within the program and are then basically endorsed by HubSpot to say, hey, these people do this thing and know what they're talking about. And so as we're generating awareness and trying to drive traffic and the partner community, how do we track all that? Where does all that information live? And we can have just like a generalized one. And what we decided on is we're going to do it by cohort. And so our goal with this campaign is to generate applications and users for this second half the H2 cohort. And so everything that we're doing towards making that goal happen is going to belong in this campaign.
One of the things that I would add to when you're going in to create a campaign goal is your biggest thing. Because if you don't have a goal and if it's not clear and simple, you don't need a campaign one. Why are you doing that marketing effort in the first place? Because we're just generating content. To generate content. It's almost like sometimes podcasting.
Shots fire.
But in the same sense, though, you gotta think about what assets are they? Or is my contacts going to touch? Is it a cold person? Where do they like? And just write it down on a sticky note. If you're that kind of person, if you're a white border that's perfectly clean in my back corner, go for that one. Okay. If you like digital tools, mirror, write out what people are going to see and interact with. All right, Then you're starting to formulate, hey, this is what my campaign is going to start working like.
Okay, I love that. And Max, I know I want to get your thoughts on this too, as. As we move forward, but I do want to hit a couple things. Devin, I'm so glad that you brought up goals and the fact that you weren't just talking about revenue goals, because again, if we talk about HubSpot campaigns, we need to realize that under the actions button of any campaign that has been created, there's literally an edit. Goals pop up that you can interact with. And you have to think kind of holistically of, well, sessions, new contacts, influence contacts, closed deals, and influence revenue. And I'm bringing this up because I can't tell you how many HubSpot portals I've gone into. I've went in and looked at their campaigns and I don't see any of those little tiny numbers under the big numbers that they're now curious about if it equals success or failure. If. If you don't know what success is, AKA here's my stab at what we'd like to achieve. Those numbers that are so great about the performance almost maybe don't mean anything. So definitely, if you go into your campaigns tool and you don't see a little number for sessions, new contacts, influence contacts, closed deals, and influence revenue, make sure you get those added. Of course, there might be an internal conversation for that.
And.
And it's funny, Justin too, I know one of the things that has just recently happened. And Max, I'm sure you may. And Devin may have things to say about this too. One of the things that's just recently happened, Justin, is that you can now customize campaign properties. What. What is that? Like, how important is it that we can customize campaign properties? Because this is like, right? This is pre. Pre the creation. You're setting yourself up for the creation. That's definitely something people should think about. Talk us through that a little bit.
Yeah, so one of the things that has come up is a lot of people are like, well, I'm running a campaign with maybe a partnership, right? We're co branding. Maybe we're running a webinar. And you want that campaign to live in your HubSpot. And one thing that we've actually done for one of our customers was specifically set up a partner field. Hey, is this a partner that you're doing this campaign with? So then that way when you're doing landing pages or if you want to send them a track link to that campaign that they're emailing out of now, we can see what's going on and attribute that success to that original campaign and then also help us better report this is what our partner campaigns are doing. Right. So then we can get even more granular. Going back to what Devin said, is this an inbound campaign or is this just a nurturing campaign that we need to keep getting those leads to do the next action so we could get granular into the reporting side of things?
Love it. Max, where does your mind go again with this question before we move on? Of like, what should they be thinking about at the creation moment?
Well, I mean, at the creation moment, I think you guys all kind of like hit it, right? Like talking about why are you building this campaign in the first place, right? What assets you're going to put into it, why are you including those assets? Right. But I'd say, like even earlier than that, let's say for the folks that are like just starting out with the campaigns tool, right. I'd say don't feel like you have to set a goal. Right. Especially when you don't know what, like your benchmark for success is. Right. You know, maybe your first couple of campaigns you're running, you're focusing on getting the content out there and setting up these like, structures and getting all this stuff down and seeing where it kind of lands in terms of the metrics. And then after that setting goals that exceed those metrics. Right. You know, if you, if you go and set yourself a lofty goal without knowing what like a reasonable goal is, and then like, you fall super short of that you're going to start going, oh, man, we suck at this. Like, everything about it was bad. When, like, you're not even sure where you should be looking as a benchmark for what you should be exceeding. Right.
So you know, there's a reason why they're not required.
Yeah, exactly. Cut yourself some slack, Jack. Right. So, yeah, that's what I'll just say, like, don't be too hard on yourself.
I love that. So let's kind of keep going here because I think sometimes we can learn from what some people might call failures. I don't really believe in failure. I believe in lessons that we can learn along the way. But what are some things that you just think HubSpot user, you are just getting that wrong. Like, what are people doing wrong with HubSpot campaigns?
I can tell you that right now. Limping everything into one campaign. Cut it out.
Oh, everything.
You want to unpack that a little bit, Devin? You were quick to click on that.
He was passionate about that. Knock it off.
Listen, it's one thing to have a campaign that is devoted to reporting on one particular push or one particular goal. It's another thing to have a blogs campaign. We don't need a blogs campaign. We have a blog.
Huge.
L. One of the things that I see a lot, and this is just a personal preference, is they don't year or month date the campaigns, and they do these campaigns year to year. So from an analytical standpoint, they just think this one campaign is still generating revenue and they're not. They're not giving themselves the success of saying, how was my 2022 campaign versus my 2023? Because that is an awesome feature of HubSpot campaigns is being able to compare campaigns to campaigns.
Right?
And even breaking it down by quarter.
I think also too, like, sometimes people, like, while campaigns is a great, like, organization tool, like when you're looking at the listing pages of those assets, I think sometimes people will like, substitute coming up with good naming conventions for your assets just by tagging them with the campaign. And that's tough because, like, let's say you're trying to like trigger a workflow off of like a form, right? But you've got like a billion forms with like similar names. But, like, the only way, I don't even know forms, I don't even know if that's a good example. The landing page that the form is on, right? You know, and you got a landing pages with a whole like the same, like similar names because you've just used the campaigns tool to like organize them, but you didn't give it a good naming convention. Like that's going to hurt you elsewhere. Right. So don't give up on naming conventions just because you can kind of make it easy and slot it into a campaign like, you know, other data hygiene stuff is like still important even if you're using the campaigns tool.
Yeah, I, I upvote that naming conventions and dare I say a tagging mentality around naming conventions so you can easily search and find the things in HubSpot is is like a definite tip that must be said all the time. So here's the thing though, Justin, you said something that. And by the way, been using HubSpot for, you know, over a decade now. And when I think about, you know, looking at year over year of campaigns, I think about going to reporting and the campaigns tool and like filtering it by year by year. For some reason that didn't feel like what you meant when you said that thing. So can you kind of dig in a little bit deeper of like date or setting dates for these campaigns to then be able to use the compare campaigns tool with it?
Yeah. So when you're creating a campaign, two of the dates it asks you is a start date, end date. And as Max pointed out, it doesn't have to have an end date. That's okay. But if we're running like quarter four marketing campaign, let's say we're doing a Black Friday sale, the biggest thing you want to do is set yourself up for success. So name it. 2023, quarter four, E commerce push, whatever it is, or B2B push. Then when you're going back and you want to look at how did our 22. What? Because our goal as marketers. Remember, you've got HubSpot. Why? Because we want to grow business in a repeatable fashion. Right. But we need to improve what we did previously. But if we're not looking back and we're just grouping everything into one big bucket, as Devin said, guess what? We're not going to be able to easily filter out and see what was successful in 2022, 2023 and so forth. So when we look at and compare those actual campaigns and in the HubSpot campaign tool, we're actually seeing sessions, generated deals, influence all that in one snapshot to easily say why did this campaign improve versus another campaign very fast?
So am I cloning the campaign and adding new dates? Like talk me through the actual, like here's the system or process that you should go through to be able to easily have these what feels like you're talking about individual campaigns based on dates to be able to deliver. Yeah, help a brother out here. Because I'm trying to pull this thread because I think it's something very unique for the Hub Heroes listeners that not a lot of people are thinking about.
Yeah. So when you're, when you, before you even start creating the next campaign, you want to go back and look at your last campaign. What worked well? Did our ads perform? Did our landing page perform? Did our emails perform? What? What performed? So then we're going to create the next one. Okay, so let's give it a date and time. Maybe you do month campaigns. So 2023. 06. Right. I got my June campaign coming up and I've got a name associated with it.
Right.
What's the theme that we're doing? Right. That goes back to the goal, Devin. You know, I mean, that's like literally hitting a home run every time. If you don't have a goal, why are you doing the campaign in the first place? But using the date values of start and end date will then help us understand, hey, this is when this campaign's ending. Let's go ahead and queue up the next one. Right. But then two, I'm able to look at all my assets and easily say, okay, this one's ending. Let me start planning the next one. Because I'm looking at. Because HubSpot's got a sweet tab that says starting next quarter, you can easily keep yourself and your team organized. Can you clone the everything from a campaign? I don't know. I've never tried cloning a campaign with all the assets. Who can answer?
Yeah, interesting.
I should be able to, but I can't.
Yeah, we gotta, we gotta be able to deep dive in that in the near future. But let's keep chugging along because holy crap, time flies when you're having fun and we are running out of it. So we started to bump into this whole kind of reporting idea or standpoint. So let's do this. Let's say when it comes to reporting, and of course we know we have the individual campaigns, but when it comes to reporting, are there things that you do that you would want to share, lessons that you learned along the way when it comes to actually reporting in HubSpot, around the HubSpot campaigns tool and the campaigns that you've created?
Yeah, so I'm going to jump in there. The best one for a marketer to stare at is the ad performance and the email performance. So when you click into the campaign itself, that Performance tab is the one that's defaulted. And if you just scroll down to the bottom of that screen, you can instantly see how well your emails, how well your forms, how well your ads did. And that's your quick, dirty reporting. I know for a fact you could then give your higher ups that report within three minutes because all the data is right there. You don't have to go build a custom report. You don't have to see which ones were attributed, what contacts were affected by that.
Right.
It's all right there in one screen. How did our landing pages do? How much did we spend in ads? How many ads, impressions, clicks, how many deals did we generate? All in one screen. So your reporting is done. And I know I told one of our customers that. Exactly. Statement. Like, just go to the campaign's report screen, performance screen. And she was like, what are you talking about? I was like, yeah, just go there. She's like, oh, my gosh, this is everything we've been looking for. And I didn't know it was there.
Sorry, I was. I was trying to see what would actually happen if you cloned it. And it does actually clone assets, which is like brand, brand new to me, but it does it in an unpublished state, which is actually great. Awesome. What was the question? That's powerful right there.
So what's fun? Here's the thing. Hang on, hang on. What's fun is again, if you go watch the video version of this, you're gonna see me talk about pulling the thread. You're gonna be able to watch, in my case, what is the bottom left box of Max's face drop, start to look at a monitor and figure ish out right in the middle of the podcast. Hence why he's like, what are we talk.
You know, the best part is I just had a therapy session where we both came to the conclusion that I probably have adhd.
Well, most likely. So here the question, Max was, what do you do? What have you learned around reporting on campaigns? When you're building a campaign with the HubSpot campaigns tool, is there something that you've, you know, ninja tip tricks thing that you. You seen or done in the past?
Well, I think, I mean, if you were to ask me about, like, reporting in the past, like, I would have called like, cam. And today I still think I would call campaigns a reporting tool. Right. Because, like, what's cool is you can go and see the relevant metrics for each one of those assets aggregated all in a single pane of glass. Right. Kind of. It's sort of like, the same benefit that, like, a dashboard gives you. Right. So you can almost think of it as like a dashboard of, like, assets that are related to each other and the individual performance for, like, each one of them. Right. Or same thing as kind of like any of those, like, analytics pages. Right. So, like, I've always thought of the tool itself, like, as an actual, like, reporting tool, but I think also they've started to bring in and I need to, like, look at this again because it's been a while since I've seen it, but they started to bring in, like, the associated, like, campaign info on assets into the custom report builder, I'm pretty sure. So, like, when you bring in, like, those CMS assets, and I might be wrong here, I don't know if anyone can, like, back me up on this, but I'm pretty sure when you bring in, like, the CMS app, the CMS assets into the custom report builder, you'll actually see, like, which campaign they're associated with and things like that. So what's really cool there is that if you're building any reports around your assets, you can, like, break that stuff down by the campaign it's in and things like that. Where I'm unsure is like, where, like, the custom property for campaigns manifest themselves in the custom reporting tool. I don't know if you saw that, Justin, if you were playing around with it at all. I haven't done a ton with, with customer, like, custom properties for campaigns specifically. I don't really know, like, where they show, but yeah, I know you could use them to, like, filter stuff, right? Like, you can filter campaigns in the index page.
Yeah, you can't filter. You can't add them to a customer report. Just.
Okay, so it doesn't show up because.
They just opened up the custom properties, right?
Yeah.
And I'm looking to see if we can set that as our primary data source. And it doesn't look like you can.
Yeah, it's only you can. You can set the asset types themselves, I think, as primary data sources, but, like, not the campaign itself. But it brings in those properties when you're doing, like, filters and stuff. So that's cool for some people.
Say, though here's. Here's what I'll say, though, Max, because you were barking up an interesting tree. And yes, I do always do these episodes with a tab of HubSpot open. I'm just gonna throw that out there. If you do add web pages, landing pages, blog posts, that type of stuff into your custom report builder, you're gonna Literally see a section that shows up called campaigns.
Yes.
And you'll start to see words like campaign, aud, budget, campaign budget, total campaign, end date, goal, name, owner, Spence. And not literally, ladies and gentlemen. I have to scroll down to actually read all of them. So I'm gonna. Under campaigns is number of forms, merged Record IDs, number of blog posts, like. And by the way, I created a custom campaign property called Test Training. You want to know what I see in my actual custom report builder right here? A property called Test Training.
Oh, they do bring it in. That's.
They bring it into the customer report.
But you heard it here first, ladies.
And gentlemen, Customer campaign properties are in the custom report builder.
So I want to regroup so everyone knows that you can't add it as a data source, but then when you add in email ads, landing pages, websites, it will bring in those campaign properties.
Yeah, so it, so it's, it's showing it. It's basically showing those. Using the fields of like associated campaigns to those assets. Right. It's kind of like how we talked about in that reporting episode, everything is an object, right? And now they're treating other stuff such as assets you build, analytical events and now campaigns as their own objects and bringing more of that into the reporting tool, which is super cool. I'm trying to like wrap my brain around how I like build reports with that stuff because I'm so used to just like the big four objects plus custom objects and that's kind of it. Right. So like, it's, it's cool. I'd like to see like, who out there is like doing some cool stuff with that.
Yeah, it would be super dope because I think when, when you start to think about those things, your brain isn't able to go in different directions that it once wasn't able to go as far as HubSpot and reporting and campaigns and bringing into this happy mix of what you can show and then put on a dashboard and then actually email out on a daily, weekly or monthly basis for those people who are actually trying to see that campaign information. And Devin, you've been sitting there quietly, just chilling, listening, and we are quickly running out of time and I have to get back to something that when you said it was like, right, what did he just say? I gotta hear this cat preach. And that is the question that got put into our, Our show notes as we were doing this is how can I use HubSpot campaigns with offline marketing like postcards, billboards, magazine ads, etc. Devin Bellamy, my man Please wax poetic.
I will. So the way HubSpot is able to track all of these things is the same way Google Analytics would track it by using utm. And so what you're able to do is create these custom URLs that are usually, like in social, automatically shortened and inserted. Your links and your emails, they're automatically generated for this attribution. But what you're able to do is you don't have to actually create assets in order to create a tracking URL within your campaign. You're able to go, and I'm doing this from memory here because I'm not anywhere near as efficient as George, where you can go and I believe it's actions and create inside your campaign tool, it's actions and then create tracking URL and then you fill in that information. The medium you could do offline or for, it'll be like other campaigns, when it asks for your sources, you can put in your what it is and specifically the medium you can put in reference to what particular offline item it is somewhere in there. So when you go back and look in your reporting, you'll see that this is the item that generated the this click. The question is, how do you generate that click from an offline item? There's a few different ways. What you can do is in your URL redirects, you can put in like if you've ever watched a TV show and they say, go to our URL.com tv7 and what you can do is in your redirects, make TV7 redirect to your tracking URL. And so you'll know that everything that came in through this tracking URL was because of that particular commercial. The other thing you can do is take that link, that link and put it into a QR code and add that QR code that everyone loves since that super bowl where they completely crashed the Internet. By incorporating it into a commercial, you can create a QR code that goes to your tracking URL. And then that way you can have attribution saying, hey, this is how many people scan this in. And there are a lot of QR code tools that will make you pay extra for that feature. You don't need it. All you got to do is put in that that tracking URL into the QR code and it'll generate it for free, incorporate that QR code into the artwork of whatever it is that you're designing, and then Bob's your uncle, you're good to go.
So, Devin, they don't need it.
They don't need it.
They don't need it.
So no, I want to, I want to piggyback off of that because then you could buy a quick trash domain, like a small three digit, four digit, whatever you can get. Throw that, connect it to your HubSpot account. So like Hub co, right. Connect it as a redirect domain. Then you can add these URLs as redirects, like hub code, Interstate 5, right. I5. Then you know every traffic that came from Interstate 5's billboard purchase. Now we're able to track. And those are easy to remember. Shorter. Instead of this long name that's on the billboard, buy something quick, get it in there, connected. Because you can connect unlimited redirect domains. These are not branded kits. These are unlimited redirect domains.
So much good stuff. So I want to end. Oh, Max, you're. I can't hear you.
That's awesome.
Good job muting yourself, Max.
I muted myself and I've been. I was trying to interject, but here's the other thing. If you're doing postal mail, like direct mail to people's houses, you could stop doing that and just never do it again.
Oh, there you go.
Or hold on, on the flip side. Or you could send targeted poster codes with the HubSpot record ID attached to that direct QR code. So now we're getting a one to one transaction.
Delete your HubSpot, you don't deserve it. And just never send anybody mail again because it just goes in the recycling and you are murdering trees. Murdering trees.
So, Max, I'll send you a later letter later tonight.
So that's what I was going to ask for. Can I get your address?
So I want to end the show. I want to end the show on a little bit of a different note. And that is I want us. Because again, I'm super curious. The question is actually not only to you gentlemen, but it is also to the Hub heroes community listeners, what do you wish HubSpot campaigns could do? What is the wish list item? So is there something that you wish would get added in that would make it even better than everything that we've talked about today?
Yeah, the ability to change a campaign name. I know why it can't be done, but dang it, I wish it could be.
Can we. Can they. Can you do multiple assets to multiple campaigns yet or. No. Can I take a landing page and hook it onto two or.
Well, so that's not landing pages. No workflows.
Yeah, well, but interesting.
But that might be changing though. So I have to test this, because I bumped into something, by the way, totally going off the rails for a second. But I bumped and. But keep it in the podcast. I bumped into something the other day. When you actually create a campaign based off of a template, creating a off of a campaign template is completely different than the historical way that we've talked about creating a HubSpot campaign in this episode. And it made me start to wonder if when creating from a template, because now we're adding individual items to that campaign, if we could have that same item in multiple campaigns. I still have to test it. Any other nerds out there, run with it, let us know. But yes, Max, you're putting the finger up in the air again.
I'm saying I want to give my one thing, so my one. My one thing. Because that was just a question. That wasn't my one thing. All right. Oh, my one thing. I want my one wish. Okay, okay. Assuming it's on its way. But now that we have the budget field and you can see how much money someone has actually dumped into a campaign, what would be amazing is if you could then look at the attributed revenue and do a very quick calculation that gives you a return on investment of what you spent versus what you made. That would be super neat. The numbers are there. Just do the maths and put it on the screen. And where did Devin go?
It's okay.
I.
So I'm gonna throw my one.
Yeah, go for it.
Just my one wish. That I wish is when you're connecting ad campaigns into the campaign, I want that money to automatically be deducted out of the budget.
Yes, yes, yes.
So I don't have to go in and say, okay, how much have I spent out of ads now? Because I've got to go do a report on it.
Isn't it supposed to do that right now with the new line item stuff? I thought it was supposed to show as a spend. Okay, Right.
I haven't, because I haven't seen any ads come across yet. I'll have to go test that because I've been sort of mind blown right now with this clone campaign because I'm gonna move all my clonable assets that we do into campaign so they can just clone and launch.
So. So I'm gonna give you, ladies and gentlemen, my wish list item for the campaigns tool, and then we're going to send you back to your regularly scheduled day, because we're already probably longer than we should be, and that is this. I wish. When I went into the HubSpot campaigns tool and I clicked on that little form, add a form or associate form that I could do one little thing. And the reason that I would love to do this one little thing is because one of the questions that I always get asked is how do I actually tie sales to a campaign? And if HubSpot would allow me not only to attach a form but attach a meeting link to a campaign that could be a direct tie to the fact that they did a discovery meeting or they did a closing presentation or whatever that meeting link is. And what kills me is that I know that meeting links is literally just another type of HubSpot form that doesn't feel like a form conversion because it's in a filter. When you go form submissions, all your meeting links are in there when you are generating a list or doing reporting. So can we please just get it in campaigns so we can tie it tighter to those sales meetings that are happening based on the campaign assets we created.
