How to Build a HubSpot Marketing Dashboard

Data is the new oil, and every business is aware of this fact. But like oil, data also needs to be refined so that it can drive profits. Businesses and marketers employ various techniques and tools for making sense of collected data. One of the most effective tools is a marketing dashboard.

Some names have become almost synonymous with marketing in recent years, and HubSpot is one such organization. HubSpot helps you measure all the marketing metrics of your website. HubSpot marketing dashboard is a simplified and easy-to-read tool for viewing these metrics.

This post shows you how to build a dashboard in HubSpot and explains how you can do this outside of the platform. We have also covered some must-have metrics to add to any marketing dashboard. 

What is a HubSpot marketing dashboard?

The dashboard of a car gives you a clear understanding of what’s happening ‘under the hood.’ 

Similarly, the marketing dashboards give you real-time data that shows how the company and its marketing campaigns are doing. You can evaluate and use the insights of your business’ performance on an ongoing basis and make adjustments to your marketing campaign or strategy promptly.

A HubSpot marketing dashboard is a readily available tool to track your company’s performance. It includes reports that evaluate your traffic growth, lead generation, and engagement. Its purpose is to follow customers’ journey from start to end.

It records various marketing activities and shows them on display. These could be campaigns, blog views, ad spending, subscriber lists, etc.

Why set up a marketing dashboard in HubSpot?

HubSpot’s Marketing Dashboard presents data in a simple and digestible format. Having such a dashboard has a few other benefits too:

• It’s easy to skim through to analyze the crucial metrics.
• Visual representation makes it easier to tweak a marketing campaign.
• A well-thought-through HubSpot marketing dashboard will provide clear guidance for any business.
• Attract, engage, and delight – the Flywheel model, adapted by HubSpot, ensures lead generation, customer engagement, and customer retention align with end goals.
• It’s a time-saving tool for visualizing your data.
• Constant monitoring helps examine the performance.
• You can create up to 300 different reporting dashboards for various reporting purposes.

Insights from a dashboard will keep you updated on how your marketing strategies are performing. However, as discussed earlier, collecting and monitoring data is just the start. The real benefit to your business will come from utilizing this information to modify and mold your marketing efforts.

The HubSpot dashboard reports enable you to make data-driven decisions on where to spend your budget to increase your return on investment (ROI).

Subscription plans and the dashboard limits

The higher your plan, the more dashboards you can have and more reports on each of them. The free account doesn’t include advanced reports such as a behavioral event trigger report, predictive lead scoring report, etc. 

As of today, HubSpot’s Marketing Hub plans are like this:

1. Free – up to 3 dashboards, each with 10 reports per dashboard
2. Starter – up to 10 dashboards, 10 reports per dashboard
3. Professional – up to 25 dashboards, 30 reports per dashboard
4. Enterprise – up to 50 dashboards, 30 reports per dashboard

How to create a custom marketing dashboard in HubSpot?

HubSpot’s marketing dashboard is easy to create. At the same time, you can customize it with ease with virtually any reports you can think of.

To set it up, all you have to do is login into your HubSpot account and at the top, go to Reports > Dashboards.

After clicking on Dashboard, you will see a Dashboard Library with some pre-made templates. This includes one blank dashboard. You can customize both pre-made and blank templates.

To create a marketing dashboard, click on the Marketing template. You will see several reports you can add to the dashboard. Select the ones you prefer and unselect the ones you don’t need. 

The next step is to name the dashboard and manage its access (view and edit). And the last step is to create the dashboard by clicking on the Create dashboard button.

The dashboard will automatically populate once you connect your accounts/website and have the relevant data added to HubSpot.

If you want to create a dashboard from scratch, you can use a blank dashboard and add reports to it later.

Hubspot dashboard outside of Hubspot

Building and maintaining a dashboard in Hubspot is effortless. The problems begin to arise when you want to combine data from different apps into one dashboard. You can import plenty to Hubspot, but even that has limitations.

When building a dashboard showcasing different aspects of a business, it’s best to do it on neutral territory – for example, in an Excel workbook or a data visualization tool (Data Studio, Tableau, etc.). 

Using a tool such as Coupler.io, you can automatically import data from HubSpot but also from Salesforce, Pipedrive, Airtable, Quickbooks, and many others.

In our article on HubSpot dashboard, we used Coupler.io and its HubSpot to Google Sheets integration to build a self-updating dashboard monitoring our deals. It’s just an example of what you could fetch from HubSpot because there are many other types of data available: contacts, products, tickets, emails, tasks, and more.

When building your dashboard, Google Sheets isn’t the only option. You can take advantage of Coupler.io’s HubSpot integration with Excel as well as connect HubSpot to BigQuery if you’d like. 

You can also use Coupler.io to connect HubSpot to Looker Studio or PowerBI. It’s even easier with a ready-to-use free dashboard template. You can get such a dashboard with your data in just a few minutes:

You can use this free template to build a HubSpot dashboard in Looker Studio in just a few minutes. To do so, to the HubSpot CRM Dashboard template and click on the Readme tab. 

HubSpot marketing dashboard examples

Different types of data need different templates to visualize the results. In HubSpot, you can generate reports based on the metrics you’d like to measure.

These could be Google Ad Spend, Social Ad Spend, Bounce Rate, Email Contacts, Email Subscribers, Sales by Platform, Followers/Subs by Platform, etc. 

The custom reports will automatically refresh with available data every two hours. However, you can retrieve the latest data by manually refreshing a report or dashboard once every 15 minutes.

HubSpot offers several pre-made dashboards. Each comes with some default reports that may be a good starting point for your analysis. You can pick either template and add or remove reports as you please.

Marketing template

Reports that could come in handy in a marketing dashboard are:

• Website visits, new contacts, and customer totals by day.
• Landing page total views and form submissions.
• Contacts and lead generation with list segmentation, engagement, conversation, and lead scoring.
• Marketing emails sent total, A/B test, and engagement rates.

Marketing Channel Performance template

These reports may be of use to measure the success of your marketing channel:

• New visitor session totals by day with source breakdown
• Form submission totals
• Ad clicks by the social network
• Multi-touch revenue attribution

Website Analytics template

Reports for a Website Analytics dashboard include:

• Website visitor engagement rates.
• Session totals by day with source breakdown.
• Session bounce rate, average duration, and page view totals by source.

You can always create a custom dashboard for adding and removing the reports your business wants to focus on. 

What to monitor on a HubSpot marketing dashboard?

HubSpot has many effective reports to choose from, each serving different purposes. You can create your unique dashboard with customized reports. Also, you can choose to give access (view or edit) to certain members of your team.

For each channel, you can keep track of various channels. Here are must-haves to monitor for specific types of reports:

• Ads – By connecting your accounts, you can analyze which ads bring in more customers. You can easily sync your CRM to your ad accounts to optimize the delivery of your ads across networks.

• Email – A great way to build your brand is by sending personalized, automated emails with a drag-and-drop editor and personalization tokens. With Professional and Enterprise plans, you can perform A/B testing and continuously improve your email marketing strategies. It also provides all the essential data such as your open email totals, email subscribers list, etc.

• Landing Pages – Whenever users visit the landing page, you can monitor and analyze how much time they are spending on each page. It also makes sense to monitor what they explore, which paths they take, on which pages they abandon the site, etc. You can analyze the effectiveness of the content and the CTA by looking into the conversion rates.

• Social – Analyze all your social media accounts. You can schedule and publish updates and analyze performance by monitoring campaigns, posting frequency, and engagement with different types of content.

• SEO – Optimise your content based on SEO and keyword recommendation reports. See what drives traffic and what underdelivers. Compare the results of the experiments.

• Campaign – HubSpot’s all-in-one campaign management makes things easier. You can create, manage and run campaigns from one place. The real-time data reports help by giving ideas so you can tweak campaigns if needed.

• Forms – Integrate forms with the contact database. Analyze the conversion rate and see how each element of a form influences the process. Experiment with different approaches and see results on a dashboard.

• Behavioral Triggers – Suppose someone visited your website and spent quite some time on a particular product page, this can be considered a potential lead. How about notifying that user when you are giving a discount on that product? This is just an example. But you can set such triggers that reach out to users when they perform a specific action.

• Website – HubSpot offers many website measuring metrics. These include: website visitor engagement rates, website visit traffic sources by day, session bounce rate, average duration, and total page views by source.

What happens if my marketing dashboard data disappears from HubSpot?

There can be several reasons behind the disappearing marketing dashboard data. Here are a few (with solutions):

• Missing tools, reports, and dashboards: You may not have access to all the features if you’re using a free account. See some examples here:
  • Unable to access Contacts – If your account doesn’t have the Contacts tool, you must upgrade your account to the free HubSpot CRM.
  • Unable to access a specific report – As we mentioned above, there’s a limitation to the number of reports one can have. You can check out your Report library and see if the report you need is available or not.
  • Unable to add a specific dashboard – If you can’t add a certain dashboard, such as Web Analytics, it may not be available with your current plan. You will need to upgrade your account to access unavailable data.
• A tool that was accessible before is missing now? There’s a chance that HubSpot made some UI changes. They may have moved the tool under a different tab. After the initial troubleshooting, you can always write to HubSpot for further assistance.
• Bugs – It’s a rare thing and rarely something to be worried about. You can always raise an incident if you face any such issues.

Hubspot marketing analytics dashboard – wrapping up

A well-designed dashboard is a convenient tool for monitoring the vital metrics of your business. There’s a lot to track when it comes to marketing, but Hubspot makes it easy by bringing it all into one place.

And when it’s not enough, HubSpot data is easily exportable from the platform for further analysis with the help of HubSpot integrations. DataViz tools are particularly suitable for crunching big sets of data points and translating them into human-readable charts, scorecards, and others. 

Choose what works best for you. Good luck, and thanks for your time!