Get More Out of HubSpot Reporting With a Third-party Tool

“Editor’s Note: This article includes affiliate links for Databox and IMPACT may receive compensation from them. This in no way affects the other examples/tools featured.”

You need good data to make great decisions. But today, as we have access to millions of data points, the key is determining what data matters and what data we can ignore. When we focus on the right metrics, we can visualize our performance and better predict our future. 

At IMPACT, we’ve been all-in on HubSpot for more than a decade. We’ve trained hundreds of clients to use the platform to better organize, track, and scale their business efforts. From sales pipeline management to marketing automation to service ticketing, HubSpot offers a suite of tools to help organizations grow better.

And it’s not just our clients. We use Sales Hub and Marketing Hub too. And we host our website on HubSpot’s CMS. 

But with all that being said, we know there are limitations to what HubSpot can do for you. Many users turn to third-party tools to bolster the insights they can access to gauge and improve their marketing performance, sales activities, and service efforts. 

A particular favorite here at IMPACT is Databox, which is the most widely used third-party data tool among HubSpot users. 

Below, I’ll explain more about how you can use Databox to get more out of HubSpot reporting, including:

• The features and limitations of HubSpot reporting.
• What Databox is and what it offers.
• How to use Databox to supplement your HubSpot reporting.

Let’s dive in.

What HubSpot Reporting offers

HubSpot offers built-in reporting tools that allow you to monitor the performance of your sales and marketing efforts. You can build custom reports to give you and your team insight to inform your strategy and meet your goals.

Combining CRM and marketing data in one tool enables organizations to follow the customer journey from start to finish. 

Let’s say a customer first found your company by landing on a blog post through organic search. Every action from that first one — sign ups, emails, pages viewed — gets tracked and compiled into reports that can help you evaluate blog performance, conversion rate, and a hundred more pieces of data. 

This helps improve the communication at each stage of the customer journey and provides more insights into what happens to a lead once it gets passed on to the sales team.

HubSpot's built-in reports are split into three different categories: 

• Dashboards:
  HubSpot Reporting Dashboards display easily digestible summaries of your organization's performance in different areas of your sales and marketing. Custom dashboards can also be created to include both marketing and sales data in one report. 
• Reports:
  HubSpot Reports provide a concise summary of your sales, marketing, or services data. These reports are presented in a way that helps organizations understand the performance of these different areas.
• Analytics tools:
  HubSpot Analytics provides a closer look at the data compiled in your reports. This helps you better understand the behavior of your customers to improve marketing and sales effectiveness. You can access traffic analytics, website analytics, ad analytics, and campaign analytics.

The limitations of HubSpot Reporting

HubSpot offers a trove of data to its users, and they can use the custom report builder to create reports and dashboards to track the metrics that matter to them. 

However, HubSpot reporting comes with limitations. We’ve found the biggest ones to be:

Connecting multiple data sources

HubSpot only reports on data already in the given HubSpot account.

If you are working with other platforms to facilitate your marketing and sales strategies, you would require an integration to pull the data into HubSpot or a third-party tool to compile a report that highlights your efforts across all platforms. 

This limitation makes it difficult to showcase the impact of your work as a whole when data is spread across multiple tools and platforms.

High-level data manipulation

HubSpot does not provide the capability to apply mathematical formulas and functions to help drill down into performance. A third-party tool can help you look further into relevant metrics so you can create reports that suit your needs. (More on this below)

Managing multiple accounts

HubSpot does not allow you to combine data from multiple HubSpot portals.

Organizations and agencies that may be managing multiple HubSpot accounts are restricted in their ability to build comprehensive reports that draw insights from all portals.

Third-party tools like Databox can help you overcome this limitation.

What Databox is (and what it offers)

Before we dive into how Databox can help you make sense of your data, let's start with some background information.

Databox is a business analytics platform designed to help companies monitor and analyze data so they can improve the performance of their most important metrics. It’s the top third-party analytics tool among HubSpot users. 

The Databox platform includes a number of reporting features that allow businesses to:

• Align teams around the right metrics and goals.
• Automate reporting.
• Track performance in real-time. 
• Effectively monitor data to capitalize on future opportunities.

With a number of easy-to-use integrations, Databox helps organizations track the performance of all their systems and software in one spot, pulling data from multiple platforms and different accounts. 

Who is Databox for? Businesses and agencies, especially marketers, sales representatives, executives, account managers, and operations teams.

How much does it cost? There is a free forever plan that includes three data source connections, all standard features, and more than 60 integrations.

Paid plans start with a 15-day free trial (no credit card required). After that, plans start at $72 per month, which includes four data source connections, five users, and all standard features. You can get started by creating a free account here.

What it looks like:  

Here’s what it looks like to build a dashboard in Databox:

HubSpot reporting with Databox

Third-party tools like Databox can help you overcome the limitations of HubSpot’s native reporting capabilities. 

Let’s explore how Databox can supplement and enhance HubSpot CRM data to give you a clearer picture of performance. 

Here are three common data challenges that HubSpot users face. You’ll see a video about each that walks you through how to use Databox to help solve it.

Tracking lead to customer conversion rate:

At any given time, the health of your marketing funnel is a leading indicator of your business’s success. But even with HubSpot’s analytics, it can be hard to know exactly how your marketing is going. You’ve got reports on specific marketing assets (like your top-performing blog posts), but attribution models can be problematic. 

Why this matters: Lead to conversion rate gives a high-level overview of the effectiveness of your funnel. With Databox you can track your conversion rate with simple data calculations — or you can also make use of the funnel visualization to highlight the stages of your customer journey. 

Suggested Databox visualization type: Number Block / Line Chart / Bar Chart / Funnel

Here's a walkthrough:

Monitoring engagement

To get a full picture of the effectiveness of your blog, you need a lot of data from several different sources. You want to know about search ranking, session length, bounce rate, backlinks and more. A report that gives all of this information in one place is invaluable.

Combining data from HubSpot Marketing and Google Analytics can help create a custom report to measure the effectiveness of your content strategy. This will help identify whether the number of blogs posted during a given time frame correlates with a higher number of sessions to your website.

Why this matters: Pulling and comparing data from multiple sources is always a challenge. With Databox you can combine data from HubSpot Marketing and Google Analytics to get a clear insight into which blog spots are driving results for your website — and which ones aren’t.  

Suggested Databox visualization type: Combo Chart 

Here's a walkthrough:

Tracking close rate by sales rep

Sales performance is essential for the success of your business. But it can be hard to track, especially when you might have more than one primary data source.

Close rate is calculated by dividing the number of deals won by the total number of open deals. Tracking close rate by sales rep is not an easy metric to monitor in HubSpot. A third-party tool like Databox can allow you to automatically and effectively track an individual’s performance. 

Why this matters: This data helps you track the consistency of the sales in an organization. It is an important metric to track to measure an individual's performance and identify who in the sales team needs extra support. 

Suggested Databox visualization type: Leaderboard

Here’s a Databox expert explaining how to do this: 

More data, better decisions

More than 130,000 businesses use HubSpot to automate marketing, track their deal pipeline, and provide customer service. And while HubSpot Reports offers a wealth of information to help businesses make better decisions, users often turn to third-party tools to integrate key metrics and build more useful reports. 

Whether it’s compiling data from different sources, creating more flexible dashboards, or being able to get a more complete view of your team’s efforts, a tool like Databox can supplement HubSpot Reports to give you what you’ve been missing. 

If you’re ready to use HubSpot as part of a proven, data-driven inbound marketing strategy, talk to an advisor at IMPACT. We’ve helped hundreds of businesses learn to use HubSpot more effectively, boosting results along the way.