Exploring the New Customer Journey Analytics Tools in HubSpot

The announcement of customer journey analytics reporting at #INBOUND22 set the HubSpot LinkedIn community on fire.

Since then, it's only gotten more popular as HubSpot users continue to find clever use cases for the tool and HubSpot delivers additional functionality.

The customer journey analytics tool is based off of a type of visualization called a sankey diagram. Generally, it's used to depict a flow from one set of values to another. In the context of HubSpot Marketing Hub, it's used to depict the flow and performance of connected marketing efforts.

Or, in the words of HubSpot: this type of reporting allows you to "view the impact of every interaction a contact has with your business. With a journey report, you can find out which touchpoints work best for attracting customers."

Pretty cool, right? Let's explore how to use the customer journey analytics tool in HubSpot.

Please note that in this post, we'll cover reporting as it relates to the Journey Analytics tool. You can learn more about the general HubSpot reporting tools here.

TRANSCRIPT

Hey, LinkedIn, I had a free hour today. So I used some of my education, marketing time that we have at Remotish to take a peek at Journey Analytics, which is the new beta that HubSpot just released coming out of INBOUND 22. It made a lot of noise at INBOUND, a lot of people are really excited about this tool. Kind of have early access to it and information about this. So we knew this was coming down the pipeline on HubSpot’s roadmap. And it's definitely been something that I've been interested in and wanting to get my hands on, but I just hadn't had a point or reason to up to this point for any of my clients.

So I took a stab at it today and cracked open the reporting tool and took a look at it. And I immediately just started to play around with some of the use cases that I would, you know, see this as a useful benefit to track a customer's journey or contact’s journey through. And definitely still learning about this tool. So I don't consider myself an expert in it by any means yet but looking to put my learnings and kind of what I'm thinking about for this tool I'm so open, get some feedback from LinkedIn and see how you guys are using it. And if you've even taken a look at it yet.

So I think this tool is really cool from like a macro perspective, how many leads are coming in? How many of those are converting into MQL, SQL? And then from there, how many of those are converting into opportunities, customers, evangelists, so forth, kind of, you know, the traditional funnel reporting that you get out of HubSpot, like you can do that in a lot of ways with this tool that expands beyond the traditional funnel reports that you would get in HubSpot, really looking at either how they've made it through their lifecycle stage or through the deal stages, is how that funnel traditionally operates.

But this allows you to now create new funnel reports from a macro perspective, to see how those breakdowns are occurring. And now through these different chart types, especially the Sankey chart, you can actually see the journey in the movement and how that relates to one another as they make it through that journey. So from a macro perspective, it's interesting. And I think there's a lot of creative freedom that this tool opens up. But where I think it really gets powerful is from a micro perspective. We've just launched this campaign, we just launched this process. And it's a really important thing for us to continue to monitor how our contacts are moving through this flow. So we're going to build out this journey analytics report for that specific flow. So I think of this tool being really powerful for going into, you know, specific things that you built out, and trying to see how that journey, essentially, is playing out across your assets.

So there's all types of options over here. You have your lifecycle stage, and then you have all the different marketing assets, you have in HubSpot, the payments tool, I think that's super interesting. And then you have some of the sales options as well. So you have your sales emails, which are your one on ones. And then you have your sequences, which are your automated, kind of drip campaigns. And you can also pull in web pages and custom behavioral events as well. So all super cool options here.

Immediately my marketing ops brain turns on, and I want to go into a portal and start playing around with what this looks like in terms of a process that I've just launched. So this is for one of the private gated websites that we've recently launched.

And here, what you're looking at is the form submissions. And one of the cool things that you can do is that you can break this down by ID, so you can get your form ID. And you can actually filter by that. How do you go about getting a form ID would be you go into your form. Thanks, Camille, for this tip. And then you go into embed that form. And then in here, you have your portal ID and your form ID, right. So when you copy and paste this code, you actually can't copy and paste it straight from here. So you have to copy it, paste it into some kind of editor and then grab the code out of here, ID out of there. And you can come in here and paste it.

Another thing that you can do is you can export all of your forms, if you want to, you can select however many forms, then you can export them, and then you can grab them all at once and bring them into here. So that's how you would essentially look at a form ID and you can filter down by that.

You can also filter down based on your emails that are delivered. So this I'm pulling the email campaign ID, make sure to use campaign and not content. And where you're gonna get that code is coming to one of your emails. See details. I'm not sure why all of these have two internal HubSpot IDs. The other quarter I was looking at only had one but you can grab those there. You can pull those over and you can use that for your email campaign ID. So for example, if you had just recently launched an entire campaign, you'll go into the campaign's tool, open up every single one of those emails individually. Pull those all out and add them here. I'm hoping HubSpot gets this filtering option a little bit better. I have a lot of experience in HubSpot, and it took me a while to figure out how to grab the form ID and the email can't campaign ID. It's not intuitive in any way. So hopefully they'll be able to add the option to filter so that this can be easier from a user experience perspective.

From that point, this particular flow I'm looking at somebody filled out a registration form that fires off the transactional email where they are delivered the email that allows them to sign up or register, which is on a systems page, it's gated, and you can only get there through that email being delivered. They don't want to know for all the emails that were delivered, how many of those were opened, and then how many of the contacts clicked a link in that email.

One of the really interesting things that you can do and it kind of messes with your brain a little bit is you can add this step, make this step optional. So if I took this away, and I refresh the report, we see that it's going to, now that everything is required, they must make it through every step of that flow in order to reach the end, right. So we can see how they're tracking throughout that journey all the way down to the end.

But when you turn on make step optional, this is when you can kind of see all the different paths that somebody could take, and how they're finding their way to the end. And this is where it gets really interesting is like breaking it down by making different steps optional. And looking at the journey analytics, and then seeing what insights you can take out of it obviously becomes very complex. At this point, you kind of have to, like one of the things I'm having an issue seeing is like, understanding what this particular report is 372 contacts, went from email delivered to email open. And then 247 contacts went from email delivered to clicked links in email without opening the email, which logically that doesn't make sense, right? What I'm thinking is happening here is there's something with the privacy laws with the way that email providers are now reporting on opens, that's restricting some of the contacts from being accessible, most likely, these contacts have Apple. That's what I'm thinking, also, this tools and data. So it's not perfect either. But I can take that, make this step optional. And it becomes a very clear stream from start to finish. But I want to have an entire picture. And my nice little abstract. So I like to see things like this and go dig in and try to figure out why exactly it looks like this. But all really interesting things findings.

And then obviously, if you wanted to, you could see which of these became opportunities. And which of these became customers, right, because once they gain access to this, this gated portal that then transitions into them asking for free trials and things like that demo requests, which then transitions into, you know, actual opportunities and, and closed WON deals and HubSpot customers.

And also a couple other really cool things. No, I'm not sure this one's too cool. But you can only have up to a 30 day range for your days, which, you know, it threw me off at first, because I wanted to set this all time like I like to look at data from an all time perspective or like a quarterly perspective. But this limits you to a 30 day, which makes sense, because this is a lot of data for the report to pool and analyze. But you are limited by that. And maybe one day that'll change. But for now, it's limited to 30.

You can also sort by a property or list, which is really cool. So for example, if I wanted to look exclusively at the contacts who signed up for that dated back end, I have a list for that. And I can pull that list. So you can add that in as filter criteria, which is really cool as well. That's really kind of all the interesting thing, I think this is actually really cool.

That's the ability to see your total conversion, like 90% of the people 666 filtered in some weird number. And then 605 actually clicked the link in the email. So we know we have for people who have signed up and filled out that registration form, we know we have about a 90% conversion on this 91% conversion rate, which is amazing. And that it's really interesting to see the time that it takes for a contact to make it between these different steps, right. So here, it doesn't really make sense. But when you're looking at form submissions to the email being delivered, one of the things with this gated private content is that the first registration email from the time this form is submitted to contact us to make it into these different forms, those forms then control access to the page and fire off the registration email. One of the things that we realized through testing was that you know, abut to get cut off 10 minutes. So I'll make a part two.

The interesting thing that we found while going through the testing process was that it takes about five plus minutes for that registration email to deliver. So one of the things that I can see that verifies that is that on average, it's taking about 10 minutes for that email to actually deliver. And it's taken about an hour, a little, you know, an hour and some change, for the context to open it. And from open that's really interesting from open to click link in emails, taking the contacts 30 minutes on average. So I would imagine that they just open it. I'm not really sure what's happening there.

Yeah, it's just interesting to be able to dig deep into these kinds of analytics so interested to hear what your experience has been with this tool thus far. Where do you think it shines? Where do you think there's limitations? And yeah, I'm really interested to hear HubSpot feedback or the HubSpot ecosystem and community everybody on LinkedIn so, so longer video I appreciate everybody who stuck around to the end and please drop all your thoughts in the comments below. Thank you very much and I will talk to you soon!