How to Use Custom Filters Rules in HubSpot Reports

I used to be a big time hater on the reporting tools in HubSpot. 🤬 📊 As one of the most highly requested items from our clients, I've become very familiar with the tool over the last year. I found that the limitations I originally felt didn't have anything to do with the features available and everything to do with my lack of understanding for how to make it work.

Now, I couldn't be a bigger advocate for building out reporting inside of HubSpot. The custom report builder is truly 🤯 In today's video, I review one of the most important aspects of building a custom report — reporting filters. Specifically, this video highlights the custom filter rules and how you can build AND/OR logic to drill-down to a very specific set of data. What are your thoughts on the HubSpot reporting?

TRANSCRIPT

Hey LinkedIn, it's Liam Redding, Senior HubSpot Strategist with Remotish agency. I'm here today to do a quick demo of custom filters in the custom reports builder. This is a tool that’s kind of easy to go unnoticed and can really change the way that you leverage this tool. And change the way that you're able to visualize your data once you know that this logic is possible in the back end of a report.

So inside your custom report builder, you're going to set up your chart, select your chart, and then set up your x and y axis. Real quick, your Y axis is going to be the count of something. So this is going to be numerical. Whereas over here, this is going to be like the way that you categorize that. So that's going to actually be like a bucket. For example, in this we're breaking this down by lifecycle stage on the x axis. Inside of your filters, filters are very important for custom reports. Any report really, it's going to be the way that you can start off in like a bigger bucket. For example, if we were to just set this and remove all filters, it's going to pull all contacts. And it's going to show us even people who have no value and lifecycle stage. So we are going to add this lifecycle stage needs to be known for this report, because we don't want to see people without a value in this use case. And then this is just for example purposes, we have contact owner and deal owner is any of Liam Redding. Well, there's a drop down option up here.

And there's a couple of different options, you have all of the filters below any of the filters below and custom filter rules. A lot of the time, all of the filters below works pretty well. So that's going to be the majority of the time what you use, you can also use any of the filters below where we look at as long as life cycle stages now and it doesn't matter if the deal owner is Liam Redding or not, as long as the contact has life lifecycle stage, it's going to populate. And then even if the contact doesn't have a lifecycle stage, because the contact owner or deal owner is any of Liam Redding, it's going to pull them into this report. So as we can see, the numbers change drastically when we switch that over.

You also have some options for custom filter rules. And this I think is super cool. So what you're able to do here is you're able to add AND, and OR logic. And you do that with parentheses. So for example, in this report, let's say I want to make sure that lifecycle stage is always known. But then I want to look at these two instances. So both when a contact owner is any of Liam Redding and lifecycle stages known, or deal owners any of Liam Redding and lifecycle stage is now.

So what you will be able to do here is we can say, we know that we want the third one to remain consistent between both of them. So we'd add a parenthesis, parenthesis, and we do and three, or now we add two. And, three, when you apply that, it's going to change the way that your data is input into this report. So we'll give it a second to refresh. Now we can see we've built this with customized logic, so that it's going to pull exactly what we wanted it to. Whereas the other two options would not have been able to do that.

And if you have lots of different filters, you can actually get really creative with the way that you're using your custom filter rules. And if those first two options aren't able to get you where you need to get, 99% of the use cases, the custom filter rules will be able to get you there unless it's incredibly complex. And some use cases like the AND OR logic just isn't enough. But for the majority of the things that you're going to be trying to report on it in HubSpot, those three options will be able to get you there. It's a really cool feature that I haven't heard many other people talk about. So I just wanted to share that today. Hope everybody has a great rest of your day and I will be back soon!