At our workshop in 2016, Scott Nursten talked about how Google Analytics data could supplement your HubSpot data and help you get the most out of your account. But, with the release of the new HubSpot “web analytics dashboard”, HubSpot has given us a lot more to work with, reducing the need to visit multiple platforms for your reports.
HubSpot advertises this new analytics dashboard as a hub to measure “your entire marketing funnel in one place with built-in analytics, reports, and dashboards”. They even claim that it’s “everything you need to be a smarter, data-driven marketer”.
With this in mind, I dived into their new dashboard and compared it against the standard of Google Analytics (GA).
When you click on the dropdown menu of available dashboards in your HubSpot account, the “Web Analytics Dashboard” now displays for all users. When you select it, you’re presented with a page that begins something like this.
The analytics begins by outlining sessions, which are compared as new and returning visitors, and filtered by custom date ranges (which then applies to the rest of the data that comes below too).
Like GA, HubSpot’s analytics allows for a view of daily, weekly, and monthly sessions of new and returning visitors. You are also given an overview of your traffic and engagement metrics following this.
Your traffic, as usually done in HubSpot, is broken down into Total, % New, and % Mobile. A fascinating addition to see is the “Engagement Metrics” box.
These metrics give HubSpot’s analytics a much needed boost. Your bounce rate, page views and average session length can be used to understand your users’ behaviour in a more detailed way. While HubSpot hasn’t gone as granular as GA just yet (i.e. you can’t filter the bounce rate for specific pages, only your average bounce rate for your entire website), it’s still a step in the right direction.
This is promising, as HubSpot claims that the new dashboard can “track the complete customer lifecycle, from anonymous visitor to closed customer”. A hefty statement, but the data that comes next makes you take it seriously.
HubSpot delves into sessions by source, and further breaks this down into new visitor sessions by source and session engagement rates.
This data helps you assess which mediums are giving you the most traffic, and which of these offer the most value to your users. It also helps you to identify where issues lie, or where your time and effort is best spent.
For even more detail, HubSpot next delivers the device breakdown of your visitors.
This shows which of your visitors use mobile, desktop, or other (usually tablets or iPads).
This is extremely helpful when considering what kind of strategy to develop moving forward. While everything is more and more geared towards a mobile audience, does your particular customer care about that? Perhaps you should be considering your desktop strategy more? Or have you been too careless with your mobile site? These are the questions the new HubSpot dashboard gets you asking.
In a similar vein, HubSpot also filters your users by country too.
There’s no doubt that HubSpot’s web analytics dashboard is a huge step forward for the software stack. While it still doesn’t offer as granular a view of your analytics as GA, it certainly is on the right path to competing against the Google giant. For the time being, it offers a great range of data to pair with GA and is another step toward having all your information in a single system.
If you’d like to know more about HubSpot and its different services, packages and platforms, you can read our in-depth review by clicking below.