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If you’re a business owner, you know that there are a variety of ways that your leads and customers have found, interacted with, and even purchased from your business. Whether they first found your business through organic search, downloaded a content offer that was promoted via a paid ad campaign, or purchased a product from a marketing email campaign, there are many different ways that your prospects can engage with your business. But how can you see which specific way a prospect interacts with your business is performing the best? Or perhaps there’s a certain area that's causing friction and leading your prospects to drop out entirely?
Enter, HubSpot’s customer journey reports. These are visual reports in HubSpot that allow you to create and filter specific customer journeys to see which parts of your process are performing and which might require more attention. In this blog, we’ll go cover what a customer journey report is and how you can get started making them yourself within HubSpot.
What Is a Customer Journey Report?
Customer journey reports are a report type in HubSpot that allow you to see how your website visitors are behaving, engaging, and converting along a variety of specific customer journeys they may take with your brand. These journeys can include website interactions, paid ads interactions, email marketing campaign engagement, and much more. With these reports, you're able to gain a better understanding of how prospects are moving along specific sections of each customer journey, seeing what is attracting prospects the most, as well as areas that could be improved upon. This insight allows you to have a better understanding of a specific campaign’s ROI, helping to inform you on whether to invest further into such campaigns, adjust them, or scrap them entirely.
How to Create a Customer Journey Report in HubSpot
Before we get into explaining how to create your own customer journey reports within HubSpot, it’s important to note that you’ll need to have an Enterprise license in order to create customer journey reports. With this in mind, here’s how you can get started:
Plot The Journey
Before jumping into creating a customer journey report, you need to think about the specific customer journey you want to explore. Whether it’s learning how prospects are moving through your website in general or what specific steps they’ve taken as part of a unique paid ad campaign, it’s important to know what kind of data you want to view within these reports in order to make the building process as smooth as possible. Structuring the journey within a flowchart format is a great way to get started, with tools like Lucidchart or Miro making it easy to create such maps. You may also recognize that you have more than one type of journey that you want to build a report around, giving you the chance to build and compare multiple reports and their performance while gathering more data overall.
Ensure Your Data Is Accurate
Another key step you’ll need to take is to make sure that the data within your HubSpot account that you’ll be reporting on is as accurate, clean, and up to date as possible in order to prevent false results. If you're sending data to your HubSpot account through an integration with a third party CRM or software, ensure that there are no issues or errors with the integration and that the data that is passed over is accurate. Skipping this step could lead to your customer journey reports not showing the entire journey, prevent data from being displayed accurately, or worse, show you false positive or negative results.
Check If You Can Track It
Once you have your customer journey report(s) built out, it’s time to move into the customer journey report builder! While the customer journey report builder has a fair amount of steps that you can add into the report timeline (such as website page views, paid ads interactions, form submissions, etc.), there may be some parts of the customer journey you’ve plotted out that may not be possible to track within the report. Take note of what specific steps the customer journey report will allow you to add to the timeline, and if needed, make adjustments to your customer journey if some of the steps cannot be tracked.
Use Filtering To Your Advantage
If you’re looking to report on specific steps that prospects take within your customer journey, or if there are some steps of the journey that could technically be skipped over by prospects, you can use property filters and “Optional” or ”Required” labels to get the most accurate data possible.
You can use property filters to target specific website pages, CTA interactions, lifecycle stages, along with having the ability to show multiple results to see which piece of content under a specific area (i.e. seeing the top five performing web pages based on different products you offer) is performing the best.
If a prospect has the option to try a demo of your product before purchasing it, you can mark the demo step as being “Optional.” If you want to make sure that a contact filled out a 'Contact Us' form before being marked as a new deal, you can make the 'Contact Us' form step of the customer journey report "Required.” Having the ability to make certain steps optional or required is great to have if there are some steps within your customer journey that prospects either do or do not have to complete, helping to streamline their buying experience while helping you to collect the data that you absolutely need.
Finally, you can use date range filters to look into a specific time frame of data for your report. You can use a static date range to target a specific date range or use a rolling date range (such as the last 90 days) to see the data within the last certain number of days. Using a rolling range is great because it allows the report to continually update automatically for the given range.
Compare Your Reports
Once you have all of your customer journey reports created, compare their results with other customer journey reports to see what stands out between them. Perhaps your email marketing campaigns are not performing as well as what you expected in comparison to your organic traffic campaigns, or perhaps a specific variant of a product or service you offer is garnering more interest and opportunities created in comparison to some of your other offerings. Or maybe while your marketing efforts are doing well in terms of bringing in new contacts and opportunities, you’re noticing that there's a significant drop off in the amount of opportunities converting into customers, signifying that there may be some friction occurring between your prospects and your sales team. Taking the time to compare these results with each other will allow you to gain a better understanding of what's working well and what can be improved upon, allowing you to make more informed decisions and boost your ROI.
Customer journey reports are powerful when it comes to showing you how well certain journeys your prospects are taking with your brand are performing. They tell you what's driving prospects to take the actions you want them to take, what's working well internally that converts them into customers, as well as where prospects are dropping off the most within a certain journey.
With good data and clean customer journey reports, you’ll be well on your way to creating and optimizing customer journeys that inform key business decisions that drive results!