A new year is always a great excuse to clean up, try new things and focus on what really matters. These are the 10 HubSpot metrics I'll be tracking all year - and I think you should too.
For the purposes of this blog, I'm assuming you're already tracking the "low-hanging fruit" metrics that every company should be tracking - things like monthly revenue, page views, leads per month, etc. The following metrics are the next step toward data mastery for gaining useful insights into sales, marketing and customer service.
10 HubSpot Metrics to Track in 2023
1. Customer health score (CHS)
Your current customers are a key source of recurring revenue and referrals, so keeping an eye on how they're feeling about you is critical. Your Net Promoter Score will give you a high-level overview of how likely customers are to recommend your product/service, but customer health score goes a bit further.
Customer health score looks at adoption, use, feedback and participation data to create a holistic view of how happy your customers are with you. What to track depends on your industry, product/service and goals, but generally includes at least two of the following:
- Product/app usage
- Website activity
- Support tickets
- Community participation
- Engagement with marketing materials
- Feedback (reviews, NPS, verbal feedback)
Once you identify the rules for your metric, your customer health score will show you where a customer falls on your retention scale - healthy customers tend to stay, while "unhealthy" customers are more likely to churn.
➤ HubSpot Tutorial: How to Measure CHS
2. Customer churn & revenue churn rates
Technically this is two metrics instead of one - but they go hand-in-hand. Customer churn rate is the number of customers your business lost over a specific time period. Revenue churn rate is the revenue lost in a specific time period. While the two are related, they are also different - consider the cost of losing one high-revenue customer vs losing three low-revenue customers.
Both churn metrics are important to track. Revenue officers (CROs, CMOs, heads of sales and/or marketing, and of course owners) are often fixated on new stuff coming in: conversions, leads, deals - and they often forget about old/existing business. Keeping an eye on churn can identify common points of friction in your business. Once you know what might be losing you business, you can then work on fixing those trouble spots to keep more of the customers you have.
➤ HubSpot Tutorial: How to Calculate Churn Rate
3. Demo-to-paid-customer ratio
When tracking both marketing and sales efforts, it's easy to fixate on the early stages of the sales funnel. But it's also critical to look at the end of the funnel, at what your leads do right before they convert to customers. Most often, this includes signing up for a demo.
If "demo" isn't applicable to your business, sub it out for something more relevant like "free trial" or "meeting with sales." The key is to look at an action from your leads that signal high interest and consideration. Reading a blog is low commitment; handing over personal information to sign up for a trial/demo - or agreeing to have a one-on-one conversation with sales - is high commitment.
This data is available in HubSpot, you just need to set up a custom report to track it.
➤ HubSpot Tutorial: Create Reports With the Custom Report Builder
4. Ratio of customer lifetime value to customer acquisition cost
Long title, but this metric is simple to understand: how much recurring revenue a customer generates, and how much it costs to land that customer. To calculate this metric, you'll first need to pull two metrics that I strongly recommend you already track:
- Customer lifetime value (LTV) - The amount of revenue a business can expect from one user or customer throughout their lifespan with your company
- Customer acquisition cost (CAC) - The average amount of sales and marketing expense required to acquire one new customer
→Read Now: 10 Sales Metrics to Track in HubSpot
Once you have those two numbers, you calculate the ratio of the two. For example, if it takes $100,000 to acquire a customer with an LTV of $437,500, then your LTV:CAC is 4.4 to 1.
Generally speaking, you want to aim for 3x or more - but this can vary depending on your business, goals and anticipated revenue.
➤ HubSpot Tutorial: How to Calculate LTV:CAC
5. Marketing-originated customer percentage
Marketing is notoriously difficult effort to attach ROI numbers to because the range of activities included in generating interest and attention can be so nebulous. This is where HubSpot's interconnectivity and reporting tools really come in handy. With everything in one place, you can make connections between marketing efforts and lead activity.
Separating out marketing-originated customers is a critical metric to track. This can provide valuable insight into how many leads get hooked by a marketing effort - it may be much higher than you assume. If it's lower, that's a sign it's time to take another look at your marketing strategy and tactics. Word to the wise: keep in mind the size and structure of your team when looking at this metric. If you have a large sales team but only one person running marketing, for example, a low metric might highlight a capacity issue and that it's time to invest in a larger marketing team instead of marketing itself being the driver.
This data is available in HubSpot, you'll just need to set up a custom report to track it.
➤ HubSpot Tutorial: Create Reports With the Custom Report Builder
6. Marketing-influenced customer percentage
This metric also aims to track marketing efforts, but expands to include the influence of marketing throughout a customer's journey, versus their first touchpoint. It's extremely common to have leads that are already aware of your business through prior engagement - perhaps attending an event, meeting a salesperson at a conference, word-of-mouth, etc. - but who don't immediately convert.
Marketing-influenced contacts will show you how many of your leads are engaging with marketing content throughout their buyer's journey - which is the goal - as well as how successful your nurturing efforts are.
This data is available in HubSpot, you'll just need to set up a custom report to track it.
➤ HubSpot Tutorial: Create Reports With the Custom Report Builder
7. Content driving conversions
When looking at marketing efforts, it's useful to see what type of content drives the most engagements, and where. If you're seeing most of your leads engaging with blog posts on LinkedIn, that tells you where your marketing team should spend most of their efforts.
This is also called attribution reporting, but I like "content driving conversions" a bit better. Whatever you call it, it's a critical HubSpot metric to track in 2023.
➤ HubSpot Tutorial: Create Attribution Reports
8. Topic clusters
Topic clusters are a way of organizing your content based on topics, not keywords. This approach accounts for modern SEO practices and how users access the web. In most cases, topic clusters are based on your services or products - a shoe company might have a cluster for running shoes, and another for hiking boots or high heels. A good place to start is to list your main services/products and then complete a content audit to see what you already have, and group accordingly.
→Read Now: Why You Should Use Topics, Not Keywords
In HubSpot, the topic cluster tool allows you to define your website pages, landing pages and blog posts that are a part of each topic cluster. Once you've done the heavy lifting of setting them up, you can track the performance of your topic clusters. This will show you two things at-a-glance: what topics drive the most sessions, and how much content you have for each topic.
➤ HubSpot Tutorial: Analyze Your Site Traffic With the Traffic Analytics Tool
9. Leads delivered to sales
Marketing and sales alignment is critical, and often very challenging, for any business. One way to smooth out points of friction is to ensure that leads are traveling smoothly between teams. Watch the paths marketing qualified leads (MQLs) take - and revisit common paths to set up automated hand-offs.
Before tracking this metric, review your lead-scoring strategy to ensure it's still relevant in 2023. Then make sure you have workflows and sequences set up in HubSpot so the right MQLs are making it to sales. Finally, create a custom report to track how many leads are being delivered to sales - both automatically and manually.
➤ HubSpot Tutorial: Set Up Score Properties to Qualify Contacts, Companies, and Deals
➤ HubSpot Tutorial: Create Reports With the Custom Report Builder
10. Deal loss reasons
Again, I'm going to make some assumptions here. I'm assuming you're already looking at your deals won and lost, at least on a high level - if you're not, you should. Our final metric digs a bit deeper into the why.
Tracking why deals fall through can provide some incredible insights. It may give you obvious areas for improvement, but it can also show you how to spin talking points. For example, if you're losing a lot of deals to something you don't want to change - like price - this could signal that either your salespeople are talking to the wrong audience, or that you need to communicate the value of your product or service more clearly.
➤ HubSpot Tutorial: Create Sales Reports With the Sales Analytics Tool
Tracking these 10 metrics will give you a deeper insight into your sales, marketing and customer service performance. They'll show you what's working right now, as well as the points of friction where you can do better. If you want to have a successful 2023, you'll need this data.
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