Adam (00:01.626)
All right, Mike, we're back again, um, back in black as it were. And, uh, so we're going to talk about HubSpot data and what you can do with it, what some of the different options are. I wanted to start by talking about sort of from the marketing perspective, what I think I'm going to, I'm going to avatar all marketers out there and say what I think every single one of them wants from some sort of integration with HubSpot. And then we're going to talk, and then I'm going to ask you sort of what some of the sticking points are in doing that. And then if you have any other things that you've

experience that marketers, you've heard that marketers also want through all the work that you've done, feel free to backfill any of the stuff that I might miss, but I know, you know, right off the bat, people in the marketing seats are wanting to know where the leads came from, what sources the person might have experienced or what content they might've seen prior to coming to a lead form. And then they're going to want to know things like further down, perhaps

Like how, of the leads that I have, how many of them are good and not good. And then right in that mix, as soon as you ask that question, you start saying like, which ones are good and which ones are not good, then HubSpot comes at you with all their knowledge based stuff around lead scoring. And so then it wants you to do all these things for lead scoring based on, I don't know, like what pages somebody saw. And they try and use that like as a sort of surrogate, the lead score as like a qualified or not qualified kind of metric.

There's other ways that we've seen people do it and that we actually use HubSpot internally and there's different ways that we do that, but that's sort of where I feel like a lot of marketers get stuck is in that what can I learn from the marketing information that I have about the leads that I'm generating? And so, what are some of the...

Mike (01:51.602)
And maybe even to summarize that in another way, but the same summary question is asking and answering where do I get my qualified leads from what marketing channels are actually producing real deals and real revenue, not just submissions of forms.

Adam (02:10.75)
For sure. Yeah. Because nobody just wants leads for the sake of having leads. So the next natural question is, yeah, yeah. The next natural question, especially if you have a big sales org, is all these leads aren't qualified and then you're trying to understand like, well, where do the best ones come from? So you can lean into that stuff. And, um, so I won't, I won't get into too many spoilers about ways that I think that thing should be done, but in terms of the integration itself,

Mike (02:14.73)
Nobody wants forms for the sake of having forms. Yeah.

Adam (02:37.618)
What are some of the sticky points that people run into when they're, when they're integrating HubSpot with marketing data at a high level?

Mike (02:46.346)
Yeah, so HubSpot is always going to, one of the first things to think about is which system is the, we call it the system of record for a given number. So like an example is the number of dollars you spend on ads, your ad platforms are gonna know that number better than any other system. They're the ones that are actually charging your card. Google ads knows how much you spend on Google ads better than any of your spreadsheets or anything else. If you integrate that data to

Google Analytics, for example, you can see Google Ads data in Google Analytics to see what your spend was, but Google Ads is the system of record. So HubSpot is, or the CRM, but in this case HubSpot is the system of record for the number of unique contacts that you created, the number of unique leads that you get. Google Ads might have a conversion based on how many forms somebody fills out and if they came from Google Ads. So it has a count that's close to that.

Google Analytics will have a count that's close to that, but HubSpot is the one that's deduping based on email address and based on when somebody changes companies and stuff. HubSpot has the count of unique people. It's your best count. It's the system of record for count of people. So one of the limitations is when, another example is the system that has the count, the best count of visitors to your website.

is your analytics system. HubSpot has a count for that. They have some web analytics functionality, but the best system of record for that is the web analytics system. Google Analytics is the most common one that's in use with HubSpot. So one of the sticking points that people run into is trying to ask and answer questions that span those systems of record. So when you say, HubSpot owns the count of people, and you say, what was the cost per my count of people?

Now you have to get a cost data number from Google ads or from Facebook or from Reddit or YouTube or whatever. And then you have to associate it with a count of people from HubSpot. When you do that, now you're presented with some questions. So maybe HubSpot has an integration with Google ads and they can give you some sort of an idea of that. But now marketers, as soon as you start to answer that question in any detail, marketers are faced with the question, what do we give attribution to? Is it the first touch?

Mike (05:07.05)
Is it the last touch? Is it a spread across all the areas where we pay according to time or something, or is it linear? And then you have this question about attributing dollars that you spend to leads that you create, and HubSpot's not built to do that. So HubSpot can't do that, but Google Ads also can't tell you the distinct, unique, deduplicated count of people. So problems, problem comes in.

Adam (05:20.083)
Yeah.

Adam (05:31.59)
Okay. So, but HubSpot has, you know, like you go through the knowledge base articles on HubSpot and it's like, you know, to integrate Google analytics, it'll be, you know, step one and screenshot and all that kind of stuff. And really just all people are doing with that is enabling a connection. They're not really configuring any like meaningful reporting to the extent that you're talking about. All, all you get out of that default box is sort of, and it depends kind of on the layer, the, the.

pricing tiers that you might be paying for with your HubSpot account. But for the most part, you're just able to see, oh, my visitors or my contacts saw these pages and that becomes a part of the stream on the activity feed. But what you're saying is that it's not, there's not your

Mike (06:17.378)
I don't even think it's like that. Um, cause HubSpot's knowledge base HubSpot can, when you talk about the connection between HubSpot and Google Analytics, the only connection between HubSpot and Google Analytics is if you're building your site with HubSpot's content management system, then you can put Google Analytics on your HubSpot content management system pages. That's the only integration. So the integration is put Google Analytics ID in HubSpot pages.

Adam (06:44.37)
When we say integration, do what, so whether we use this on the site content is relevant. This is kind of like the side question we're having live, but like, can't you, I mean, we have AdMind and we have HubSpot and we have like, so you're saying that like the tracking pixel and things like that, that you might have for Google analytics is not, it's only telling information back to Google analytics, it's not integrated with the passing any information into HubSpot. Got it.

Mike (06:52.007)
Yeah.

Mike (07:09.486)
Correct. HubSpot has its own tracking pixel to track page views of people and stuff. And that's how you get that stuff in the activity feeds is you put HubSpot's pixel on. That doesn't have anything to do with Google Analytics data.

Adam (07:21.322)
Okay. So what about, cause HubSpot will tell you that they have, they have default original source values and they'll tell you that they use their source attribution stuff to line that up and they do it, you know, automatically. And, and we have UTMs and everything's properly tagged. And every single one of our paid clicks gets marked as offline sources within that default setting. Unless I go in and like run some manual changing type of things.

Mike (07:27.822)
Mm-hmm.

Mike (07:35.895)
Mm-hmm.

Adam (07:50.02)
So what do you think is happening there?

Mike (07:52.342)
Well, what's happening there is we don't, we're not using a HubSpot form. We're using our form submits to an endpoint in gravity forms or whatever, WordPress form. And then we hook into that form submission with Zapier, and then we process some of the stuff, yeah, and then send it to HubSpot. And so HubSpot sees our form submission as an offline source, regardless of anything else. In order for HubSpot's attribution information to come through,

Adam (08:06.122)
And so that's the offline source.

Mike (08:20.29)
you either need to be using a HubSpot form or using a default HTML form that submits in, suffice it to say without getting dev heavy here, you have to be using a default HTML form, not like a clever type for me looking one that spans multiple pages and stuff like that. And you have to have HubSpot's pixel installed. So those are the two options, use a HubSpot form or use a default HTML form with HubSpot's pixel installed. If you do those things, then HubSpot's attribution gets

then you get additional information. Yeah, yeah, it's baked in, but it's locked in too. It's only HubSpot's picture of attribution. You can't say, what about a linear weighted model or what about an even weighted model or time decay model? You just get HubSpot's last and original.

Adam (08:51.23)
is baked in. Yeah. Okay.

Adam (09:08.618)
So then as the marketer, you're left to kind of figure out how you're going to attribute these things. Like what is the original source going to be? And like, and you're...

Mike (09:15.61)
And they don't have, yes. Yeah, you're left to interpret it. It also doesn't have like a channel. So like you may have the, you may want to roll the sources together up to make the idea of like branded paid search versus non-branded paid search versus branded organic versus non-branded organic versus paid shopping versus whatever it is. You can't control that in HubSpot. So that's number one problem is you can't aggregate it the way you would want unless you pull the data out of HubSpot and do something clever with it.

Or you build a workflow in HubSpot to do that. And then, and then to run the data historically. Now you have a big workflow management job in HubSpot. And even then you still don't have the cost data. And so now you have the sources kind of customized the way you want, but you still don't have the cost. You still got to deal with how do you spread the cost across anything.

Adam (10:05.402)
Yeah. Okay. Let's talk for a second about, cause it doesn't seem like there would be a ton of use cases where you would say, and I'm okay with all those limitations. Like, like everything you just said, where it's just the form coming in and I don't necessarily want to know anything else. So like best case scenario, if I'm just using HubSpot and I have analytics separate, but they're not integrated. Like what would I be able to expect out of my analytics performance of in the hubs, if I, in that scenario analytics over here, HubSpot over here.

Mike (10:32.342)
Yeah. So if that's the case, then you would say you're kind of like leaning into the HubSpot is going to be the source of truth world, meaning we're going to try to get all of the data that we can from the other systems to line up with HubSpot because we're going to lean into HubSpot as the source of truth system of record for contacts, but we're saying for paid like spend and for attribution, we're going to try and stuff in all the extra information there. So what you're in, what you end up with is a job to make sure everything's UTM tracked appropriately.

a job to make sure that the forms that submit HubSpot data to HubSpot have hidden fields for UTMs and anything else that you would want to use for attribution type of information. So page categories or things like that you'd want to use. And then you have to figure out how to join cost data. HubSpot doesn't have a cost data integration feature. So you're going to have to do the cost per analysis outside of HubSpot. So what you get in HubSpot is a report that...

It's if you set up workflows to, to get nice channel grouping, channel groupings that you actually want to use. Then you have a workflow, a set of workflows that manage custom UTM fields that manage HubSpot's built in original data source data and last source data fields and you get a report finally that, that says, here's the number of contacts that we got created and the number of deals that we get created and the number of deals closed one by your either channels or original source values or something. And

Adam (11:58.898)
Yeah. Okay. Yeah.

Mike (12:00.578)
Those are never clean. Like nobody's ever seen one of those done correctly because it takes all that stuff to work in order to get that to work. And then you have to join the cost data. Then you have to join cost data.

Adam (12:05.03)
Yeah. Right. Cause I was just gonna say, yeah. Yeah. So what you would have to do then is you'd have, you'd probably have like 30 hits, 30 fields that are coming through with each one of these forms. If you wanted to be like super detailed where you've got like a channel field and then you might, then you'd have campaign fields and then you're going to have messaging fields and then you have like all your other UTM stuff that, that would go in there plus, you know, any other number of things.

Mike (12:32.194)
So yeah, 30 might be big, but it might be 12 or 15. Might be 12 or 15.

Adam (12:36.718)
Okay. And then someone's got to have to manage those and QA them and make sure that, like that to your point, like you'd have to be real tight on that. And then even with all of that, you're still having to export that data and then compare it against the cost data.

Mike (12:46.946)
then you still have...

Mike (12:51.402)
But before that, because if somebody, because if you have a scenario where you're creating content that's like, that's not sales-based content on the site, where you wanna get people to download white papers or pricing sheets or whatever, if that stuff's happening, now you have scenarios where people are coming in multiple times through different UTMs. And so in order to, if you, the marketer is interested in keeping track of just the original values of those things, most of the time, most of the time you're saying, what did I do to acquire?

Sometimes you're saying what was the incrementality of the things I did to nurture, but lots of times you're asking the question, what did I do to acquire? And because HubSpot has, HubSpot's contact property rules say that the most recent value you get, so if you store UTM source as a contact property and put it as a hidden field on those forms, next time somebody comes in, their UTM source property gets overwritten and you don't know what their original value was. So in order for that to work, in addition to having 10 or 15 fields on a form,

Now you also have to have a set of workflows in HubSpot to every time somebody submits a form to save off of a set of those fields and call them the UTM source white paper. Well, like you have the original ones, but then it's like for every action where somebody might fill out a form, it's like UTM source white paper, UTM source pricing sheet, UTM source demo request, like all of those things so that you can have.

Adam (14:00.138)
Originals or something? Oh

Adam (14:05.136)
Yeah.

Adam (14:11.858)
Yeah. You can't have just a generic one that says asset and then have it filled within with whatever asset it is. You'd have to have one per asset. Yeah.

Mike (14:20.458)
like perform type essentially, you have to have a set of UTM fields so that when HubSpot goes to overwrite one the next time, that's saved off in a contact property that's not gonna get automatically updated. And so.

Adam (14:30.866)
So you've added the fields exponentially.

Mike (14:33.354)
Yeah, so now you got potentially hundreds of fields and to create a report, now you have to say it's a report per asset form or white paper form or whatever.

Adam (14:41.806)
Okay. Yeah. And I could definitely see a scenario where a marketer says, I want my CRM to be the source of truth and we're going to get everything else to line up with, with the CRM and then that, that to our, which yeah, it gets sticky.

Mike (14:55.359)
It's a super common.

Mike (14:59.902)
It does, it gets sticky because it's the system, the difference is the difference between system of record and source of truth. Like it's the system of record for contacts and deduping actual people. It's just not built for even moderately like mature attribution questions or integrating cost data. It's not mature enough to do either of those things. So when you make it the source of truth, that means that you're now making it have to handle

Adam (15:08.658)
Yeah. But it's not.

Mike (15:29.238)
the other systems of record for those two other types of data.

Adam (15:32.422)
And I could see that being a fit for like smaller, local, hyper localized, like service industries where you're not running like really sophisticated multi-touch marketing campaigns that would probably work great.

Mike (15:40.106)
Oh, for sure.

Mike (15:44.202)
Yeah, if you don't have white papers where people are getting UTM sources and your time from contact to sales call or contact to close is like a day, then like, you know, if you're a local plumber or something, then that's perfect because you don't need that complexity. But if you have, if you're describing educational type content or whatever, like now attribution matters, now you have multiple touch points.

Adam (16:06.75)
Yeah, as soon as you start having conversations around like, yeah, multiple content campaigns on different platforms, multiple places where people can, yeah, multiple places where people can become a lead, like that. Now we're okay.

Mike (16:11.686)
multiple places where you're spending money. If you're spending money only on Google ads, yeah.

Yep. Yeah. If you have multiple channels and multiple potential ways for people to become a lead, now you have attribution. That's a part of your marketing. The ethic. Yeah.

Adam (16:27.074)
Okay. And we haven't really even talked to, we're going to segue this into the next one, which is the ad platforms themselves want to know about your conversion information so that they can optimize their, your spend around those things. So it's ideal then to be able to get that conversion information back into the ad platform or back into analytics so that you can marry those things up. So, so talk about what we just talked about was HubSpot being the, the system of record and source of truth.

Mike (16:54.306)
source of truth. Yep.

Adam (16:56.526)
And now like, what are the scenarios where you would have the analytics or even an ad platform be a primary operator of that? I mean, you're not going to have. Yeah, go ahead.

Mike (17:03.766)
So another option, yeah, another option here, and this is oftentimes driven by the, either the, an engineering team, like a marketing engineering team that's responsible for the website or an analytics team that's responsible for building out reports, thinking like somebody who's more used to working in ad platforms or in analytics systems or group that's interested in that, saying we want the conversion data in our systems and they dominate the conversation.

CRM is like maybe a little more dominated by sales team or sales focused marketing people that say this needs to be the source of truth. The other scenario is like, well, let's get the ad data, the conversions, not just lead forms filled out, but like actual quality leads, actual qualified opportunities, actual closed one data. Let's get that into either the ad platforms or the analytics system.

Adam (17:57.61)
So I want to, I want to pause and paint a scenario where you might have a marketing team and a sales team that aren't as connected as you might like them to be. And the C the sales team owns and runs the CRM and the marketing team owns and runs platforms and analytics and the marketing team is having questions like, Hey, we'd like to know more about what happened with these leads so that we can, you know, X, Y, Z with that thing.

But it's, it's in that scenario where the marketing and the sales teams are not as tightly integrated as you might want where you might have marketers who are limited to, you can play in the sandbox of, you know, Google analytics and your ad platforms, but you don't have full access over the CRM.

Mike (18:42.626)
Yep, yeah. And so what you can do then is you can, the various different ad platforms have different opinions here, but like Facebook will say, just give us a download of your CRM stuff. Give us the people who converted in their email address and that's it, and upload it to us. And then we can do a conversion modeling. They don't call it that, but they call it like an import. And then they'll go, do we have people that match those email addresses and those conversion times and so yada, and take as aggressive as possible responsibility

Adam (19:04.009)
look-alike audiences.

Mike (19:12.534)
for generating those conversions. And you can give them a little more data if you do something like every Facebook ad or every Google ad that gets clicked has a click ID. And if you store that with every contact record that gets created in HubSpot, then when you download the data from HubSpot, you can include the click IDs. And so that would be by creating hidden fields on the form and then passing them forward to the contact properties. And then thinking about, do we wanna give them the first or the last or whatever? Now you have the same thing as the UTMs again.

But now you can give that back to the ad platforms. And now the ad platforms can say, oh, based on your conversion upload, here's what your, you spent this, you spent these dollars, but then you got this many closed one deals based on their matching capabilities. Again, you have an attribution problem now because they're going to, Facebook and Google ads are not going to consider one another if you have potentially advertised on both of those, through both of those channels to one person, they're both going to take credit for that thing.

So you're going to get more conversions in total when summing up Facebook's conversions and Google Ads conversions than you had in reality. Yep, because they're both claim credit, which they should be for optimization purposes, but shouldn't be for accounting purposes. When you're trying to describe their value, you shouldn't trust them. When you're trying to give them as much data as you can so that they can find more similar people and advertise profitably, you shouldn't. So.

Adam (20:17.93)
because they're both claiming credit.

Adam (20:33.298)
Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, you should for budgetary purposes, like where, you know, knowing where you're having influence, but not necessarily all your budgeting because it, it's not going to be a full one-to-one of where your people came from.

Mike (20:48.906)
Right, right. So you can't, so that's one option and that means that you're kind of leaning into the ad buying platforms as the source of truth. They're the system of record for spend but now you're trying to do the import job of grabbing the contacts and stuff them into there and they're not the system of record for that but you're trying to make them a source of truth.

Adam (21:08.622)
And in reality, I think from a marketing perspective, like no one's going to say, if I was in that scenario and I was like the person running that and someone asked me where the source of truth was, I highly doubt I'm going to say like, well, the conversions in Facebook, but you're, you're limited to what you're in that scenario where marketing data and sales data are not aligned, you're sort of limited to it's like, well, this is the best I can do with what I've got in terms of telling the platforms what converted, you know.

Mike (21:33.366)
But you could imagine a scenario though, so the director of marketing probably wouldn't answer the question that way. But you could imagine the director of marketing going to his agency that runs all of paid and saying, how many leads do we get and what was our cost per lead? And the agency saying, we don't, not even hesitating and saying, well, the ad platform cost and conversion count is therefore the cost per lead is, and answering just from the ad platform because they don't have access to the CRM in a scenario, like, you know, like they might not have that. So it might not be,

Adam (21:54.921)
Right.

Adam (21:59.506)
Yeah.

Mike (22:02.518)
the source of truth, but it may be spoken of as having all of the information required to answer a question at any point in time. Yeah, that's right, that's right. It's not the business's one, but that's the only thing, the only way agency might have to answer that question. So another flavor of that is, well, the analytics platform, the web analytics platform has, in Google Analytics, has the capability to discriminate between people who got acquired on Facebook and then

Adam (22:09.126)
It's somebody's source of truth.

Mike (22:31.138)
their closing channel was Google Ads. So you can say, well, what about the first or last? You can control attribution better in the analytics platform. So if you could get the conversions from HubSpot into analytics, the offline ones like actual deals and deals closed one, then you could do, and the analytics platform also can ingest cost data. You can do cost data uploads. Then you can do cost per actual closed one deal in the analytics platform.

if you can get the HubSpot data back in analytics and if you can do the job of importing the cost data into Google Analytics. So that can work, that can work, but it's got pros and cons too. Con number one is there's a big integration job there because you have to store the analytics visitor ID with every contact record and then you have to schedule an upload back into Google Analytics.

Adam (23:08.65)
Okay. Yeah, go ahead. Yeah.

Mike (23:27.866)
and you have to do the job of scheduling the cost data to get into Google Analytics. And that means you have to have really good UTM parameters, parameter hygiene in order to join the cost data at a granular level. Then, so that's con number one is there's a bit of integration work to get that to function. Con number two is that once you're there, the primary thing marketer wants to be able to do is say, what did I spend and what did I get? What's my return on spend? Well,

Google Analytics operates as if a conversion happened on the day that it actually occurred. So if you pay for somebody to come to your website and then three weeks later they convert, you're lining up cost that was three weeks after the cost that you acquired them with. You spent the money three weeks ago. So you want to attribute that conversion back to the days that you spent to acquire or influence that person. Google Analytics doesn't do that. That's called.

accrual, and the accountants call that accrual based reporting, the ad platforms automatically do this. They attribute conversions back to the days of spend so that you're doing the cost per analysis and they're not worrying about how much time between when you spent and when you converted. So now you have the problem that you're associating the wrong cost with the wrong or with the wrong conversions when you're trying to do the cost per analysis in the, in the analytics platform. So that's the other big con.

Adam (24:47.57)
Yeah. And it could get, it could be made worse based on what your internal accounting processes are. I remember it at a trucking company that I won't specifically name that I worked at. They did the cost data based on when they sent a check to Google. It's like, that's even worse like that. So it's like leads we generated in July against money that we spent back in like February. Yeah. I mean, it was, it was terrible. So.

Mike (24:59.14)
Ha ha.

Mike (25:03.956)
Oh yikes, yeah.

Mike (25:13.366)
May. Y'all were, yeah, we're, it's right, yeah.

Adam (25:17.214)
So, and it's not like, that's not malicious intent, obviously. Like it's just the systems of the business, not lining up with the systems that the marketing people are using. But those things matter is kind of what our point is, is that you need to be aware of those things as you're connecting and integrating these platforms so that you, so that when you give answers, you can understand the answers that you're giving, you know, it's that same thing with like the, your agency saying, well, your cost per lead is this, and this is how many leads there are. And it's like, well, to them.

but not necessarily to the CRM. Okay, oh sorry, did you have a?

Mike (25:47.736)
Yeah.

Yeah, the, no, I was just gonna say there's a third, the third option we can cover pretty quickly is, and this is, well, I'll say one thing before that too. This stuff matters when, if you spend, if you can improve your conversion rates or your targeting by 5% and that turns out to be meaningful to you, like that turns into hundreds of thousands of dollars difference in revenue or in ad savings, then accuracy to that level matters. If what you need, if you're spending,

Adam (25:55.595)
Yeah, yeah.

Mike (26:20.414)
$5,000 a month and just directional accuracy is good enough. Like getting the answer right to 30% or 40% gives you what you need to spend your next $5,000. Then great. Pick, pick option, pick option one and, and do the, you know, associate the cost with the, the HubSpot contacts by just going to spend about this much in that timeframe. And there's about how many contacts we got, or you know, how many leads we got good enough. But, but it starts to matter when

when you start to get larger volumes and larger of spend and conversions. So option number three is you take HubSpot data and you get it into a central location, get it to a data warehouse. Take analytics data, get it to a central warehouse. Take cost data from the ad platforms, get it to a central warehouse. Now you have all of the system of record data sources in one place. So you have contacts deduped from the CRM,

cost data actually from the ad platforms, and you have attribution of multi-touches from the web analytics system, boom, in one place. Now you can build a report that doesn't have any of those problems that we've discussed already. The contacts are deduped, the ad spend is based on the actual spend, you're not trusting the attribution model of the ad platforms, which is aggressive. You can use attribution modeling from the web analytics system to say, what was the multi-touch? You can take all of the content.

somebody's seen and describe which pieces of content are the most likely to create conversion. And you can talk about not, you can talk about conversions, not in terms of just the last thing somebody did on the web, but you can talk about actual revenue and LTV that was created because your, your CRM has that record. So you can do all of it in one place.

Adam (28:05.03)
What, when I, when I hear that, here's a couple of thoughts that I have. If I, I was trying really hard to put, put my marketing hat on and listen to that as someone who might be, yeah. Well, there's two things. Okay. So Spendy is definitely one of them where I'm going like data warehouses and exports and you know, all these other things. So there's that. And then there's also the, um, like I understand the concept of, you know, the ad platform gives you a click ID. Cause you know, you see that stuff. You see those things in the platform.

Mike (28:13.258)
You hear Spendy.

Adam (28:33.306)
And then the web visitor getting an ID, you know, you see that's pretty, pretty common and your CRM getting an ID. And so here are there always, is there always a match? Right? Like is there always a match? Are there any orphaned IDs anywhere in this process? And if there are, to what extent?

Mike (28:51.426)
Mm-hmm. Yeah. The answer is yes. And the reason is, there's a couple of reasons. Main reason is, everybody that visits your website doesn't allow web analytics tracking. So for the US and Canada, in an average industry, that's something like 7% of people. So for those people, you won't have a web analytics record. You won't know where they came from. You don't have a record about their session or the pages they saw or anything. If...

they fill out a form, then you do have a record in the CRM. So, five, 7% of the time on average, you won't have web analytics attribution information for a record in your CRM. So that means you have more in the CRM than you have in web analytics. And that's about the only scenario that's acceptable where you have orphan IDs. The CRM has a little bit better coverage than web analytics and frankly to that, if the web,

The ad platform suffer from the same thing. If they don't, somebody's not allowing analytics data to be tracked, they're probably not allowing you to track conversions either, so.

Adam (29:56.062)
So you'd have like an orphan to ad click and an orphan session ID and then boom, they show up as a CRM ID.

Mike (30:02.146)
you have an orphaned ad click, you have a missing analytics ID, and then you have a record in the CRM that doesn't have an associated web analytics ID.

Adam (30:04.402)
or like a blank. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, oh, I see what you mean. Yeah, yeah.

Adam (30:13.502)
What do you do in that scenario? As you're the one providing the report to the brand, if you and I are having this conversation and I'm the CMO going, well, that sounds like a lot, we could be not making the right decisions if there's a lot of that going on. Or like, do we discount those people? Do we remove them from the thing? You know, from the count, what do you do?

Mike (30:26.218)
Yeah, no-

Mike (30:30.154)
Number one is you track it over time. Cause if it gets to be 15 or 20%, it means you have a technical problem, not an acceptable problem. So another thing you can do is if you implement server side tracking, you can shrink that number down. So there's ways to shrink the number and make sure that it doesn't get out of hand. But those take time and cost to do those things. So if you go, all right, say we exist where we have 7%, that's just not matched.

Adam (30:38.534)
Not a tracking disallow, yeah, yeah. Okay.

Adam (30:58.938)
And we're okay saying it's always gonna be 7%. As long as it's at 7%, plus or minus or two, we're okay, we accept that.

Mike (30:59.126)
You use, yeah, if it goes, yep. If it goes to 25 or 30, we have a problem, but we accept 7%, that's acceptable. In that scenario, what you do then is just say, you're actually getting 7% better performance on a cost per lead basis than your ad platform or your web analytics system says. Yes.

Adam (31:08.568)
Yeah, okay.

Adam (31:22.458)
Yeah, because you have more desired outcomes than you thought you did.

Mike (31:26.602)
Yeah, so one way to account for that is just know what your baseline is and then when you say, we have a $300 cost per qualified lead, it's actually 7% better than that. It's probably more like 260 or 270, that's the actual number for cost per lead. And we can assume that because those people that block that tracking are no more likely to be people that click on ads than they are people that click on organic traffic versus like,

Adam (31:55.002)
Yeah, it's not. Yeah, yeah.

Mike (31:56.35)
it should be spread evenly across your marketing channels generally. So that's a pretty fair assessment.

Adam (31:59.794)
Yeah. Gotcha. Okay. So the con, the other one, so that was my first question as you were talking is like, what about these orphans? What happens to those? The other one was about the cost. Cause you know, the, when, when data warehousing first started rolling out and I started getting random salespeople barraging my inbox with these kinds of pitches, it was like a hundred thousand dollars to set stuff up. And so even for mature marketing organizations, like that's a huge cost.

Mike (32:08.71)
Yep.

Adam (32:28.65)
to take as, I mean, depending on how mature we're talking about, but we're saying there's sort of a fit, generally speaking, for service industry, local people, and there's sort of a fit generally for you've got multiple ad platforms, multiple leads, you're nurturing people, and it's between here and, oh, and also we spend $10 million a month on marketing. Right? There's a ton of people in that space where they could use what we're talking about, but might feel like warehousing is not.

Mike (32:55.702)
Yeah, it's expensive.

Adam (32:59.207)
approachable for them.

Mike (33:00.834)
So a couple thoughts, one is if you have an internal data team and you were to task them with this, then and they've never done this process before, there's a bit of system integration required here, right? You gotta get your forms set up so that you can store the right records in the CRM system. You gotta get your UTM set up so that when you get the data in a single place, you can actually join it together. If you've never done that before, it's super error prone. You're gonna screw it up three or four times before you get it right once. So if you're paying people and it takes them a year,

and you got three or four people working on it, you just spent half a million dollars. So it can be expensive if it's the first time you've gone through this working with marketing data and you're doing it in-house and trying to train a business team, a BI team on marketing data while you're doing it, it can be really expensive. The cost of the warehousing though is just not as expensive as it used to be. It used to be super, lots of years ago you had to set it up on premise. Now you can set it up in totally unmanaged,

You don't have to manage the servers or anything. You just get aware. You just get the data stored in a warehouse. You get Snowflake or BigQuery or Redshift and the data just gets in there. And your cost for running one of those things is 10s, 15s, 20s of dollars a month in a lot of scenarios is pretty dang cheap. You have to get the data from the sources to those warehouses. That meant in, you know, a few years ago that meant you had to build API connectors and write custom code. Now they've got these, there's got a bunch of tools available at the market, ETL type tools to extract the data from the sources and get it in the warehouse.

That's maybe 20s, 40s, 50s of dollars a month. Those aren't extraordinarily expensive tools. And if you're working with a team, in our case, we have a lot of the, you know, this job is 80% the same every single time we do it. It's 20% custom, the way people have their CRM set up and stuff, but the idea is 80% the same every time. And so we can get it done quickly and without the error proneness because we've done it a hundred times. So that's...

This cost is not hundreds of thousands of dollars anymore. This is between systems and teams and people. This is measured in tens, tens of thousands. And depending on how quick and how much data volume you have and how much customization there is, it's in that neighborhood though. It's not hundreds anymore or half a million. And it's also measured in times that are not a year. It's measured in times that are like numbers of weeks, six, four, eight weeks.

Adam (35:25.418)
Yeah. What would you say to kind of close this out? What would you say the biggest, I'm not going to limit you and say top five, although maybe don't go more than five, but like your top few things that are the lift that you would see if you did better than the default HubSpot analytics reporting, like what's the desire, what do you get out of this? Yes. Like overall marketing, why would I do this? What's the lift that I would get? I would get.

Mike (35:46.387)
Like lift in performance. Yeah, yeah, so.

Mike (35:54.338)
So the first one is a financial one. It's that you find out that you've been spending on places that are generating leads from a site perspective, like form fills, but they never turn out to be quality form fills. And so when you find that out, you go, oh my gosh, we were counting those as like our cost per lead there was comparable across the board. And it's actually, we've done this in scenarios and gone like, it's actually five times the cost per qualified lead of other systems because the quality of those form fills is junk compared to other things.

So that's a huge, potentially huge financial savings. Sometimes 5X the spend or the cost per lead, like a decrease of cost per lead in those scenarios. The next thing that you get is you get an overhead savings of the time trying to navigate. What happens when you don't have qualified leads coming in equally across the board and you don't have cost per qualified lead equalized across the board is you have the sales team that's going.

you the marketing team is going, we're generating, we're sending you enough leads and sales teams going, but the leads suck, they don't match. Like I can't get a call with any single one of them. And the marketing going like, we don't know what to tell you, you guys must just suck. And the sales team going, we don't know what to tell you, you guys must just suck. There's a ton of human trust that's lost there. There's a bunch of time that's lost in meetings. There's a bunch of decision-making that gets delayed. And there's a bunch of learning that doesn't happen because of that lack of connection. And so that's.

actually way harder to quantify what its financial value is, but it's much larger than the savings in cost per lead. Whatever it is, it's more than the cost per lead savings, because now you get all those people aligned, rowing in the same direction, not doing the things that don't matter anymore, trusting each other. Like that's a super valuable thing.

Adam (37:25.607)
Yeah, whatever it is, it's larger. Yeah.

Adam (37:40.87)
Yeah. So I, I would, yeah. The only other one that I would add, cause I had those, I wrote down three as I was talking and so yes, the financial one, I put down driver seat to sort of represent the one that you're talking about because oftentimes, and I say this with my own PTSD as a marketer, the sales seat people are much closer to the C level people than the marketing people are. In other words, like sales.

Mike (37:42.358)
That's the one and two. I don't even, we don't need to go three, four and five. Those are one and two.

Mike (37:50.123)
Yeah.

Mike (37:55.008)
Uh-huh.

Mike (38:06.079)
Yeah, it depends, but yes.

Adam (38:07.338)
typically has the ear of the CEO and CFO and all that stuff, more so than the CMO. And so when the salespeople say, we don't have qualified leads, my experience, I realize broad brushes and I index more in those spaces, my experience is that it makes the marketing team's job exponentially harder. So, all right. So financial driver seat. And then the other one that I put in here that what people is, is content direction. And I think when

Mike (38:25.643)
Yeah.

Mike (38:34.094)
Oh yeah.

Adam (38:34.738)
when you can start to understand better what people are doing on your site, and you can say these qualified leads did these kinds of things on the website and came from these kinds of sources, when you can kind of do that, because what marketers are all hearing is all about inbound content, developed as content, right? Content, great content. It's like if you don't have a way to inject content experience into your reporting, then it's kind of hard to say what content is resonating. And so,

Mike (38:48.118)
Yeah.

Adam (39:03.89)
Those three things, your financial stuff, your driver seat stuff, and your content stuff. And to me, it's worth whatever the cost that is.

Mike (39:11.518)
I, yeah, I bundled all of that content stuff into learnings, which is just about, cause it's part content in my mind, part of it's like, what do we say to people onsite? What resonates with them? What doesn't? Where do we set up false expectations? Where do we sit, you know, set their standards really high and the sales gets on the phone with them. And it turns out that we've, you know, oversold them in marketing. There's that content piece. There's also the targeting piece. Where do we find people that we're going after to tell them those stories? And, and I bucket all that into learnings. And it's like, but that's like all like,

Adam (39:35.622)
Yeah.

Mike (39:40.898)
we're probably talking here where a tenth of the marketing team, that's the only thing they're employed to do is those between content and targeting. Like, okay, that's a big bucket.

Adam (39:42.122)
Sure, sure. Yeah.

Adam (39:46.674)
Right. Those things.

Adam (39:51.882)
Cool. All right, well, there's a lot more to getting stuff out of HubSpot than just integrating systems. So, okay. Thank you, sir. See ya.

Mike (39:57.834)
Yeah. All right. Okay. Later.

Adam (48:14.122)
Yes.