The sources report in HubSpot is one of the most valuable tools for monitoring where your website traffic and leads are coming from and what proportion of your traffic and leads are coming from each source.
HubSpot's sources report shows seven traffic sources:
- Organic search results
- Referrals
- Social media
- Email marketing
- Paid search results
- Direct traffic
- Other campaigns
To get the most out of this tool, there are four things you should be looking at on a regular basis.
1. Monitor weekly traffic.
It’s a good idea to go into the sources report every week to look at the trends of each traffic source. Red flags to look for would be things like
- a traffic source showing zero traffic consecutively over a few days
- major spikes or drops in traffic
Once you’re aware of this data, you can do further investigation into why those trends are showing and make the necessary adjustments.
2. Compare traffic year over year.
With inbound marketing, the goal is to be increasing your traffic steadily year over year. You must check the sources report on at least a quarterly or yearly basis to make sure your traffic is moving in the right direction. If you notice that traffic has decreased from one year to the next, ask yourself the following questions:
- What has changed in our business that may have caused a drop in traffic?
- Has our blogging frequency decreased?
- Have we lowered our ad budget?
- Have we stopped producing new downloadable content?
- Have we neglected our SEO work?
All of these things can contribute to a traffic decrease. It's important to first be aware of a traffic decrease so you can think about what factors may have caused it.
3. Identify which sources bring in the most and the least traffic and leads.
It’s important to be aware of your top traffic sources and your worst traffic sources so you know what areas of your marketing are working and where you could improve. However, it is typical to see more traffic coming from organic search results and direct navigation than from referrals and email marketing. Also, if you spend money on social media or Google advertising, then traffic from social media and paid search will naturally be higher. Regardless, you want to be aware of the level of traffic and leads you're getting from each source and ask questions like:
- Why do we have a ton of traffic from organic search but hardly any leads from organic search?
- Why do we have very few visitors from referral sources, yet a very high proportion of them are converting into leads?
These types of questions will help you better understand your data and how your marketing efforts are working.
4. Look at the percentage of leads from each source.
In the HubSpot sources report, there is a column that shows the visits-to-contact conversion rate. While this number will vary from industry to industry, a good general goal is to have at least a 1% visit-to-contact conversion rate from each of your sources. Say in one month you have 900 visits from organic search but only get 5 conversions, giving you a 0.55% visit-to-contact conversion rate. This reveals that although you’re getting a lot of organic visits, for some reason, not many people are providing contact information on your website. You can then look at your website to see whether it could use more (or more compelling) calls to action, whether it loads slowly, causing people to leave early, or other factors that might influence your conversion rate.
Clearly, the sources report in HubSpot can be an immensely valuable tool for your marketing efforts. By monitoring the data it provides on a regular basis, you will be able to identify trends and areas of strengthe and weakness in your marketing strategy.
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