Reporting & analytics setup

How to set up the right tooling to track your entire funnel, know what's working, and plan for the future.

How to setup up tracking

Follow these steps to go from zero analytics to full-funnel reporting:

‍Identify your funnel stages - the goal posts along the prospect to customer journey.
Set up your CRM and marketing automation tools.
Use UTM codes and make sure that data is getting passed through your tools.
Set up conversion events in Google Analytics and campaigns in your CRM.
Make sure all leads go through Qualified 1 (aka MQL) stage for clean reporting.

You need to know the goal posts along the prospect to customer journey.
Many leads won’t follow a linear path, but even if they move in loops or zig zags throughout the journey, there are still milestones.
These milestones or goal posts are your funnel stages.
You then need to track volume in each stage, and conversion rates and time between stages.

For more on mapping your funnel, read this article.

Set up Google Analytics tracking on your website. And also set up Google Search Console while you’re at it.
Use a marketing automation tool (we recommend Hubspot). This will be the source of truth for marketing interactions and will 2-way sync with your CRM (whether that’s Hubspot or Salesforce or something else).
Connect your conversion forms to your marketing automation tool.The easiest way to do this is to just use Hubspot forms—so when someone fills in info it automatically gets tracked in your marketing automation tool and CRM. But if you are using something else for forms for some reason, you can feed the data into your marketing automation tool easily through integrations.
(Optional) Augment your CRM data using lead enrichment tools.

Adding UTM codes aka parameters to all links to your website helps you collect first-party data on how your leads got to your website and enables you to get more precise than the basic data provided to you out of the box in Google Analytics or Hubspot web analytics.
Here's an example that Sendoso sent us to track an ad in one of our newsletters:

‍https://sendoso.com/solutions/marketing-leaders/?utm_source=MKT1&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=2023-09-01-PROS-3RDMEDIA-MKT1‍‍

You need to make sure your UTM code data and your form data stick together.
To do this, you’ll create hidden fields in your form and pass the UTM parameters through your form. Here’s how to do this in Hubspot.‍
This doesn’t happen automatically with Hubspot, but setting this up only requires a bit of work.
Having UTM code data mapped to funnel data is a huge unlock for understanding top of funnel.

The image below shows the process for setting up UTM codes.

Set up conversion events to track form fills.
The conversion event should be a page view of the thank you page(s).
Mark events as conversion event in GA4; previously, this was called “Goals” in GA.
Set up “campaigns” in Hubspot or Salesforce for your initiatives (Salesforce is a bit easier).
Make sure you associate campaign members from one tool to the other if using both Salesforce & Hubspot.
Once you set up campaigns, both tools have reports to help you measure the campaign’s impact on revenue.
This gives you essential insight into what’s marketing activities drive revenue.
Campaigns can be events, launches, ad campaigns, high-value content, etc.

The image below shows an example event setup in Google Analytics.

Be sure all prospects pass through all funnel stages. Note: Often times prospected or outbound leads skip the “marketing qualified” stage and this creates reporting madness.
Even if marketing activities never touched the lead, even is sales sent cold outbound to a lead they prospected, the lead still needs to pass through through this stage.
If you don’t pass all leads through this stage, you will have really messy conversion reporting.
Leads can be in the Q1 stage for a literal second if they book a meeting from an email—and go right to Q2 stage.
Have the source or qualifying event marked as “offline” or “cold email” for attribution reasons.