When we first chat with new clients about their HubSpot portals, an early topic is about connecting their advertising platforms into HubSpot.
I don’t have hard data, but I’d estimate that only 50% of clients portals we review have any of their ad platforms (Meta, LinkedIn, Google) connected.
[1] HubSpot Ads Tool benefits
For those clients who don’t have ads connected, we usually hear three main responses:
- “We don’t do paid ads” (OK, fair enough)
- “We didn’t know you could connect ads into HubSpot” (OK, so an opportunity)
- “We manage our ads on the ad platforms themselves” (OK, so a misunderstanding on the real value)
For the third item, there’s a basic misunderstanding of the value of connecting ads into HubSpot.
- It’s not about managing ads (we never manage our ads from HubSpot either, always on the ad platform).
- Instead, it’s about attribution reporting, tracking, seeing the whole customer journey and pushing back insights to the ad platforms.
[2] Lead Form Syncing
Of the 50% of portals that do have ads connected, we then find:
- Hardly any (perhaps only 20%) have Lead Syncing enabled (ie to pull down contacts from Lead Forms into HubSpot)
- Instead many clients have created elaborate Zapier zaps for importing Lead Form contacts from Facebook, LinkedIn and Google into HubSpot
- They didn’t know this could all be easily enabled with a single setting in HubSpot instead
[3] Audiences
Of the 50% of portals that do have ads connected, we also find:
- Hardly any are pushing back contact lists back up as audiences to Facebook, etc (eg for inclusion, exclusion, lookalike audiences)
- Instead they are doing manual exports (privacy nightmare!), or additional convoluted Zapier zaps
- When they could be simply doing this from HubSpot (plus, it continuously syncs)
[4] Events
And finally, almost no one is pushing ad events up to the platforms (eg Google Ads).
- Events are really powerful because they close the loop back to the ad platform on a contact that came via ads.
- Plus you can set a dollar value so the ad platform knows how to calculate their value. Very powerful.
Time to skill up
- In episode 313 of HubShots, Ian and I go through all of this in detail.
- You can listen to the podcast (Spotify, Soundcloud or Apple podcasts), watch on YouTube, or read the in-depth show notes.
- We also have a complete course in our HubShots Community.
And if you’d like to book in time with Ian and me to review your HubSpot portal to optimise your ads integration, you can book in a time here.
