Marketing automation has grown at an astounding rate. There are nearly 11 times more B2B organizations using marketing automation today than there were in early 2011. As people jump on the marketing automation train, it has evolved to include more robust features. For example, marketers want to be able to track visitor behavior on websites—whether a visitor has clicked on a specific URL or even a specific element within your web page. Most good marketing automation programs offer this. In our case, we use HubSpot. If you have the HubSpot Enterprise platform, you’ll find events reporting can give you the answers you need quickly. If you have a different version (Basic or Pro), events reporting may well be the feature you need to make the case for upgrade.
What are events?
Events are potential goal indicators, and reporting on them can give a marketer or decision-maker important information about the progress and health of a campaign. Or think of it this way, let's say the goal is your destination in a road trip you are taking. Put gas in the car? Look at a map? Plug in your phone to charge? These are all behaviors that are strongly associated with the road trip. A "good" road trip will rack up a count of such behaviors, and likewise you can get a sense of how what behaviors are showing up more than others. Events, as they are called in HubSpot, lets you report on similar campaign touchpoints and more. Additionally, it's good to know that implementing this readily-available feature is made easier by installing the HubSpot Event Bookmarklet.
What can be measured?
So what kinds of events in HubSpot can be tagged for measurement? First off, you'll want to look under the reports section of HubSpot. You'll see that straight out of the box, HubSpot can measure: a) the clicked element of a page whether CTA or hyperlink; b) whether a page is visited; c) whether a given HubSpot form was submitted.
Here's an example of simply counting a given landing page visit as an event. Here we can see at a glance how effective our landing page is at creating contacts.
Now, without that data reporting of contacts created, this feature would really not be more than a glorified hit counter. That might be true except for the fact that you can also use events as workflow triggers, and that opens up all kinds of possibilities. Take the case of the trial sign-up page, that also has a link to pricing details. By using event reporting to record, for example, the views on the pricing page, we could plan a nurturing campaign with tailored communication targeting just those contacts who have viewed this special content. How does that work? It's simple. Because events can drive workflows, we can identify those who triggered the event, and once in the workflow we can schedule a series of communications—all driven by the fact that they viewed a specific piece of content or clicked on a specific CTA.
Using custom events
Custom events are also an option, though not for the faint-of-heart because of the technical know-how required. However, imagine this: instead of recording an event of viewing the special content page, maybe we want an event that records when the user scrolls to the bottom of the page. That is something a bit more extensive to pull off, but it is possible using events funtionality and some javascript that measures visitors scroll depth.
So give events a whirl, and if you'd like some assistance brainstorming how using events and workflows can help your campaigns, let us know.