What is HubSpot Content Staging and how do you use it?
Jan 21, 2025
When it comes to measuring your website's performance, HubSpot provides powerful analytics tools that integrate directly with your CRM. This gives you a complete picture of not just who's visiting your website, but how those visits turn into leads and customers for your business.
HubSpot's website analytics are built-in tools that help you track and analyse website performance. Unlike standalone analytics platforms, HubSpot connects visitor behaviour with your CRM data, letting you understand the complete journey from first visit to closed customer.
Getting started with HubSpot analytics depends on where your website is hosted.
If you're using HubSpot to host your website, analytics tracking is automatic. There's no setup required – you'll start seeing data as soon as your site is live.
For websites hosted outside of HubSpot, you'll need to add the HubSpot tracking code to begin collecting analytics. Once implemented, HubSpot will track all pages where the code is present.
HubSpot provides several key analytics reports to help you understand your website performance.
HubSpot's sources report shows exactly where your traffic comes from, breaking down visits by organic search, direct traffic, referrals, social media, email marketing, and paid channels.
Track the performance of individual pages with metrics like views, time on page, and conversion rates. This helps you understand which content resonates with your audience.
Monitor the effectiveness of your marketing campaigns by tracking custom UTM parameters. This is particularly valuable for measuring specific campaign performance.
See how visitors access your site across desktop, mobile, and tablet devices to ensure your content works well for all users.
Understand your global audience with geographic data showing which countries your visitors come from.
Track which web browsers your visitors use to ensure your site performs well across all platforms.
Measure the effectiveness of your content strategy by analysing how topic clusters perform in terms of traffic and engagement.
HubSpot custom events allow you to track specific interactions or behaviours that matter to your business but aren't covered by HubSpot's standard analytics. Think of them as creating your own trackable actions – whether that's product usage, offline interactions, or specific user behaviours.
With custom events, you can track things like:
The real value of custom events comes from their flexibility. You can create up to 500 unique events and use them for segmentation, personalised marketing campaigns, lead scoring, and detailed reporting. Plus, each event can carry additional context through custom properties, helping you build a richer picture of customer interactions over time.
For enterprise users, HubSpot's customer journey reports provide deeper insights into how visitors become customers.
These reports help you to:
To get real value from HubSpot's analytics, you need to think beyond basic metrics and focus on insights that drive business growth. Here's how to make the most of these tools.
Website traffic isn't just a number – it's a signal of your market presence and marketing effectiveness. When analysing trends, look for:
This deeper understanding helps you move beyond "more traffic" to focus on attracting the right visitors at the right time.
Traffic source analysis is about quality, not just quantity.
However, there's an important caveat here, software attribution doesn't tell the full story.
Modern B2B buying journeys are complex. Buyers might discover you through social media, research you via organic search, and finally convert through a direct visit. This is why pairing HubSpot's attribution data with self-reported attribution is crucial. Ask your leads how they first heard about you – you might be surprised how different the story is from what the analytics show.
Page performance analytics reveal more than just popular content – they show how effectively your website serves your audience. When analysing page performance:
Analytics should drive action, not just provide information. Use your HubSpot data to:
Remember that not all metrics matter equally. Focus on the ones that align with your business goals rather than trying to improve every number.
The real power of HubSpot analytics lies in its CRM integration, which goes beyond basic website tracking to connect visitor behaviour with pipeline and revenue data. This deeper integration helps you understand the true ROI of your marketing efforts.
This connection lets you:
However, it's crucial to remember that much of the B2B buyer journey happens outside of what analytics tools can track – what we might call marketing's "dark funnel". This includes:
This is why it's essential to combine HubSpot's analytics data with other sources of insight, like self-reported attribution and sales team feedback, to build a complete picture of your marketing effectiveness.
While HubSpot provides powerful analytics tools, there are several limitations you should be aware of when using them.
While HubSpot's analytics have some limitations, they're an invaluable part of creating and maintaining an effective B2B website. Success comes from understanding both the capabilities and constraints, then working within them to make data-driven improvements to your website.
Analytics are just one of many powerful tools that make HubSpot CMS an excellent choice for B2B websites.
