You’re running campaigns, building workflows, publishing content… but when the CEO asks, “What’s driving revenue?”…you freeze. HubSpot has dashboards, but the answer isn’t really there.
This lack of clarity isn’t just frustrating – it’s downright risky. If you can’t prove what’s working, you can’t double down on it. If you can’t spot what’s broken, you waste money fixing the wrong things. And if leadership can’t trust the data, you lose the confidence (and budget) to grow.
Here are four ways to tighten your HubSpot setup so you can better track ROI, cut wasted spend, and get the answers you actually care about.
1. Use HubSpot’s campaigns tool
The campaigns tool is your best friend for figuring out what’s actually working. As the command center for campaign insights, it lets you group related assets into a single campaign so you can track how all those moving parts work together to bring in leads and revenue.
This includes components like:
-
Lists
-
Emails
-
Landing pages
-
Ads
-
Articles/blog posts
-
Forms
-
And more
Why it matters: Looking at one-off metrics like email open rates won’t tell you the full story. Campaigns help you connect the dots between your efforts and real results. Setting up the campaign correctly should help you answer these questions:
- How many contacts did this campaign influence?
- How many new leads did we generate?
- How much revenue came from those leads?
Pro tip: Running a product launch? Build a campaign in HubSpot and tag everything involved. You’ll be able to see how many leads it brought in, how many turned into customers, and what the ROI looks like.
2. Centralize more of your work in HubSpot
The more of your sales and marketing lives inside HubSpot, the clearer your data gets. If you’re juggling tools, such as your email in Mailchimp, landing pages in Unbounce, ads somewhere else, then trying to measure success in HubSpot is a mess.
Why it matters: When everything’s scattered, you can’t get a clear read on what’s driving results. When your tools don’t talk (or only sync halfway) you lose the ability to answer basic questions like:
- Where are our best leads coming from?
- Which content is influencing the most deals?
- What’s our true cost per acquisition?
Additionally, cross platform reporting becomes a challenge if HubSpot’s native properties label external data as “integration” or “offline sources” – you’ll have to develop additional fields to report on rather than using default settings.
Pro tip: If you can’t move a tool into HubSpot, make sure it’s tightly connected. For example, use the native integration for Facebook Ads so you can see which leads and customers came from which ads — inside HubSpot. See our integrations playlist for tutorials on top integrations.
You could also consider creating a centralized integrations audit!
Make a list of all tools your team uses that touch the customer journey, then identify which ones are currently synced to HubSpot (and how). Prioritize fixing or replacing any tool that creates data blind spots.
3. Use deals for tracking revenue, even if your sales team lives in another CRM
Most of HubSpot’s revenue reporting depends on deal data. No deals = no revenue attribution. Even if you manage sales in Salesforce or somewhere else, you still need to get that deal info into HubSpot.
Why it matters: Without deals, HubSpot has no way to connect your marketing to actual revenue. You’ll miss out on key reporting, even if your marketing is working.
Pro tip: Set up a sync between HubSpot and your sales CRM, or mirror your pipeline in both places. Just make sure HubSpot knows when a deal closes and how much it was worth.
4. Build reports that actually answer people’s questions
Too many HubSpot dashboards look impressive but fall short of helping you make better decisions. At Simple Strat we coach teams and employees on a “Question-Based Reporting” approach.
Why this matters: instead of building dashboards around what HubSpot can show you, build them around what your team needs to know.
- Start every report with a specific question: Instead of “Contacts by Source,” think: “Which channels brought in the most closed-won deals last quarter?” That one shift makes your report 10x more useful—and gives it a clear purpose.
- Use the report and dashboard description fields: HubSpot lets you add descriptions when creating custom reports and dashboards—use these! Explain what the report is measuring, why it matters, and how often it’s reviewed. This turns a static chart into a living insight.
- Customize tooltips: When building reports with custom properties or calculated fields, add helpful tooltips so users understand what they’re looking at—especially if you’re using internal naming conventions (e.g., “MQL Score (v2)”).
- Embed content directly into HubSpot dashboards: Use HubSpot’s embed module to add helpful context: Loom vids, Google Slides, images, SOPs, etc.
- Use quick filters and saved views intentionally: Create dashboard-level filters by campaign, time period, or lifecycle stage so users can explore without needing to rebuild reports. And make sure default date ranges are set correctly (or that can cause confusion right away).
- Tailor dashboards to the person, not just the team: Create different dashboards for different roles (Marketing Ops, Sales Manager, CEO). Keep them clean, focused, and question-driven so each person sees only what they need to make decisions.
Pro tip: Add a simple naming convention to your dashboards, like Marketing | Revenue Attribution or Sales | Pipeline Health, so it's clear at a glance who the dashboard is for and what it's helping track.
The data is there – but it shouldn’t have to be so hard to find the treasure!
If any of this hit a little too close to home — unclear ROI, messy reporting, clunky handoffs — you're not alone. Most teams aren’t using HubSpot to its full potential, and that gap between what should be working and what is working creates friction, lost time, and missed revenue.
That’s exactly what our Fix My HubSpot service is built to solve. Whether your portal’s a tangled mess or just needs a tune-up, we help you clean things up, align it to your business goals, and turn HubSpot into a system you can trust — and scale.
Ready to go from guessing to knowing? Book a call and let’s get your HubSpot working for you with the clarity you deserve.