Benefits of using the HubSpot WordPress Plugin

If you're a HubSpot customer and use WordPress for your website, make sure you are using the HubSpot WordPress plugin (available from WordPress.org here).

If you are already using it, you might be wondering why I'd make a point of recommending it. The reason is because many sites prefer to use script insertion rather than a plugin. For example, we usually use Google Tag Manager to insert as many of the scripts into the site as possible, and avoid using plugins or manual script insertion into the theme itself.

But the HubSpot WordPress plugin is one case where using the plugin actually gives you an advantage over just inserting the script.

The benefit is that the WordPress plugin allows HubSpot to differentiate between a page and a post.

This in turn means that your analysis of Pages versus Posts can be split out on the Page Performance tool. Here's the dropdown selections you'll be able to use from the HubSpot page type selection:

Or here's how it looks if you are still using the old page performance layout.

If you're not using the WordPress plugin the Blog posts listing will be empty, and instead all your posts will get lumped into the general Website pages listing.

Moving on to the Page Performance report itself now... one of the things I really like about this report is that it highlights the CTA% of posts.

The CTA% column

From the HubSpot Knowledge base the CTA% is calculated by dividing the total number of views of a page or post by the number of clicks a CTA on the page got (or, if you have multiple CTAs on the page, it is the average of each of their CTA%).

This is really useful since it highlights which pages or posts are driving visitors to click on a CTA (and hopefully complete a next action such as filling out a form):

From this I can find my better performing posts (eg in green boxes), and analyse them to see what I could learn and apply to my poor performing posts (eg in red boxes).

As an example, here's a post that is performing very well in terms of CTA%:

It is good at driving people to click on a call-to-action and take the next step. But it gets hardly any visits (only 36 last month) so here is an opportunity - I should focus on promoting this post more.

Further, I can also see that my 2nd and 3rd most viewed posts have lower CTA% - perhaps there's work I can do on them to improve the click throughs as well.

(And one other thing - those little yellow triangles highlight that the posts themselves can be optimised a little better - always a good housekeeping activity to do.)

By the way, Ian and I discuss this further in episode 5 of HubShots - our new HubSpot podcast.

Improvements I'd Like To See

The Page Performance report in HubSpot has been changing lately (as well as moving - it was removed from the Reports menu, and is now back).

As such it's like there's a bunch of improvements in the works. One of things I'd like to see is the ability to sort by any of the columns. Especially the CTA% column, that way I wouldn't have to page through the list of pages to find the highest performing and lowest performing posts.