Campaigns | Frequently Asked Questions

Find answers and general information about the campaigns tool and analyzing your campaign performance in HubSpot. Learn how to use the campaigns tool to achieve your marketing goals. 

General

What’s the difference between a campaign, a utm_campaign, an ad campaign, and a email campaign?

When marketing your business, campaigns may be referenced in different contexts within HubSpot and externally: 

• Campaigns: this refers to HubSpot campaigns created in the campaigns tool. Generally, campaigns include a group of related marketing assets and content, tagged under a single campaign. 
  
  • Campaign assets refer to content created in other Hubspot tools. Ad campaigns and marketing emails can be considered marketing assets. For example, you can set up a marketing campaign involving a series of social posts, ad campaigns, marketing emails, and a landing page.
  • After setting up a campaign, you can keep track of the performance of both individual campaign assets and the overall marketing campaigns. For example, you may want to keep track of which types of content had the most engagement. You may also want to note the quantitative returns on the campaign, such as influenced contacts and deals, for other stakeholders in your team. 
• utm_campaign: this refers to the tags used to track traffic to your website.

  • HubSpot campaigns may include traffic that is tagged with utm_campaign parameters, but not all utm_campaign parameters are necessarily related to a HubSpot campaign.

• Ad campaigns: this refers to ad campaigns within the HubSpot ads tool. The ads tool allows you to create and keep track of ad campaigns on different ad networks such as Facebook, Google, and LinkedIn. 
  • Ad campaigns can be associated with campaigns as assets.
  • After connecting your ad account, you can create different types of ad campaigns, from Google search ad campaigns to Lead generation ads on Facebook and LinkedIn. 
  • You can analyze the performance of ad campaigns created in HubSpot and externally. 
• Email campaigns: in other platforms, marketing emails may be sometimes referred to as email campaigns. Externally, email campaigns are usually either a single email or a series of marketing emails with the purpose of attracting or engaging your contacts to your website.
  • In HubSpot, you can create marketing emails from the classic email editor or the drag and drop email editor. You can manually send the marketing email, or save the email to send workflows.
  • Marketing emails can also be added as assets to your campaigns. You can set up a HubSpot campaign, with specific marketing emails and pages. Or, you can also create and send individual, standalone emails. 

What are the differences between a HubSpot campaign and Salesforce campaign?

Although both HubSpot and Salesforce have campaigns, these two objects do not correspond to each other.

• HubSpot campaigns: this refers to a group of related marketing assets and content, under a certain marketing campaign.
  • Associating marketing assets and content in HubSpot to a campaign allows you to measure the effectiveness of your collective marketing efforts.
  • HubSpot campaigns cannot sync to Salesforce.
• Salesforce campaigns: manage outbound marketing campaigns with various marketing collateral. Salesforce campaigns can sync limited data to HubSpot:
  • If a Salesforce lead or contact is associated with a Salesforce campaign, the Salesforce Campaign ID field will sync to their HubSpot contact record. This property can also be used to segment contacts in HubSpot.
  • Contacts can be added to a Salesforce campaign from a HubSpot form or workflow.

Assets and content

Can I associate assets or content with more than one campaign?

Each individual blog post, form, call-to-action, email, landing page, website page, social post, paid search campaign, and tracking URL can only be associated with one campaign in HubSpot.

Adding assets or content that are already associated with another campaign to a new campaign will remove them from their current campaigns. Only individual workflows can be associated with multiple campaigns.

Why isn't my associated asset or content appearing in the campaign?

If your asset or content is not appearing in a campaign as expected, confirm that the content is associated with the correct campaign and that the campaign's start and end dates match the time range when the content was published. 

There are three additional reasons why your asset or piece of content may not appear within its campaign in the campaigns tool or campaign analytics:

• Social posts will not appear until they are published.
• Paid search campaigns and tracking URLs will not appear until they receive at least one visit.
• The maximum number of social posts that can be associated with a campaign is 10,000. Once a campaign reaches the limit, you will not be able to associate any additional posts to that campaign.

What happens if I switch the association of an asset to a different campaign?

When you associate an asset with a different campaign, any existing attribution data will not transfer over to the new campaign. Based on the type of asset you switch, some data will transfer over to the new campaign:

• Clicks from any CTAs will not transfer over to a new campaign.
• Marketing email metrics, including the number of contacts who sent, opened, and clicked your email.
• Clicks and interactions from your social posts.

Data and metrics

What data is included in campaign analytics?

In general, campaign analytics gather data after association with marketing assets and content:

• Campaign analytics, such as the metrics in the Overview report, are based on the assets associated with the campaign:
  • Asset data for these reports are only included after association. These metrics are calculated from the date and time the assets were associated with the campaign.
  • Asset data from prior to the association will not be included in these metrics. 
• However, the metrics in the [name of asset] section reports will show historical data for each individual asset.
  • These metrics are not dependent on the date and time an asset was associated with the campaign.
  • These metrics will include data from prior to the association. 

For example, if you associate a marketing asset to a campaign after it was released, the data prior to the association will not be present in the campaign's Overview report in the Performance tab, but will appear in the data for individual assets below. 

Why are tracking URL visits not appearing in campaigns or campaign analytics?

A tracking URL will not appear in the campaign details page or campaign analytics unless it has at least one visit after the campaign was created.

For example, if a tracking URL is visited on June 10, 2022, but the campaign was created on June 12, 2022, the tracking URL will not appear on the campaign details page or in campaign analytics.

What's the difference between each contact-based metric?

When analyzing your campaigns, you may come across a number of different contact-based metrics. Each metric is outlined below: 

• Contacts (first touch): the number of newly created contacts, attributed to the campaign that directed them to your website for the first time. These contacts will be counted under New Contacts (First touch) when either condition is met:
  • The first page they visit has a URL containing utm_campaign parameters.
  • The first page they visit is associated with the campaign.
• Contacts (last touch): the number of newly created contacts, attributed to the campaign that led to their conversion. These contacts will be counted under the New Contacts (Last touch) when either condition is met:
  • They convert on a page where the URL contains utm_campaign parameters.
  • They visit a page or submit a form that's associated with the campaign before converting, during the same session.
• Influenced contacts: contacts that have engaged with one or more campaign assets in a given HubSpot campaign. For example, they may have visited a page or opened a marketing email associated with the campaign. This metric can include both new and existing contacts. Learn more about influenced contacts in your campaign metrics. 
• Contacts with revenue (Marketing Hub Professional only): the number of associated contacts with closed-won deals, that have interacted with assets from this campaign. The interactions for this metric are different from the interactions for the Influenced contacts metric. Learn more about the contacts with revenue metric. 
• Contacts with attributed revenue (Marketing Hub Enterprise only): the number of associated contacts with closed-won deals, depending on attribution model selected. Learn more about attribution reporting and the different revenue attribution interaction types..

Why is my deal data not included in a campaign?

For deal data to be included in a campaign's reports, the deal must meet the following requirements: 

• The deal must be associated with a contact that has been influenced by an asset or piece of content in the campaign.
• The deal needs to have been associated with the influenced contact before the deal is closed.
• If you are analyzing revenue or revenue attribution data, this typically does not include data from static lists. Learn more about analyzing your campaign metrics.