If you’re switching your HubSpot partner agency or getting in some extra help after managing your own HubSpot portal, undertaking a HubSpot portal audit is a great way to service your portal and make sure everything is in working order.
By running an audit, you can identify and fix errors, and learn how to use the available tools on your subscription better.
When Wave welcomes a new HubSpot partner, the first thing we run is a portal audit. This is separate from your onboarding training.
Wave offers free and paid for portal audits.
The free audit gives you actionable suggestions and quick wins on how you can improve your HubSpot portal and tailor it towards your business needs.
→ Check out Wave’s Ultimate Guide to Picking a HubSpot Partner
The paid audit goes a little deeper and looks more intrinsically at your tool usage. How many contradicting workflows do you have? How many duplicate contacts need to be deleted? Are your integrations triggering properly?
Whatever audit you have, it helps us tailor our HubSpot management to your needs. We will also be able to identify how you can use your HubSpot portal better and even save you some money with your subscription!
Why do a HubSpot portal audit?
Would you buy a house without doing a survey?
When you’re making big decisions for your company and spending money, you want to be sure your investment won’t spiral. What if you have to keep adding more contacts and bumping up costs?
An audit identifies this straight away and finds a way to keep your costs low. An audit stops problems appearing later on and is a great way to keep stock of your HubSpot system.
What does Wave’s free HubSpot portal audit include?
Wave’s HubSpot portal audit has five stages.
- We find out what you want from your portal to achieve
- We check that your contacts meet your subscriptions criteria to guarantee you aren’t getting hidden costs
- We run through your portal one tool at a time and identify what you are, and are not, using.
Marketing ✔️
Sales ✔️
Service ✔️
CRM ✔️
Account management ✔️
SEO ✔️
Social media ✔️ - Create an action plan to get you from where you are to where you want to be
So now you know the basics of how we run a portal audit, let’s dig a little deeper.
Do a HubSpot audit to make sure you’re not overpaying
When you sign up to HubSpot, you have to choose what type of subscription is right for you. The subscription tiers are Starter, Professional and Enterprise.
Each subscription has their own set of tools, with Enterprise giving you access to the full suite of HubSpot tools.
Reading this, you might assume that Enterprise is always the most expensive. This is not the case.
As well as paying for your chosen subscription, you also pay for the number of contacts you have above those allowed in your subscription.
For example, if you’re on a Professional subscription, you are allowed 2,000 marketing contacts. You have to pay an extra $224.72/month per 5,000 additional contacts.
If you’re not monitoring this, you can find yourself paying too much.
So as part of your Wave HubSpot audit, we do one of two things.
- We will check to see if you can save money by moving to Enterprise and will recommend this if we think you’re objectives will benefit from the extra tools
OR - We will comb through your contacts and identify the type of contact that can be a non-marketing contact. You can have up to 1,000,000 non-marketing contacts, and you don’t have to pay for them.
Whatever option we choose, we will use our portal audit to save you money.
Do a HubSpot audit to use your HubSpot tools effectively
Once we have checked out your contacts, we will now check out your tools.
This process is simple and impactful.
At the top of your portal, you will have the following menu:
| Contacts | Conversions | Marketing | Sales | Service | Automation | Reports |
We simply go down each menu item and bucket how you use the tools into three categories.
| Tool is used well | Tool's use can be improved | Tool is not used |
This method enables Wave to understand how you use your portal relative to your business goals.
We’re not going to advocate that you use all of the tools at your disposal. We actually think our value lies in telling you what tools not to use.
For example, there is very little point in you using the prospecting tool if you don’t use HubSpot for business development. It’s wasted energy and a distraction from your goals.
By knowing what you currently use, we can suggest how you can improve your experience and generate better results. We will help you use HubSpot strategically and deliver more value to you as a result.
For some tools, we will have to go under the surface and get more information.
Social media HubSpot audit
The social media tool on HubSpot is a beast. Like rivals like Hootsuite, you can write, schedule and post social media posts directly from HubSpot.
You can also view important reports for benchmarking and progress, including number of impressions, likes, interactions and shares.
HubSpot works with the following social media platforms:
- YouTube
In fact, HubSpot and LinkedIn integrate beyond just running posts. You can also connect your Sales Navigator account and funnel leads and account directly into your portal.
When Wave audits your HubSpot social media use, we audit more than just scheduling. We will check you are using the following features correctly:
- The publishing calendar
- The inbox
- Campaigns
When auditing your social media tool usage, we answer the following questions:
- Is social media the right channel for your business?
- Do you need one inbox to answer all of your social media DMs and comments?
- Is your posting cadence right for your business and marketing goals?
- Are you successfully tracking the leads generated by your social media accounts?
- Are your paid and organic social channels integrated or separate?
Once you have answers to these questions, you will know how to make your HubSpot and social media usage work towards one aim.
Content HubSpot audit
When Wave audits the content you create in HubSpot, we will look to see if you are using the website pages, landing pages and blog tools effectively.
We will also check if you are using the native SEO tool, or check the last time you used it, but more on that later.
Auditing web pages and landing pages
We check that you are hosting your web pages in HubSpot. If you’re not, then the audit is simple. If you are, then we will check that the pages are on the right domain, see where they sit in your site tree and check when they were last updates.
Auditing your blog
If you are hosting your blog on HubSpot, we will check to see if you have any outstanding drafts that need to be scheduled or published.
More importantly, we will see how you are using your blog for your inbound marketing efforts and if your blog is delivering results. If not, how can you improve this?
Tracking URL Audit
How does HubSpot track visitors? If your pages are hosted in HubSpot or links are added to social media posts using the social media tool, HubSpot automatically adds a tracking code to your pages.
If visitors have cookies enabled, HubSpot will then track their progress across your site. When they convert into contacts, their contact record will automatically fill with the number of page views and the average time spent on page up to the point of conversion. You will also be able to see where they originated from.
What’s included in Wave’s paid HubSpot audit?
Wave’s paid HubSpot audit follows the same outline as above. However, it goes into a bit more detail.
In a paid audit, we identify what properties are redundant, what workflows have errors or are contradicting each other, scrutinise your integrations to make sure information is seamlessly flowing between your apps, and go through your SEO one webpage at a time.
Auditing your HubSpot Properties
Your objects (contact, company, deals and tickets) contain properties.
The best thing to do is to create custom properties. This will enable you to gather more tailored data for your company.
However, during your HubSpot usage, you might have created too many custom properties. There will probably be properties that are now redundant and never used. You might even have important properties that your team struggles to find.
Wave’s paid audit combs through your properties and identifies the properties you can:
- Delete
- Promote
- Use better
Auditing your HubSpot workflows
If you heavily use HubSpot’s automation tools, you might find a few workflows contradict each other. For example, if you forget to turn off a workflow that sets a contact owner, anyone who meets the enrollment criteria will have that person as a contact owner even if this shouldn’t be the case. You might even have the same criteria for all of your contact owners, meaning the system will get confused.
Wave will go through your workflows to identify any contradicting workflows, identify potential errors and see why any unused workflows are no longer firing.
Auditing your integrations
Wave will also take a look at your third-party integrations.
We make sure they are working correctly and that data is transferring as it should.
We’ll also see how you can use HubSpot’s automation tools as well to send information between apps.
SEO audit on HubSpot
Wave’s uses HubSpot’s SEO tool to run an SEO audit.
This works in conjunction with Google Lighthouse to identify on-page and technical SEO areas that can be improved.
This includes:
- Analysing Total Blocking Time and if your site is taking too long to respond to user input actions
- Check if your meta-description is up-to-scratch
- Find out if your site is optimised for mobile and if elements fit within the viewport
Get a HubSpot portal audit from Wave
Wave is a HubSpot partner agency dedicated to specialised and personable service.
Book a time to kick off your free portal audit here.
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