Attribution is one of the most common challenges marketing teams face as they scale.
As organizations grow, the number of active marketing initiatives increases, and campaigns become more complex. What might have started as a few simple initiatives has turned into several multifaceted campaigns running across different channels.
A single campaign might include emails, landing pages, blogs, forms, ads, social posts, and nurture workflows. Each of those assets lives in a different part of HubSpot with its own set of disconnected metrics.
Individually, those metrics are easy to access. What becomes difficult is tying them together.
Which assets actually belong to the same campaign? How did those interactions influence contacts over time? How much revenue did the campaign generate?
Without a clear way to track attribution across multiple assets, it can be difficult for marketing teams to prove the effectiveness of their campaigns. Reporting becomes fragmented, and teams are left trying to piece together campaign performance from unclear metrics.
This is where the HubSpot Campaigns tool comes in.
It provides a structured way to group assets, connect interactions, and measure performance across an entire campaign instead of evaluating each component in isolation.
When it’s used correctly, attribution data becomes more consistent, making it easier to report on the ROI of marketing initiatives.
Native to Marketing Hub, a HubSpot Campaign record allows you to group related marketing assets and track their performance toward a singular goal.
Within a campaign, you can associate assets like emails, landing pages, forms, ads, social posts, blogs, case studies, and workflows. Once those assets are connected, HubSpot aggregates their performance and reports on them at the campaign level.
Campaigns also track key metrics based on the assets and records associated with the campaign, such as impressions, sessions, new contacts, influenced contacts, deals, and revenue.
At its core, the Campaigns tool groups related assets and tracks how they contribute to contacts, deals, and revenue within HubSpot.
Elements of a HubSpot Campaign
HubSpot Campaigns include several tools that support the execution, management, and reporting of marketing initiatives in one place.
HubSpot’s goal tracking tool allows you to define and track specific goals across all of your campaign assets.
You can set targets for metrics like website traffic, contacts influenced, leads / MQLs generated, deals created, or revenue generated, and track progress directly within the campaign. This provides a clear benchmark and helps teams holistically evaluate performance.
The performance tab provides a consolidated view of campaign performance against defined goals. It includes metrics like website traffic, lifecycle stage progression, influenced contacts, and ROI, along with performance data from individual associated assets. These metrics are driven by asset and record associations, so accuracy depends on how consistently the campaign is set up.
The attribution tab breaks down how contacts are created and influenced across the campaign by asset and interaction type. For teams using Sales Hub Enterprise, this also extends to deal creation and revenue, helping connect campaign activity to pipeline outcomes.
The assets tab shows all marketing assets and records associated with the campaign, including emails, ads, forms, blogs, social posts, workflows, CTAs, tracking URLs, files, and marketing events. These associations determine what is included in campaign reporting, making this one of the most important steps in campaign setup.
In addition to marketing assets, teams can now manually associate CRM records or segments directly to a campaign, allowing for more complete tracking of influence across both digital and offline efforts.
The tracking URL builder ensures that traffic is attributed correctly. Generating tracking URLs directly within a campaign applies consistent UTM parameters tied to that campaign. This helps avoid tracking inconsistencies and ensures that external traffic is reflected accurately in reporting.
The budget tab allows you to set a total campaign budget and track spend over time.
Teams can update spend as the campaign progresses, making it easier to compare planned versus actual investment and evaluate performance in the context of overall cost.
The tasks tab allows teams to create and manage work related to your campaign directly within the campaign record. Tasks can be assigned to coordinate activities, track progress, and ensure key deliverables are completed on time.
The activity feed provides a timeline of updates to assets associated with the campaign.
It shows changes made by users, such as updates to campaign assets, giving visibility into ongoing work and how the campaign has evolved over time.
The following steps outline how to set up a campaign in HubSpot.
Start by creating a new campaign and adding core details. This includes the campaign name, owner, start and end dates, and any other relevant details.
If you are managing multiple campaigns of the same type, color-coding can also be used to visually group related campaigns and improve organization.
After creating the campaign, set your campaign goal from the available goal types. Then define the goal name, timeframe, frequency, and target.
These goals provide a benchmark for performance and allow you to track progress directly within the campaign as assets begin driving results.
Next, associate assets with the campaign.
Add any emails, landing pages, forms, ad campaigns, social posts, blogs, workflows, and other relevant assets. These associations determine what data is included in campaign reporting.
If an asset is not associated, it will not be reflected in performance or attribution metrics, which is why this step should be done as assets are created.
For any external links tied to the campaign, create tracking URLs using HubSpot’s tracking link builder.
This ensures that HubSpot can accurately attribute activities to the campaign when source data is unclear. Ensure that you have values for utm_campaign, utm_source, and utm_medium so that campaign and source fields can be set accurately.
If multiple team members are involved in working on your campaign, tasks can be created within the campaign record to ensure that you hit all necessary milestones. Tasks help coordinate work, assign ownership, and ensure that key deliverables are completed on time.
As with most HubSpot assets, establishing consistent naming conventions makes it easier to organize, group, and filter campaigns. A standardized naming structure helps teams quickly identify campaigns by name, type, and timeframe. Naming conventions should be documented and consistently followed by all users.
Views and the campaign calendar help teams organize and analyze campaigns in their portal.
On the campaign index page, saved views can be created based on parameters like timeframe, campaign owner, and campaign name. These make it easier to find only campaigns that belong to certain groups. Saved views can also be shared with other HubSpot users to ensure consistent user experiences across teams.
The campaign calendar view adds another layer of analysis by showing when campaigns are starting and ending. This makes it easier to identify overlaps, gaps, and timing conflicts across initiatives, especially when multiple campaigns are running at once.
Tracking URLs should be created for each external channel to ensure source attribution is consistent and accurate.
For example, separate tracking links should be used for platforms like LinkedIn and Facebook to differentiate web traffic. Marketing emails do not require manual tracking links if automatic UTM tagging is enabled in HubSpot, which helps reduce the number of tracking links you need to manage per campaign.
Custom campaign properties allow teams to track information beyond HubSpot’s default fields.
This can include campaign type, region, audience segment, or internal classifications. Adding these properties makes it easier to filter campaigns and ensures they have the necessary context.
Forms should be configured to capture UTM parameters using hidden fields.
This allows you to capture additional attribution data outside of HubSpot’s default attribution properties. It also provides a reliable way to attribute conversions to a campaign when an asset is not associated with it directly.
Setting up the following properties as custom single-line text fields and adding them as hidden fields on your forms will let you pass through UTM data to the contact record:
Marketing events can be used to track both digital and in-person event participation.
Associating event attendance with campaigns helps ensure that these interactions are accurately included in attribution data. This is especially useful for events that are not fully tracked through standard digital channels.
HubSpot has made several recent updates to the Campaigns tool that improve how campaigns are used. These updates make it easier to connect campaign activity to performance and better understand how campaigns influence contacts, deals, and revenue.
HubSpot now allows you to edit or delete campaign UTM values directly within the Campaign tool. Previously, the utm_campaign property was a set value based on the campaign name.
This helps correct outdated or incorrect values and keeps reporting clean. However, deleting UTMs is permanent and will stop tracking future traffic tied to that value, so changes should be made carefully.
Campaign asset reporting now includes search, sorting, and expanded metrics.
This makes it easier to identify which assets are driving performance and where adjustments are needed, reducing the time between analysis and action.
Campaign properties and events can now be used within workflows.
This allows you to automate actions based on campaign performance or contact influence. For example, you can trigger a follow-up when a contact is influenced or alert your team when a campaign exceeds budget.
You can now directly associate records in HubSpot with campaigns or automate associations through workflows. This is especially useful for offline campaigns like events, print, or direct mail.
When manually associating contacts, you can define an Influence type to capture how that contact was influenced.
As the number of campaigns grows, maintaining organization in your system can become more difficult. Using folders allows you to group campaigns into structured categories. This improves usability as the number of campaigns grows, helping teams keep their portals organized.
For more complex folder structures, be sure to document the process so that folders are created with purpose and consistency.
Campaigns should help you understand which efforts generated contacts, influenced deals, and contributed to revenue. Having the right reports in place is equally as important as having the right data. Below are some ways to leverage campaign data for better attribution reporting.
The Analyze tab provides a centralized view of campaign performance across all campaigns.
It allows you to evaluate results across campaigns and identify trends in traffic, contacts, and revenue. Campaign AI insights build on this by highlighting patterns and surfacing what is driving performance, helping teams quickly identify areas to optimize.
HubSpot’s marketing analytics suite includes pre-built reporting templates designed to analyze campaign performance.
These reports allow you to track metrics like leads generated or contacts influenced across campaigns without needing to build reports from scratch. They are a useful starting point for building out a useful marketing dashboard.
Custom reports offer more options for creating the right reports for the data you want to see.
Using properties like first touch converting campaign, last touch converting campaign, and UTM parameters, you can build reports that show how campaigns influence contacts and deals across the customer journey.
When default attribution properties are not sufficient, automation can be used to capture campaign data at key points in the lifecycle.
For example, workflows can be used to stamp the last converting campaign on a deal at creation. This ensures that campaign influence is preserved and can be used in reporting, even as records move through the funnel.
HubSpot Campaigns is a core feature within Marketing Hub that is often underutilized.
When set up correctly, it provides a structured way to connect assets, track attribution, and report on how campaigns influence contacts, deals, and revenue. But like most tools in HubSpot, its effectiveness depends on how it’s implemented.
Clear structure, consistent execution, and strong governance are what make campaigns work. Without those, reporting becomes fragmented and difficult to trust.
HubSpot is continuing to invest in this area of the platform, with upcoming updates like Marketing Studio expected to further evolve how campaigns are managed and analyzed. Stay tuned for further coverage of how marketers can manage campaigns in HubSpot using these exciting new tools.
Need help using campaigns in your portal? Contact the Pros.