Maximise Your Advertising ROI with HubSpot's Ad Management Tools

Effectively managing advertising across various platforms can be challenging, especially when using ad systems for insights and media budget management. HubSpot's Ads tool addresses this complexity by providing a unified platform to oversee all campaigns, enabling insightful comparisons of ad performance across different platforms and campaigns. In today's digital landscape, advertising is pivotal to a successful marketing strategy; however, the multitude of available platforms makes allocation decisions daunting. 

HubSpot Ads offers a comprehensive solution, empowering businesses to create and manage impactful campaigns across multiple channels. Striking the right balance in ad spend is crucial, and HubSpot's ad management tools facilitate this by connecting ad platforms and monitoring digital ad performance. This integration ensures maximum ROI, efficient budget management, and seamless coordination with the HubSpot CRM. The features of HubSpot Ads, including targeted advertising, ad creation, optimisation, tracking, and reporting, position it as an excellent tool for achieving marketing and sales goals. 

With HubSpot Ads, cross-comparing ad performance on LinkedIn, Google, and Facebook becomes seamless, providing valuable insights for optimising campaigns. The tool integrates ads, allowing a complete view of performance, syncing contacts from lead generation ads, identifying engaged contacts, and creating target audiences based on contact lists and website visitors. To leverage HubSpot's Ads tool, connecting LinkedIn, Facebook, and Google accounts is the initial step, each with its specific requirements outlined in the subsequent sections.

What is HubSpot Ads?

HubSpot Ads is a powerful advertising platform that enables businesses to create, manage, and track their advertising campaigns across multiple channels. With HubSpot Ads, businesses can create and manage campaigns on Facebook, Google, LinkedIn, and other popular advertising platforms, all from one convenient location.

HubSpot Ads gives you a comprehensive view of your ad campaigns and lets you make data-driven decisions to improve their performance.
With a range of features and tools to create and optimise campaigns, HubSpot Ads enables businesses to reach a wider audience, improve brand awareness, and increase conversions.
Additionally, detailed analytics and reporting provide businesses with insights to refine strategies and optimise ad spending for better ROI.

By leveraging the power of the HubSpot CRM, businesses can create more effective and personalised advertising campaigns, while tracking and measuring the performance of both campaigns from a single platform. In conclusion, HubSpot Ad management is a powerful tool that helps businesses optimise their digital ad campaigns and improve their return on investment. 

HubSpot Ads Features:

HubSpot Ads offers a range of features and tools that make it easy to create and optimise advertising campaigns, including:

Ad Management:
HubSpot Ads enables businesses to create and manage advertising campaigns across multiple channels, all from one convenient location. HubSpot Ad management is a that helps you connect your ad platforms and track your digital ad performance inside of HubSpot, instead of needing to login to each individual platform. With ad platform integrations and a unified dashboard, you can manage all your ad campaigns in one place and save time on manual data entry. With HubSpot's ad management tools, you can connect your ad platforms and track digital ad performance--maximising ROI and minimising wasted ad spend. 

Targeted advertising:
With features like audience segmentation and retargeting, you can create targeted ad campaigns that are more likely to reach and convert your target audience.

Ad Creation:
With HubSpot Ads, businesses can create custom ads that are tailored to their specific goals and target audiences.

Ad Tracking and Reporting:
HubSpot Ads provides businesses with detailed analytics and reporting on the performance of their advertising campaigns. You can track key metrics like impressions, clicks, and conversions, and get insights into which ads are performing well and which ones need improvement. HubSpot Ads offers valuable insights that allow you to make data-driven decisions about where to focus your time.

Ad Optimisation:
HubSpot Ads offers a range of optimisation tools that enable businesses to improve the performance of their ads over time.

Budget management:
You can set and track your ad budget, and get alerts when you're close to reaching your budget limit. Maximise your ROI and minimise wasted ad spend. Let's take a closer look at how HubSpot Ads management works.

Integration with HubSpot CRM:
HubSpot Ads seamlessly integrates with the HubSpot CRM, allowing businesses to track leads and customers across all stages of the buyer's journey. 

Guide to Connecting Your Ad Platforms to HubSpot

Now that we've gone over some of the basics of HubSpot Ad management, let's take a look at how you can connect your ad platforms.
Here's a step-by-step guide:

To connect your ad accounts to HubSpot Ad management, follow these steps: 

1. Go to the HubSpot Ad management dashboard.
2. Click on the "Connections" tab in the left-hand menu.
3. Click the "Connect Account" button for the ad platform you want to connect (e.g. Google Ads, Facebook Ads).
4. Follow the prompts to log in to your ad account and optimise the connection to HubSpot.
5. Repeat the process for any additional ad platforms you want to connect.
6. Repeat steps 2-4 for each ad platform you want to connect.

Once you've connected your ad accounts, you'll be able to manage all your ad campaigns in one place using the HubSpot Ad management dashboard. You'll be able to track ad performance, set budgets, and make data-driven decisions to optimise your ad spend and improve your return on investment.

Connecting LinkedIn Ads to HubSpot

Connecting your LinkedIn Ads account to HubSpot requires a HubSpot user with Publish access and account manager status in the LinkedIn Ads account.
After obtaining the necessary access, follow these steps:

1. Navigate to Settings | Marketing | Ads | Connect account from the top menu.
2. Choose LinkedIn as the desired platform in the popup.
3. In the prompted popup, sign in to your personal LinkedIn account. It acts as a conduit to access your company's Ads account.
4. Select the LinkedIn Ads account to connect to HubSpot. For tracking contacts interacting with your ads, leave autotracking on.
   This applies HubSpot tracking to your LinkedIn ads. Click Connect. Upon completion of these steps, your LinkedIn Ads account is successfully connected, ready for launching and tracking both existing and future ads on LinkedIn. Next, let's explore the process of connecting Facebook ads to HubSpot.

Connecting Facebook Ads to HubSpot

To connect your Facebook Ads account to HubSpot, ensure the HubSpot user possesses Publish access to the HubSpot ads tool and holds admin status in the Facebook Business Manager account for the ad account. Follow these steps, similar to connecting a LinkedIn Ads account:

1. Navigate to Settings | Marketing | Ads | Connect account, following the instructions from the previous section.
2. Choose Facebook instead of LinkedIn at Step 2 when prompted to select an ad account. Alternatively, establish a connection between your company page and Facebook ad account, enabling Facebook lead ad forms to appear in HubSpot. Here's how:
3. Go to your Facebook page.
4. Click on All Tools from the side menu.
5. Navigate to Instant Forms on the left-hand side menu.
6. In the Search CRM providers field, find HubSpot and select the corresponding entry in the dropdown.
7. Next to HubSpot, click Connect from Website, redirecting you to log in to your HubSpot portal.

To connect your Google Ads account to HubSpot, ensure the HubSpot user has Publish access to the HubSpot ads tool and admin access to the Google Ads account. Follow these steps for a successful connection:

1. Navigate to Settings | Marketing | Ads | Connect account from the top HubSpot menu.
2. In the popup, select Google Ads.
3. In the opening dialog box, log in to your Google account using the email associated with your Google Ads account.
4. Click Allow.
5. Select the Google account you want to connect to HubSpot and click Connect. Upon successful connection, you will be redirected to the Ads dashboard in HubSpot, syncing existing ad information to the HubSpot Ads section. 

Installing Tracking scripts (Pixels) for each Ad Platform

Once your Facebook, LinkedIn, and Google ad accounts are linked to HubSpot, you can enhance tracking by installing pixel tracking codes. By incorporating pixels like the Facebook pixel, Google conversion tracking tag, and LinkedIn Insight Tag onto HubSpot-hosted or external pages with the tracking code, you refine audience creation within the HubSpot ads tool. Though HubSpot's tracking code suffices, social media pixels offer richer insights seamlessly.

Follow these steps for pixel installation:

1. Navigate to Settings | Marketing | Ads.
2. Access Pixels from the top menu.
3. Click on Add pixel.
4. Select the desired pixel from the dropdown menu.
5. Click Add pixel.

By opting for this integration, the Facebook pixel is automatically embedded in HubSpot pages, including landing pages, blog pages, and web pages, or on external pages with your HubSpot tracking code. This approach ensures comprehensive tracking for better-informed advertising strategies.

How to create audiences in HubSpot for Ad Targeting

Developing an effective ad audience is a crucial step post the completion of technical tasks in connecting ad accounts. HubSpot provides three distinct ways to create your ad audience, centered around website visitors, HubSpot contacts, and existing audiences. Understanding the specific requirements of each platform is essential before initiating the audience creation process.

Google Ads audience criteria include:

• Google Search Network: At least 1,000 visitors in the last 30 days.
• Google Display Network: At least 100 visitors in the last 30 days.
• Facebook Ads: Minimum audience size of 20 users.
• LinkedIn Ads: Minimum audience size of 300 users.

Opting to create audiences in HubSpot offers the advantage of utilising your own data if you already have contacts in HubSpot. Additionally, you can gradually build audiences over time that align with specific criteria, allowing targeted focus on these contacts in your ads.

To create a website visitor's audience in your HubSpot account:

1. Navigate to Marketing | Ads | Create audience.
2. In the pop-up page, choose Website visitors.
3. Under Source pixel, select the appropriate pixel (Facebook, Google Ads, LinkedIn Ads).
4. Segment the audience based on visited pages with ad time estimation.
5. Provide a name and click Create audience.

HubSpot simplifies audience creation by offering an inclusive audience for all website pages. For Marketing Hub Starter, Professional, or Enterprise accounts, specific website pages can be selected for inclusion.

Creating an audience list based on contacts involves:

1. Go to Marketing | Ads | Create audience | Contacts list.
2. Check the checkbox confirming the list was not obtained from a third party.
3. Choose the relevant ad account.
4. Name the list and click Create audience.

This contact list becomes accessible on the chosen social media platform, enabling targeted campaigns in the future. Subsequently, the focus shifts to creating ads for these campaigns.

Creating Ads inside HubSpot

Creating impactful ads is the next step in the process, following the connection of ad accounts and audience creation. Here's a concise guide to crafting ads tailored to your audience:

1. Navigate to Marketing | Ads in your HubSpot account.
2. Click on Create ad campaign at the top-right corner, selecting your preferred social media platform.
3. Choose the platform and input all necessary details.
4. In the LinkedIn campaign's Ad tab, complete the ad account details, including image or video, body text, headline, call to action (CTA), and a Linkedin lead gen form.
5. On the Targeting tab, input details for Remarketing, lookalike audiences, Location, and Interests/Behaviors/Demographic lists.
6. On the Budget & Schedule tab, set the budget and dates for the ad campaign.
7. Once all information is filled, proceed to publish the ad.

Remarketing with HubSpot Ads

Crafting compelling retargeting ads within HubSpot can significantly enhance your advertising strategy. Retargeting involves reaching out to individuals based on their past online interactions, particularly those who have visited your website or are part of your database. Targeting an audience already familiar with your product or service often yields superior results, proving to be a more cost-effective investment. HubSpot's paid ads tool facilitates the creation of retargeting ads tailored to contacts in the middle and bottom of the sales funnel. While these campaigns may generate fewer conversions, the quality of leads is typically higher.

For effective retargeting, it's crucial to install a tracking code on your website. Retargeting campaigns, distinct from remarketing, focus on attracting new audiences through ads on various platforms, including social media and email. 

1. Create a list of existing contacts: In HubSpot, formulate a list based on life cycle stage and interests. Ensure the list is substantial before moving forward.

2. Add list to Facebook's Audience Manager: Export the list to a CSV file and import it into Facebook's Custom Audience manager to match email addresses with Facebook profiles.

3. Determine your destination URL: Access Facebook's Ad Manager, hit the Create button, and choose the campaign type (awareness, consideration, or conversion). If using an external URL, name your campaign, add segmentation for specific audiences, set the budget, and you're ready to go. Utilize UTM tracking URLs for effective campaign tracking. Optimise success by keeping campaign names simple and clear, ensuring a seamless retargeting experience.

Using HubSpot Buyer Personas with Ads

Exploring advanced targeting strategies on Facebook involves leveraging the look-alike audience feature. This functionality enables the creation of an audience resembling an existing list of contacts, allowing for a precise match with the criteria of individuals already present in your database. The primary objective is to extend your outreach, seeking more individuals whose characteristics align with those identified as pertinent to your target audience.

By seamlessly integrating your HubSpot with your Facebook ad account, you can harness the potential of building look-alike audiences directly within HubSpot. This strategic approach amplifies the reach of your ads, offering a dual advantage of expanded coverage and sustained focus on precise targeting aligned with your buyer personas.

Initiating this process involves the preliminary step of crafting lists of leads or individuals embodying the traits of your buyer persona within HubSpot. This streamlined method provides a quick and efficient commencement for creating look-alike audiences. While the Facebook Ads Manager offers additional features for look-alike audiences, the integration with HubSpot ensures a synergistic expansion of your paid outreach, maintaining an unwavering emphasis on meticulous targeting and the nuances of your buyer personas.

Creating Ad Copy using HubSpot

Perfecting your ad copy is pivotal for channeling pertinent and focused traffic to your company. Elevate your ad copy by integrating the following components:

1. Target Persona: Tailor your ad copy to pre-qualify your traffic and inject a personal touch. Use phrases like "Report guide for CTO" or "Essential insights for CMOs in start-ups" to resonate with specific roles and industries.

2. Business Size: Clearly convey your focus on business size within the ad copy. For smaller enterprises, incorporate terms like "start-ups" and construct compelling copy such as "Tailored solutions for start-ups, enabling real-time analysis."

3. Industry: Concentrate your messaging on industries directly relevant to your business, steering away from a generic approach.

4. Pricing: Enhance transparency by including pricing details, acting as a filter for contacts without the budget for your solution. Employ phrases like "Starting at £999 per month" to set clear expectations.

Moreover, employ A/B testing to discern the most effective offers. Evaluate diverse campaigns encompassing free trials, demo scheduling, webinar invitations, and content downloads. During A/B tests, tweak and assess one element at a time to precisely gauge its impact on performance. Experiment with variables like headlines, call-to-action (CTA) language, and various visual elements in headers or backgrounds. This methodical testing not only scrutinises click-through rates (CTR) but also identifies which offers yield maximum conversions and opportunities.

HubSpot Ad Analytics

Analysing Ad Campaigns in HubSpot's Ads tool provides a comprehensive view of various metrics, enabling strategic optimisation. Key metrics include the number of impressions, cost per click, cost per contact, cost per customer, total budget spent, and ROI. A deeper analysis allows you to compare the performance of different ads, understanding their impact across platforms and the number of contacts generated. The ad screen not only displays information but also facilitates adjustments, such as budget extensions, schedule modifications, and creative asset enhancements.

Accessing the Edit button opens a new interface, offering the flexibility to edit various metrics. To scrutinise your ad campaign data, navigate to Marketing | Ads on the top menu. The Campaigns tab presents a high-level report, while the table below breaks down information per campaign. For a more detailed analysis, explore the Analyse tab, providing insights into your campaigns' performance.

Thoroughly analysing campaign results is crucial for the success of paid ad investments. HubSpot simplifies this process, offering a clear overview of contacts generated per campaign and their quality. Track their progression through the funnel stages, from lead to marketing qualified lead, sales qualified lead, opportunity, and ultimately, customer. This detailed analysis empowers informed decision-making and optimisation of your advertising strategy.

HubSpot Ad Reporting

HubSpot Ad management provides a range of reports and metrics to help you track the performance of your ad campaigns and make data-driven decisions to optimise your ad spend. Some of the key metrics and reports available in HubSpot Ad management include:

1. Ad performance:
   You can track key metrics like impressions, clicks, and conversions to see how your ads are performing and identify areas for improvement.

2. Budget management:
   You can track your ad spend and set budget limits to ensure that you don't exceed your advertising budget.

3. Audience segmentation:
   You can segment your audience based on factors like demographics, location, and interests to create targeted ad campaigns that are more likely to reach and convert your desired audience.

4. A/B testing:
   You can test different versions of your ad copy, images, and targeting to see which performs the best and optimise your campaigns accordingly. 

5. Ad placements:
   You can see where your ads are being shown (e.g. on mobile devices, desktop computers, etc.) and optimise your ad placements to improve their performance.

6. Ad creatives:
   You can see which ad creatives (e.g. images, copy, etc.) are performing the best and optimise your ad campaigns accordingly.

7. Ad spend breakdown:
   You can see how much you're spending on each ad platform and campaign, and adjust your ad spend as needed.

8. Conversion tracking:
   You can see how many conversions (e.g. sales, leads) your ads are generating and track the return on investment of your ad campaigns.

9. Custom reports:
   You may be able to create custom reports to track specific metrics and see how your ad campaigns are performing.  

10. Ad reach:
    You can see how many people your ads are reaching and optimise your targeting to reach a larger or more relevant audience.

11. Ad engagement:
    You can see how many people are interacting with your ads (e.g. clicking, liking, commenting) and optimise your ad campaigns to improve engagement.

12. Cost per conversion:
    You can see how much you're spending to generate each conversion (e.g. sale, lead) and optimise your ad spend to improve your return on investment.

13. Click-through rate (CTR):
    You can see the percentage of people who click on your ads and optimise your ad copy, images, and targeting to improve CTR.

14. Cost per click (CPC):
    You can see how much you're paying for each click on your ads and optimise your ad campaigns to reduce CPC

By using these reports and metrics, you can make data-driven decisions to optimise your ad spend and improve the performance of your ad campaigns.

Measuring Ad ROI inside HubSpot

Tracking ROI in HubSpot

To track the return on investment (ROI) of your ad campaigns, you'll want to look at metrics like cost per conversion, conversion rate, and overall ad spend. You can use these metrics to calculate your ad ROI and see how well your ad campaigns are performing.

Some additional tips for tracking ad ROI with HubSpot Ad management:

1. Set up conversion tracking:
   Make sure that you have set up conversion tracking in your ad campaigns so you can see how many conversions (e.g. sales, leads) you're generating.

2. Use the cost-per-conversion metric:
   The cost-per-conversion metric shows you how much you're spending to generate each conversion. You can use this metric to see which ad campaigns are generating the most ROI and optimise your ad spend accordingly.

3. Compare ad ROI to other marketing channels:
   It's helpful to compare the ROI of your ad campaigns to other marketing channels, such as email or social media, to see which channels are performing the best.

4. Use A/B testing:
   Try testing different versions of your ad copy, images, and targeting to see which performs the best and optimise your campaigns accordingly.

By tracking ad ROI and using data-driven decision-making, you can optimise your ad campaigns and improve your return on investment.

HubSpot Ads Events

HubSpot Ads provides a powerful way to manage and optimise your advertising campaigns across multiple platforms. One of the key features of HubSpot Ads is optimisation events, which allow you to sync changes in a contact's CRM lifecycle stage with your ad platforms, enabling ad networks to optimise the delivery of your ads.

Optimisation events can also help you save ad spend by targeting HubSpot contacts that are not converting.
For example, you can create an ad event in HubSpot based on the user lifecycle changing to 'customer.' If you don't have any conversions from active campaigns targeting your 'customer' tagged contacts database, you can effectively stop showing ads to them and save ad money.
The event firing will be triggered on database changes within the past 90 days and will be automatically synced with the ad networks based on the event creation.

You can choose which optimisation events you want to sync with your ad platforms in the HubSpot Ads tool, allowing you to optimise your campaigns effectively. To do this, simply navigate to the Settings page and select the optimisation events you want to track.

By using optimisation events in HubSpot Ads, you can maximise the effectiveness of your advertising campaigns, increase efficiency, and enhance integration with the HubSpot CRM. This enables ad networks such as Google Ads, LinkedIn Ads and Facebook Ads to deliver your ads more effectively, based on the changes in the CRM lifecycle data from your HubSpot account. Overall, optimisation events are a powerful feature of HubSpot Ads that can help businesses achieve better ROI from their advertising efforts.

The main optimisation events that can be synced with your ad platforms:

• Contact becomes a lead:
• This event will trigger when a contact becomes a marketing-qualified lead in HubSpot.
• Contact becomes a marketing-qualified lead:
• This event will trigger when a contact becomes a marketing-qualified lead in HubSpot.
• Contact becomes a marketing-qualified lead:
• This event will trigger when a contact becomes a marketing-qualified lead in HubSpot.
• Contact becomes a sales-qualified lead:
• This event will trigger when a contact becomes a sales-qualified lead in HubSpot.
• Contact becomes a deal/opportunity:
• This event will trigger when a contact becomes an opportunity in HubSpot.
• Contact becomes a new customer:
• This event will trigger when a contact becomes a new customer in HubSpot.

HubSpot Campaigns

Inside HubSpot's Marketing Hub (Pro/Enterprise editions) you have an area called campaigns. Not to be confused with HubSpot Ads, this campaign area is for all campaigns, from all traffic sources. HubSpot campaigns Tool lets you organise just every type of marketing campaign.
In HubSpot campaigns, you can group multiple ad campaigns into a single HubSpot campaign. 

Using HubSpot Ads with HubSpot Marketing campaigns provides businesses with a powerful solution for managing and optimising their advertising and marketing efforts. By leveraging the power of the HubSpot CRM, businesses can create more effective and personalised advertising campaigns, while tracking and measuring the performance of both campaigns from a single platform. By integrating HubSpot Ads with the HubSpot CRM, businesses can create targeted advertising campaigns that are more effective and personalised, based on the data and insights gathered from the CRM.

Overall, this integration enables businesses to achieve greater efficiency, effectiveness, and ROI in their marketing and advertising efforts.

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Conclusion: 

Digital advertising is a crucial part of any marketing strategy--but it can also be a major drain on your budget if you're not careful.
With HubSpot's Ad management, you can connect your ad platforms and track digital ad performance, maximising ROI and minimising wasted ad budget. 

In conclusion, HubSpot Ad management is a powerful tool that helps businesses optimise their digital ad campaigns and improve their return on investment. With features like ad platform integrations, budget management, and targeted advertising, businesses can streamline their ad campaign management, track ad performance, and make data-driven decisions to optimise their ad spend.

Additionally, HubSpot Ad management offers valuable insights and reports to help businesses track key metrics like impressions, clicks, and conversions, as well as create custom reports to track specific metrics.
By using HubSpot Ad management, businesses can maximise their ad ROI and minimise wasted ad spend.

If you want to learn more about HubSpot Marketing, see our guide to HubSpot Marketing Hub