Set up campaign tracking

HubSpot's campaign tool is how you connect all the pieces of a marketing initiative into a single view. The email you sent, the landing page it linked to, the blog post that drove traffic, the social posts that promoted it, and the ads that retargeted visitors: all tied together under one campaign with shared metrics.

Without campaign tracking, you know how each individual asset performed. With it, you know how the campaign as a whole performed: how many contacts it generated, which assets contributed, and what the cost per lead was.

I set up campaigns at the start of every initiative, before building any assets. That way, every email, page, and post is automatically tagged from the moment it's created.

What a campaign tracks

A HubSpot campaign is a container that groups related marketing assets and tracks their collective performance. You can attach:

Marketing emails. Landing pages. Blog posts. Social media posts. Ads. CTAs (calls to action). Workflows.

Once assets are attached, HubSpot aggregates their metrics: total contacts generated, total sessions, influenced revenue (if you use deals), and individual asset performance.

The campaign view has several tabs. Performance shows the big picture: contacts, sessions, and deals influenced. Attribution shows which touchpoints contributed to conversions. Assets lists everything attached with individual metrics. Activity shows a timeline of campaign events.

Create the campaign before the assets

This is the key principle: create your campaign first, then build the assets and attach them during creation.

Go to Marketing > Campaigns > Create Campaign. Give it a name, a start and end date, and optionally a budget and goal. HubSpot automatically generates a UTM campaign parameter based on your campaign name.

When you later create an email, landing page, or blog post, you'll see a "Campaign" field in the settings. Select your campaign from the dropdown and the asset is automatically attached and tracked.

If you build assets first and try to attach them later, it still works, but you miss any tracking data from before the attachment. Start with the campaign.

Tracking URLs for external channels

Not everything you promote lives in HubSpot. You might share links on social media, in partner newsletters, in offline materials, or in ad platforms.

HubSpot's tracking URL builder lets you create URLs with UTM parameters that feed data back into your campaign. Go to Marketing > Campaigns, select your campaign, and use the tracking URL tool.

A tracking URL includes: the destination URL (your landing page), the campaign name (auto-filled), the source (e.g. linkedin, google, partner-newsletter), and optionally the medium and content.

When someone clicks a tracking URL, HubSpot attributes their visit to the correct campaign and source. Without tracking URLs, that traffic shows up as "Other campaigns" or "Direct" in your analytics, and you lose visibility into what's working.

Reading campaign analytics

After your campaign has been running, go to Marketing > Campaigns and click into it. The Performance tab shows:

Sessions. How many website visits came from campaign-associated assets and tracking URLs. New contacts. How many contacts were created through campaign touchpoints. Influenced contacts. Contacts who interacted with the campaign but may have been created earlier. Influenced deals. Deals where associated contacts interacted with the campaign.

The Attribution tab (available with Marketing Hub Professional and above) breaks down which specific touchpoints contributed to contact creation and deal creation.

When to use campaigns versus when not to

Use campaigns for time-bound marketing initiatives with multiple assets: a product launch, a webinar promotion, a seasonal offer, a content push around a specific theme.

Don't use campaigns for ongoing evergreen activities. Your weekly newsletter doesn't need its own campaign. Your always-on retargeting ads can exist outside campaigns. The campaign tool works best when there's a defined start, end, and set of coordinated assets.

Naming convention

As you build more campaigns, a naming convention prevents chaos. I use: [Year-Quarter] [Initiative name]. For example: "2026-Q2 HubSpot playbook launch" or "2025-Q4 End-of-year webinar series". This makes campaigns sortable and searchable.

Campaign tracking is the difference between knowing that individual assets performed well and knowing that your marketing initiative as a whole generated results. Create the campaign first, attach every asset, use tracking URLs for external channels, and review the aggregated data to understand what moved the needle.