Conducting a Hubspot Audit? Here's Your 20-Point Checklist

by Lauren Ryan on April 2022

HubSpot needs occasional maintenance to ensure it runs well. 

Many users leave sequences and Workflows on autopilot to gather and manage data and deliver emails. However, users run the risk of mismanaging their data. 

That’s why conducting a HubSpot audit at least once a year is essential to ensure your data remains clean and organized. 

We’ve compiled a 20-point HubSpot checklist of every item you need to complete a thorough HubSpot audit. 

How Often Should I Conduct a HubSpot Audit? 

The frequency of your HubSpot audits will depend on the number of contacts you collect and the size of your website. 

For example, your business could survive on a quarterly HubSpot audit if you have two HubSpot campaigns with around 50-60 monthly contacts. 

However, suppose you manage hundreds or thousands of contacts monthly and have multiple campaigns across different channels. In that case, best practices dictate that you should refresh and audit different campaigns every one to two months. 

Regularly auditing your HubSpot portal keeps your data clean, ensures campaigns meet standards, and establishes tracking measures for success. 

Before we begin the HubSpot audit, let's discuss some best practices. This will help us understand the goals we need to achieve for each audit. 

Best Practices of a HubSpot Portal Audit

Before you begin your HubSpot portal audit, it is important to follow these best practices. This will help ensure your audit focuses on specific goals and outcomes.

• Establish campaign goals for data collection
• Use KPIs to track performance
• Clean up cluttered or unused data in each HubSpot portal
• Regularize naming conventions and formats
• Consult Workflows and HubSpot integrations to streamline processes
• Execute strategies to improve internal processes and data collection

The 20-point HubSpot checklist below will ensure that your HubSpot audits run smoothly and your data remains hygienic!

20-Point HubSpot Audit Checklist

HubSpot Data Audit

1. Basic Settings and Plan Overview

To get started, go to the Account and Billing tab to review your plan and how much you’re paying based on your total amount of contacts. This preliminary step will help ensure you’re not overpaying for your plan when only tracking a limited number of contacts. 

2. Organize Teams

HubSpot Teams allow large organizations to manage new and existing HubSpot users into different groups and hierarchies based on their function in your company. 

Under Settings, click on Users and Teams > Create Teams to organize users into specific groups and titles. HubSpot even offers parent and child hierarchies to differentiate roles and permissions by company position. 

In addition, be sure to navigate to Edit Existing Teams to remove old users who have left your company to keep your teams organized and up-to-date. 

3. Syncing Contacts, Companies, and Lifecycle Stages

Under the Data Management tab, click Companies and then enable proper settings to ensure each new contact collected in your portal is associated under a Company name in HubSpot. In addition, you’ll want to sync that contact to a particular lifecycle stage for seamless lead handoff. 

To find contacts not associated with a lifecycle stage, click the following: Contacts > Contacts > More filters > “Lifecycle stage is unknown.” 

Next, assign them to a custom stage by clicking Contact Record > View all properties > lifecycle stage property and then update that property with the correct lifecycle stage. 

4. Lead Scoring

To ensure contacts are associated with proper lifecycle stages and campaigns, you must score contacts using HubSpot’s Lead Attribution Score. 

Navigate to: Settings> Properties> HubSpot score >  Property name

You can add “+ Criteria” and “- Criteria” that score leads based on their engagement with your website and custom properties you populate in this property. 

5. Identifying Duplicate Contact Properties

To uncover duplicate properties, such as duplicate addresses and job titles, manually look through contact properties under the Properties tab and type in select keywords in the search bar. 

To merge duplicate contacts, you can create a Workflow and create an action to copy a property value from the duplicate property to the property you want to keep. Then, you can delete the old property in the Properties Settings section of HubSpot.

For example, if you have three properties for Lead Status, use a Workflow or the Contact List view to ensure the master Lead Status property has the most up-to-date Lead Status. Then, delete the two duplicate Lead Status properties. 

6. Merging Duplicate Contacts

HubSpot duplicate contacts can arise for many reasons outside of duplicate contact properties. Fortunately, HubSpot makes this problem easy to combat. To merge duplicates, click the following: Contacts > Contacts > Actions > Manage Duplicates 

Then, review your list of duplicate contacts and choose to merge or dismiss them. You should only dismiss contacts if they are not duplicates. HubSpot is pretty good at spotting duplicates, but there’s a chance that contacts have been marked as duplicates in error. So make sure you take a close look before merging or dismissing contacts.

7. Deleting Bounced Contacts

Bounced contacts hurt email conversion rates and increase costs by inflating your Marketing Contact volume. Delete hard bounces in your Marketing portal by clicking on Email bounce tools in the left-hand column of your Email tab. 

From here, filter between hard and soft bounces and list all bounced contacts you wish to delete. Once created, you can find the list in your Contacts tab and delete them. 

8. Delete or Archive Old Lists

The Lists tool in HubSpot allows you to compile lists of contacts for Workflows, emails, events, ad targeting, etc., to change contact properties in bulk for specific purposes. However, it pays to review old lists during an audit and delete them if they're no longer necessary. For example, you may still have old lists from outdated ad campaigns promoting an event that passed. 

Most importantly, deleting a list does not delete the contacts, so there’s no harm in eliminating that form of clutter.  

9. Tracking Code

We recommend embedding the HubSpot tracking code on every website page not hosted on HubSpot. 

To get a more accurate view of traffic numbers, exclude traffic from your company’s IP addresses by navigating to Settings > Reports > Tracking Code > Advanced Tracking > Exclude Traffic and typing in every individual IP address from your team. 

10. Managing Data Security

Having access to customer data is a privilege. For this reason, be sure to research and implement top third-party data security tools to ensure customers' data is always protected. 

In addition, be sure to enable the following on your website for safe measures:

• Two-Factor or Multi-Factor Authentication
• Cookie notices for GDPR
• Legal basis settings for data collection

HubSpot Marketing Audit

11. Creating Campaign Goals

Be sure to create and monitor campaigns for specific marketing tasks to keep team members aligned around organizational goals for development. First, navigate to Marketing > Campaigns and then populate campaign fields with a name, target dates, budget, notes, and KPIs for tracking and monitoring campaigns. Next, you can add assets to your campaigns, including URLs, marketing channels, and content. 

There will also be a Tasks tab under campaigns that allows you to assign tasks to individuals with dates and assets attached.

Bonus: Integrate a Workflow to automatically trigger tasks in your favorite project management tool, such as Trello, Asana, and Google Calendar under Campaign Tasks. 

12. Website SEO Performance

HubSpot provides website and page-specific tools that analyze how well your URLs are optimized for organic SEO. 

Navigate to Marketing > Website > SEO and enter your homepage URL under Scan New URL.

Once you arrive at this page, there should be a list of recommendations in a tab next to your website URL. Click on these recommendations to view specific SEO strategies related to crawling/indexing, on-page SEO, mobile experience, etc. 

HubSpot can export these recommendations into a spreadsheet or third-party program. In addition, HubSpot enables users to edit SEO recommendations directly in the page Editor feature.

Be sure to go back to the Website Pages tab to consult your KPIs, remove unwanted web pages, and use standard naming conventions for each page. 

Bonus: HubSpot provides Google Search Console integrations that allow you to view recommendations and KPIs directly from Search Console in your Marketing Portal. 

13. Landing Page Optimization

Navigate to Marketing > Website > Landing Pages to view individual SEO page performance. 

HubSpot provides the same tools, such as an SEO Optimization tab and the ability to view KPIs for specific web pages to help you consolidate and concentrate your efforts on those high ROI pages. 

In addition, be sure to choose winners for old A/B tests to remove unwanted web pages and get the most out of your existing ones. To choose A/B winners, click on the URL and then click on Test Results. Next, hover over each page to view results and click on the page that provides the best A/B test results to confirm its use. 

14. Email Performance 

First, navigate to Marketing > Emails to check on the performance of your email marketing campaign. 

Click on the Health tab to view KPIs and recommendations related to:

• Click-through rates
• Deliverability
• Open rates

We recommend removing unused email formats, clicking winners for old A/B tests, implementing standard naming conventions, and consulting KPIs to make manual and creative changes where necessary.

Secondly, update your Subscriptions type under the Configurations tab to filter traffic flow and exclude unsubscribes. 

In addition, under the Subscriptions tab, be sure the following boxes are checked to fine-tune your email marketing campaign:

• Resubscription email 
• Don’t send to unengaged contacts,  
• Double opt-in (Not necessary if GDPR settings aren’t enabled)

 

15. Content Performance

To run an audit of your existing content and analyze it page-by-page, you can download ScreamingFrog for free ($150/yearly after 500 URLs) or integrate any of your favorite content audit software, including SEMRush and Google Analytics. However, HubSpot SEO tools run off of SEMRush data. So, it’s best to leverage your tools before spending on new subscriptions!

This step is completely optional but helps you gauge overall content performance and areas where improvements can be made. Here are some tips for running a HubSpot content audit:

• Create content goals that align with overall marketing campaigns
• Analyze traffic and click-through rates across all blog and content pages
• Aggregate URLs based on the highest ROI pages
• Analyze targeted pages for SEO optimization opportunities (Target keyword frequency, Header optimization, backlinks, internal linking, metadata optimization)
• Implement 301 redirects on underperforming pages
• Implement robots.txt files for content pages you don’t want to get crawled and indexed any longer

 

16. Social Media Performance

Be sure to check the health and status of your connected social media accounts by navigating to the Social tab under Marketing. Here are some best practices to follow to optimize your social media accounts:

• Reauthorize any expired social media accounts (accounts automatically expire after a certain period)
• Set up email notifications to respond to social media interactions 
• Consult KPIs to determine the efficacy of various campaigns and publishing times
• Set a custom Publishing schedule to best target users at the right periods of the day

 

17. Optimizing Calls-to-Action (CTA)

Under the Marketing tab, navigate to Lead Capture > CTAs to view the performance of various CTAs and A/B tests. Like other checklist items, implement standard naming conventions, choose A/B winners, and properly attribute CTAs to relevant campaigns. Finally, delete any CTAs with 0 clicks or conversions.

18. Reviewing Forms

Navigate to Lead Capture > Forms to view KPIs and organize folders for various lead forms. Again, follow the same best practices outlined above and be sure to organize all forms in specific folders for easy access. 

Bonus: Add the lifecycle stage property on all forms as a hidden property to automatically set a lifecycle stage for new contacts. 

19. Organizing Website Files and Folders

Organizing all website files into folders allows easy access and auditing of your website architecture. Navigate to Marketing > Files & Templates > Files and organize all website files into custom-name folders. For example, you could create folders for the following assets on your site including:

• Website images with custom alt-text
• Videos with custom thumbnails
• Company logos and branding material
• Email templates
• Landing page design templates
• CTAs
• Forms 
• Workflows

Consolidate unused files into a dedicated folder and delete that folder to eliminate those assets from populating your website. 

20. Optimizing Workflows 

Finally, the last step is to audit your automations under the Workflows tab. Follow these best practices to optimize Workflows to work best for you:

• Consolidate any similar Workflows
• Delete any old or unused Workflows
• Add comments to explain or alert other team members about Workflow changes
• Ensure Workflows are associated with campaigns

Conducting a HubSpot audit is easy and only requires a few hours of work to ensure that all internal processes are running at full throttle. 

A HubSpot Audit will save you money on misspent marketing funds and ensure that all campaigns are properly aligned with organizational goals. 

If you’re struggling with an internal HubSpot audit, don’t have the resources to complete a full audit, or just want a professional opinion, be sure to contact a HubSpot consultant today. 

We have dedicated staff that can assist with any errors related to a recent HubSpot Salesforce integration. We also offer a HubSpot Salesforce Integration Certification to help you streamline your next integration and smooth out your data. 

FAQs: HubSpot Audit

Does HubSpot have an audit log?  

Yes, HubSpot provides an audit log feature that allows you to track changes made within your account. The audit log records user activities, such as content edits, property changes, and account setting modifications. You can access the audit log by going to "Settings" and then selecting "Audit Trail" under the "Account" section. This log helps you maintain transparency and track changes made by different team members over time.

 

What is the benefit of a HubSpot audit?  

Conducting a HubSpot audit ensures the accuracy and cleanliness of data. This enhances decision-making while improving marketing, sales, and service performance. 

The audit also strengthens security measures by reviewing and updating user permissions and access controls, aligns the HubSpot setup with current business goals and strategies, and facilitates streamlining workflows and automations. 

Additionally, the audit allows for identifying gaps in user knowledge, enabling targeted training initiatives where needed.

 

How do I audit HubSpot properties? 

To audit HubSpot properties, follow these steps:

• Navigate to Property Settings:
  • Go to your HubSpot dashboard and click on "Settings" in the main navigation.
•  
• Access Properties:
  • Under "Properties," you can review various property types, including contact, company, and deal properties.
•  
• Review Existing Properties:
  • Examine the existing properties to ensure they align with your data collection needs. Remove any outdated or unused properties.
•  
• Check Property Groups:
  • Verify that properties are organized into logical groups for better management and user understanding.
•  
• Custom Properties:
  • Review custom properties and ensure they are properly labeled, and their data types are appropriate.
•  
• Dependencies:
  • If properties are used in workflows, automations, or integrations, ensure that any changes won't disrupt these dependencies.
•  
• Documentation:
  • Document the purpose of each property and provide guidelines for proper usage.
•  
• Data Privacy:
  • Ensure that properties related to sensitive information comply with data privacy regulations.

By thoroughly auditing your HubSpot properties, you can maintain a clean and organized database, improve data quality, and ensure that your properties support your evolving business needs.