Grading HubSpot’s Marketing Grader

With the recent release of HubSpot’s Marketing Grader, I’ve received several questions already about interpreting the results and what they exactly mean.

How accurate are the results? Should you lose sleep over a bad grade?

I jumped in and used one of my own personal reports from my photo art website, along with a client’s report they shared with me so I could really understand what kind of differences there were between two DRAMATICALLY different websites.

Here’s a quick synopsis.

The grader is broken out into three sections which include:

“ToFu” – Top of the Funnel

This analyzes whether or not you are engaging in activities to generate leads to your website—which includes creating content, optimizing it and promoting it. It specifically categorizes these into blogging, SEO, Mobile and Social Media.

“MoFu” – Middle of the Funnel

This determines whether you are doing a sufficient job of converting traffic into sales leads and ultimately, paying customers. Conversion forms, email marketing and social media are indicators of success.

Analytics

This reveals whether you have tools in place on your website to help you better understand what marketing activities are working. For example, if you have Google Analytics or any other statistics package, you’ll probably have a passing grade.

The Good

1. I must say that the best part of the grader is that it is effortless… all you need to do is type in your website and an optional entry of two of your closest competitors. It’s a breeze.
2. Each of the three sections gives you three action items to improve your grade. It’s concise and clear.
3. It checks alt tags for all images, and it turned out I was missing a couple. That’s helpful.
4. The report reveals how many sites have linked to yours, including “authoritative pages”—a crucial component of SEO.
5. The report emphasizes the importance of mobile websites. It also outlines Apple icons and meta viewport tags, details that are often missed.
6. Twitter stats are revealed, including the average number of days and hours between tweets which was certainly a wake-up call for me. It also knows whether you are conversing with others and not just standing on a soap box. Guilty as charged. Good stuff.
7. It pulls in useful social data including traffic statistics, Facebook fans and Klout score. Nothing you couldn’t find elsewhere, but it’s certainly nice to have on the report for convenience.

The Not-So-Good

1. The results got off to a rocky start, with the very first one stating that my last blog entry was on Wednesday, December 31, 1969. Considering my website didn’t exist, and I wasn’t even born yet, I scratched my head. My blog clearly states the dates, so I’m a bit confused as to what the crawler may be searching for to extract that data. It penalized me for not having any recent blog posts when my last one was just over a week ago.
2. A few philosophical differences popped up. For example, it says that all blog post titles should be 75 characters or less. Perhaps this grader presumes that the title tag will be the exact same as the article title. This is often not the case. If 75 characters should be the length for brevity, I can’t totally disagree, but I’ve seen some pretty interesting titles longer than 75 that I absolutely HAVE to click on.
3. Several errors appeared, including not being able to tell how often I post new articles on the blog. Simply the downside of a robotic crawler in this case it seems.
4. The report states that my blog is “not easy to share” because I “forgot to add social sharing buttons to my blog.” I have two large “Share” and “Tweet” icons on every blog post. I suspect since my buttons are a bit custom, the crawler didn’t see the code.
5. It takes a few random internal pages and sees how well they are optimized. It chose a couple of pages that have little relevance to SEO (including an account page), so that seems it would confuse or lead astray an end user less familiar with SEO. In the other report, it penalized this aspect of the site, but gave absolutely no reasoning or suggestions on what to fix. I’ve been looking at website Page Titles and Page Descriptions for many years, and I thought they were rock solid. Hmmm….
6. The report offers some interesting results such as visits, visit to lead ratio, lead to customer ratios and monthly customers compared to other companies. It uses its data from over 5,000 of its own clients. This seems really awesome at first, until you realize that it’s useless to smaller companies that receive less than 34k monthly visits. This is probably you too. Congratulations if it’s not! The data is irrelevant and hurts your feelings at the same time. Perhaps this is a clever psychological HubSpot sales strategy
7. I can’t be sure how this grader calculates whether your traffic is sufficient or not, but I’m guessing that 2,000 visitors per month might be the make or break point. One report was acceptable while the other was not, and both were close to that line, but on opposite sides. Seems a little strange to cast a judgment blanket over traffic numbers like that, but I may have no idea of the sophistication level of the measurement. Further, there doesn’t seem to be a distinction between pure organic traffic vs. paid traffic which can really fog up the results.
8. I was astonished to see that it detected a mobile version of my site, which isn’t the case. Sure, my site can be seen on mobile phone, but it is obvious it is not built for it.

Data Gold Nuggets

(Taken directly from HubSpot’s Report. I’m not sure about the source of the studies, so there’s my disclaimer.)

1. Companies that blog get 55% more web traffic and 70% more leads than those that don’t.
2. Businesses with 31 to 40 landing pages get 7X more leads than those with 1 to 5.
3. US Internet users spend 3X more time on blogs and social networks than on email.
4. Companies that use Twitter average 2X more leads per month than those that do not.
5. Companies with 1000+ Twitter followers get 6X more traffic on their websites than those with fewer Twitter followers.
6. 39% of B2B companies using Twitter have acquired new customers from it.
7. Companies that blog have 97% more inbound links than those that don’t.
8. Blog posts shared on Twitter get 113% more inbound links than those not shared on social media at all.
9. 46% of daily internet users read more than one blog every day.
10. 46% of daily searches are for research on products or services.

Drum roll please, it’s time to grade HubSpot’s Marketing Grader.

80/100 B-

The accuracy of the grader is a little disappointing, but the information on the report itself saves the day and certainly sways you, the student, in the right direction. I will give kudos since both reports did share some similar information, but certainly isn’t a cookie cutter. Each focused on different ways to improve which reveals some sophistication in the grader.

It turns out that the greatest convenience of simply typing in your website (that’s it) is this survey’s greatest downfall. The crawler is limited in its ability to fully understand intentions of pages, read blogs properly and can just pull random information that does little good for analysis. If you don’t have a blog, prepare to get scorched. If you don’t participate in social media, it’s gonna hurt. It most heavily emphasizes blogging and social media, and because of this ignores some other smaller components of effective online marketing strategies. Perhaps it was an attempt to focus on the larger items rather than overwhelm the student with more details and specifics.

If you take HubSpot’s Marketing Grader, just make sure you understand that the final report is the most important takeaway, not your score.

Do you have any questions or comments about your HubSpot Marketing Grader Report? If so, please leave a comment.