Overview
Pursuit is a nonprofit workforce development organization based in Long Island City, NYC. They train adults with the most need and potential to get their first tech jobs, advance in their careers, and become the next generation of leaders in tech.
Pursuit began working with Media Cause in late 2021 to catalyze their tech fellow recruitment efforts through digital advertising. Their goal was to reach adults who have the most need and potential for transformative careers in tech. In 2022, we partnered with Pursuit to continue our successful paid media campaigns, but in our discussions, we identified several additional needs: a comprehensive understanding of their fellow lifecycle, how ads connected to real-life program participants, and a systematic approach to integrations and reporting.
John Meyers Growth Marketing Manager Pursuit
Pursuit needed a marketing CRM that would integrate well with established systems and scale their fellow recruitment efforts. And, they needed to tighten up their paid media campaigns to understand how clicks, impressions, and leads related to real fellows signing up for programs.
With Hubspot, Pursuit wanted to measure aspects of their program that had long been elusive to achieve a holistic view of each contact, understand performance at each stage of their funnel, and bring clarity to their attribution picture.
With paid media, they wanted to accurately track conversions, with a focus on identifying which advertising platforms were bringing in the highest quality leads (most likely to convert/complete a registration) at the lowest cost.
Our approach was two-pronged. For the marketing CRM component, we began by assessing which platform would work best for Pursuit, which we did through a formal process. With Hubspot as the winner, we needed to work through setup, migration, and integration to get them up and running, with ongoing support to ensure a smooth onboarding. This included a robust user-experience mapping process, building a custom API-to-API integration with their Applicant Tracking System (ATS), SurveyMonkey Apply, and automating a variety of manual processes using Workflows.
Once HubSpot was selected and implemented, the tech and paid media teams worked together to apply HubSpot tracking to paid ads. This enabled us to track new contacts from paid media down the funnel, analyzing which ad platforms, audiences, and ad creatives were producing the best results.
With Hubspot in play, we had a single-source of truth for our reporting and ad optimizations. We improved the information about our leads in a database of records that was directly relevant to strategic decisions.
Prior to the HubSpot implementation project, Pursuit had been relying on Google, Meta, and third-party vendor pixels to track conversions. This approach to conversion tracking limited the ability to see the full picture of how contacts/leads behaved over time.
To track conversions from paid media in HubSpot, we needed to link Pursuit’s HubSpot account to their Meta and Google Ads Managers, and enable auto tracking.
With this set up, we were able to attribute contacts to specific campaigns, audiences, and ads by applying tracking parameters (UTMs) to the end of ad URLs. We built out campaign names and tracking UTMs in HubSpot, and applied those conventions to the paid ads we launched in Meta and Google. This ensured that as conversions occurred in Meta and Google, they flowed into HubSpot with the correct platform, campaign, and audience source.
HubSpot allowed Pursuit to track contacts from their original source, all of the way down the funnel, to better understand how leads from various ad platforms and audiences perform over time.
Our Hubspot implementation began with the selection process, ensuring we took the time to define requirements and identify the right platform. With Hubspot as the winner, we plotted out each implementation step using a collaborative Asana-based project board.
The next step was critical to get right: data migration. We took stock of the records from the old system and devised a plan to migrate them into the new system in an easily accessible way that matched apples-to-apples with new records.
The final steps were to ensure integrations with third-party apps, and that the Pursuit staff was trained on the tool.
The Hubspot implementation greatly improved their data and reporting across the board. It helped Pursuit to determine that programmatic vendors and Google Ads were requiring more ad budget for fewer results. That insight helped them shift the paid media budget to Meta, where they could recruit more high-quality leads at a lower cost per lead (CPL).
