HubSpot + Salesforce campaigns 101
Track ROI across HubSpot and Salesforce despite disconnected campaign structures
The return on investment (ROI) of marketing campaigns determines if a marketing department succeeds or fails.
Without effective marketing campaign measurement, marketers put their budgets, teams, and external resources at risk for depletion or elimination.
How do marketers measure the ROI of marketing campaigns?
Ideally, marketers leverage the reporting tools in their customer relationship management (CRM) and marketing automation tools.
Marketers using the HubSpot Salesforce integration have two strong options for measuring marketing campaign effectiveness: HubSpot Campaigns & Salesforce Campaigns.
In this article, we explore the Campaigns tool in HubSpot and Salesforce. We will outline how HubSpot and Salesforce Campaigns differ and show you how to get the most value out of using HubSpot and Salesforce Campaigns together.
1. Understanding HubSpot campaigns
What is HubSpot?
HubSpot leads the market as an all-in-one sales, marketing, and customer service tool. With HubSpot’s Smart CRM, companies work from a single source of truth across all departments.
Their work feeds the CRM with more data to enrich marketing campaigns and empower sales and customer service to deepen relationships. In addition to the underlying CRM supporting all HubSpot Hubs, HubSpot provides industry-leading marketing automation capabilities.
With HubSpot, marketers can create, execute, and measure multi-channel marketing campaigns from one tool.
What are HubSpot Campaigns?
HubSpot Campaigns are HubSpot’s way of filing together assets that belong to the same marketing campaign.
Meaning assets supporting a singular goal. HubSpot Campaigns bridge the reporting gap between the individual marketing assets and the goal they’re working to achieve.
Key features
A. Centralized campaign management
HubSpot provides a unified dashboard for planning, executing, and tracking your marketing campaigns. This centralized approach simplifies coordinating various campaign elements, including emails, social media posts, landing pages, and ads, ensuring a consistent and cohesive customer experience.
B. In-depth analytics & reporting
HubSpot's Campaigns tool offers real-time analytics and reporting, providing valuable insights into campaign performance.
Track key metrics like click-through rates, conversion rates, and ROI to make data-driven decisions and continuously optimize your marketing strategies.
Benefits of Using HubSpot Campaigns
HubSpot Campaigns are designed to show how effectively a collection of marketing assets achieves a goal.
HubSpot Campaigns enable you to track the overall effectiveness of emails, landing pages, social media posts, workflows, and more all in one place.
Campaigns can also be used to track budget, spending, and performance to goal for associated marketing assets. Marketers should use Campaigns to report on marketing performance across asset types easily.
2. Understanding Salesforce campaigns
What is Salesforce?
Salesforce CRM is a cloud-based customer relationship management platform that helps businesses manage and analyze their interactions with customers and prospects.
It provides tools for tracking leads, opportunities, and customer data to enhance engagement and drive business growth.
What are Salesforce campaigns?
Salesforce Campaigns are organized initiatives within Salesforce CRM that allow businesses to plan, execute, and track marketing and promotional activities.
They enable companies to target specific audiences, track campaign effectiveness, and manage various marketing elements such as leads, contacts, and opportunities associated with a particular campaign.
Key features
A. Campaign Creation and Management
The Salesforce Campaigns tool enables you to create a centralized account of all Leads, Contacts, and Opportunities influenced by a specific marketing or sales effort.
B. Campaign Hierarchies
To better track the impact of individual Campaigns that serve a higher Campaign goal, Salesforce Campaigns provides the ability to create hierarchies.
For example, a marketing team may leverage this to create a Parent Campaign for “2023 Marketing” and Child Campaigns for Email Marketing, Organic Search, Paid Advertising, etc.
This enables marketing to roll up overall performance to the Parent Campaign while maintaining reports on the influence of all Child Campaigns.
C. Campaign Members
The Campaign Member object adds a Lead or a Contact to a Campaign in Salesforce.
This junction object enables the association between Leads and Contacts and their various Campaigns in Salesforce.
Additionally, the Campaign Member object enables status tracking for Leads and Contacts in the Salesforce Campaign.
Struggling to see Campaign Member status in Salesforce? Check out our sync workaround.
Benefits of using campaigns
Salesforce Campaigns make it easy to quantify Leads and Contacts associated with various marketing efforts - inbound or outbound.
They also enable Salesforce users to track the stage of participation within a specific campaign using the Campaign Member object.
For example, you can track if someone has been invited to an event as part of this campaign or if they’ve RSVP’d Yes or No.
Salesforce Campaigns enable marketers to track high-level marketing campaign data in the primary CRM platform (Salesforce) to align sales and marketing teams better.
Syncing Salesforce Campaigns with HubSpot
HubSpot Campaigns and Salesforce Campaigns still don’t sync natively.
The two tools are built on different data models: HubSpot Campaigns track marketing assets and performance, while Salesforce Campaigns tie Leads, Contacts, and Opportunities together through Campaign Members.
That said, HubSpot Enterprise users now have a more robust option than ever before: bidirectional custom object sync.
With custom object sync (GA since 2025), you can:
- Bring Salesforce Campaigns into HubSpot as a Custom Object.
- Map Campaigns to Contacts and Deals so associations mirror Salesforce.
- Manage Campaign Members from within HubSpot using Workflows (e.g., updating Campaign Member Status automatically).
- Keep HubSpot and Salesforce Campaign records aligned without relying on a custom API or developer-built integration.
What’s worth keeping in mind is that associations and field mappings don’t happen automatically - you’ll need to configure them during setup.
And while syncing Campaigns into HubSpot gives you a lot more visibility, the heavier reporting use cases (like attribution tied directly to Opportunities) usually still require some extra work in Salesforce, whether that’s Flows, custom field mappings, or hierarchy rules.
Most of the mess we see in HubSpot–Salesforce setups isn’t because anyone did something “wrong.” It’s because the two platforms were built differently, and without some RevOps thinking in between, you end up with broken attribution, duplicate data, and teams arguing over which numbers to believe.
This is the kind of groundwork we do every day.
We’re certified in both HubSpot and Salesforce, and we help PE-backed and B2B teams connect the dots so the systems actually serve the revenue engine instead of slowing it down.
If that sounds like the gap you’re dealing with, have a look at our partners page.
