You can tell whether your marketing automation is being used. You just have to know where to look, and most people never actually look.
The usual approach is to sense it. Adoption "feels" low, or someone mentions the team's back in spreadsheets, or the reports seem off. That's a hunch, not a diagnosis. And you can't fix a hunch. An adoption audit turns the vague feeling that "we're not really using HubSpot properly" into a specific, evidenced list of exactly where usage has broken down and what to do about it.
This is the step-by-step version. It's a process you can run yourself, in an afternoon, using data already sitting in your HubSpot. No new tools, no guesswork. Just a structured look at the places adoption shows up (or doesn't), and how to turn what you find into a plan. Work through it in order.
Adoption isn't one number. It's the answer to a broader question: is the team actually using the automation the platform provides, and is that automation actually producing results?
So the audit looks at three layers, and it's worth being clear on them upfront:
A proper audit checks all three, because they fail differently. You can have active users and broken workflows. You can have healthy workflows nobody feeds. Checking one layer tells you a fraction of the story. Here's how to work through all three.
Start with the people. Automation only delivers value if the team is actually using the system it lives in, so the first question is whether people are genuinely in HubSpot doing the work.
Check login frequency. In Settings, under Users & Teams, you can see the last login date for each user. Go through your paid seats. Anyone who's supposed to be using HubSpot daily but hasn't logged in for a week or more is a red flag - they're working somewhere else, which means their activity isn't in the system.
Check activity logging. Look at your deal records and sort by last activity date. Are your sales people logging calls, emails, and notes? Or are deals sitting with no logged activity for weeks while the team clearly is talking to those customers? Unlogged activity means the CRM's picture is incomplete, which undermines everything built on top of it.
Check feature usage by role. Are the tools each role should be using actually being used? For sales, that means checking whether sequences are being used or whether reps are sending manual one-off emails. For marketing, whether workflows and lists are being actively built and managed. A feature that exists but shows negligible usage is an adoption gap.
What you're looking for: the gap between who's supposed to be using the system and who actually is. Note every user and every feature where usage is far below what it should be. That's your first list.
Now the automation itself. Even with active users, adoption fails if the workflows are broken, stale, or were never really running - because automation nobody can trust is automation nobody uses.
Review the active-to-inactive ratio. Go to Automation, then Workflows, and look at the split between active, inactive, and draft. A library where most workflows are inactive or stuck in draft suggests automation that was started with good intentions and never followed through.
Check enrolment. Open your active workflows and look at how many contacts are actually enrolling. A workflow that's technically active but enrolling almost nobody is a workflow that's not doing anything - either its trigger is broken, its criteria are too narrow, or the segment it targets no longer exists.
Look for stale workflows. Sort by last modified date. Workflows that haven't been touched in a long time and are still running are worth inspecting - they may be firing on forms, properties, or lists that have since changed, which means they could be doing the wrong thing quietly.
Check for the automation that should exist but doesn't. This is the reverse angle. Are your key conversion forms connected to a follow-up workflow? Is lead routing automated, or manual? Is lifecycle stage progression automated, or is someone updating it by hand? Missing automation is an adoption gap as real as broken automation - it's value the platform could deliver that nobody's set up.
What you're looking for: workflows that are broken, stale, barely used, or missing entirely. Add each to your list.
Adoption and data quality are joined at the hip. When the data's a mess, the automation produces unreliable results, the team stops trusting the system, and they stop using it, so poor data quality is both a cause and a symptom of low adoption. Worth checking directly.
Run HubSpot's Data Quality tools. In the Data Management area, HubSpot surfaces data issues automatically - duplicate records, properties with formatting problems, records missing values. Run it and note the scale of what it finds. A lot of flagged issues means the data underneath your automation is shaky.
Check lifecycle stage distribution. In your contact records, look at how contacts are spread across lifecycle stages. If the vast majority are stuck in one early stage with little progression, it's a sign the lifecycle automation either isn't built or isn't working, and that your funnel reporting can't be trusted.
Check pipeline hygiene. Look at your deals. Are there deals with no amount, no close date, or close dates that passed months ago? Stale, incomplete deal data means the automation and reporting built on it are unreliable.
What you're looking for: the data problems that are quietly undermining trust in the system. Add them to the list.
The final layer. Even active users running healthy workflows on clean data is only worth it if it's producing something. This step connects adoption to value, and it's the one that makes the audit matter to leadership.
Check whether reporting is being used. Are your dashboards actually being opened and used to make decisions, or were they built once and ignored? Reporting nobody looks at is a sign the system isn't embedded in how the team works.
Trace automation to results where you can. For your key automated workflows, can you see what they're producing? A lead nurture workflow - is it moving contacts through stages? A follow-up sequence - is it generating responses? You don't need perfect attribution; you need a rough read on whether the automation is doing anything commercially.
Check the marketing-to-sales handoff. Is the transition from marketing-qualified to sales-qualified automated and working, or are leads getting stuck or lost at the handoff? This is one of the most common places value leaks, and it shows up as deals that should exist but don't.
What you're looking for: the gaps between activity and results - the places where effort is going in but value isn't coming out. This is the list that gets leadership's attention.
Four lists later, you've got a genuine diagnosis. Now make it actionable. Don't try to fix everything at once, sort what you found by impact and effort.
Fix the foundation first. Data quality issues come before almost everything else, because clean data is what makes the rest trustworthy. Deduplicate, close out stale deals, fix the lifecycle stages. This is unglamorous and it's the highest-leverage work.
Then repair or remove broken automation. Fix the workflows that are firing wrong, switch off the stale ones that are doing harm, and rebuild the missing automation that would deliver the most value - usually lead follow-up and routing.
Then address the implementation gaps. For the users and features with low adoption, work out why. Is it training (they don't know how)? Access (the tool isn't part of their workflow)? Trust (the data's unreliable)? Each cause needs a different fix, and now that you've cleaned the data and repaired the automation, retraining actually sticks.
Then re-check outcomes. Once the foundation, automation, and usage are addressed, the outcome gaps often close on their own. Whatever's left is your next round.
The sequence matters: data, then automation, then people, then outcomes. Fix them out of order - retraining people to use automation that's running on bad data, say - and the fixes won't hold.
An adoption audit isn't a one-off. Adoption drifts - new hires develop their own habits, workflows age, data degrades, the business changes and the setup doesn't keep up. Running this audit on a regular cadence, quarterly or twice a year, catches the drift before it becomes another "we're not really using HubSpot properly" situation.
The first audit gives you a baseline and usually a decent list of fixes. The repeat audits tell you whether adoption is improving or slipping - which is the number that actually matters over time.
Low marketing automation adoption isn't a mystery you have to guess at. It's a diagnosable condition, and the diagnosis lives in data you already have. Audit the four layers in order - user activity, workflow health, data quality, and outcomes - and the vague sense that "we're not using this properly" becomes a specific, prioritised list of exactly what's wrong and what to fix first.
The audit itself takes an afternoon. Acting on what it finds is the real work - but at least you'll know precisely where to start, instead of guessing.
Want the audit run properly, or the findings turned into a fix? Give us a shout. We'll diagnose where your HubSpot adoption has broken down and what it'll take to sort it.
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Happy optimising!