The difference is that Business Units are tags throughout a Marketing Enterprise account that allow you to properly segment multiple businesses in one account. For example, allowing you to have more than one "manage subscription" pages for contacts to unsubscribe from specific businesses within the same HubSpot account.
Brand Domains signify different domain URLs for usage. It's the top level domain that you can then create subdomains off of. You'll need Marketing Hub Enterprise, CMS Hub Enterprise
Reporting & Business Units (https://knowledge.hubspot.com/account-settings/manage-brands-with-business-unit)
- You can create custom business unit reports and associate existing dashboards and reports with a business unit.
- Create and manage business unit dashboards:
- Navigate to Reports -> Dashboards
- Click “Create Dashboard”
- Select the “Business Unit Overview Template”
- Review the reports included in the dashboard and select the reports that you would like to keep
- Click next to continue creating the dashboard
- To edit the business unit a dashboard is associated with:
- Click Actions -> Dashboard details
- Click the Business Unit dropdown menu and select a business unit
- Click Save
- To filter a report by a specific business unit, customize the report filters using the Business Units property in the custom report builder or click the Business unit dropdown menu and select a business unit.
- To associate an existing report with a business unit:
- From the reports dashboard, select the checkbox next to the report and click Set business unit
- In the dialog box, click the Business unit dropdown menu and select a business unit
- Click set business unit
Reporting & Brand Domains
- In the Traffic Analytics report, you can filter by domain. Another option is to create a new analytics view and only report on activity on a specific domain.
Reporting for multiple domains tracking with HubSpot tracking code
- This is currently not possible https://knowledge.hubspot.com/reports/set-up-sources-tracking
- “While these steps will allow you to track traffic on any domain, you can only create a custom analytics view to segment your website traffic if the domain is a brand domain in the account.
However
This article explains how to use the HubSpot Reporting Add-on to create sources reports for specific domains, brands, products, subdomains, and subdirectories: https://www.danielbertschi.com/en/hubspot-tips-and-tricks/sources-reports-multiple-domains
Business Units & Domains with the Prospect Tool
- The prospect tool will only capture information from views on pages where the corresponding tracking code is installed. For example, if you have the tracking code for portal 1234567 installed on website A and the code for portal 2345678 installed on website B, there isn't any way you can access the prospect information from website A in portal 2345678. The two portals are separate and distinct and even though you can access both via one HubSpot login and switch between the portals, you can't migrate or access the prospect information.