Hi everyone! 👋
I just got access to Hailuo through my company's new martech stack, and I'm really excited to start pulling more custom reports and automating some of our campaign flows. The problem is, I keep seeing references to Hailuo's query language (HQL, I think?) in the advanced docs, and I'm hitting a wall.
My background is in marketing ops and campaign management. I'm comfortable with basic formulas in tools like Google Sheets and can navigate our CRM's interface, but I have zero formal programming experience. The official documentation feels like it's written for engineers who already understand concepts like joins and data types.
Could someone point me to the most beginner-friendly resource? I'm looking for something that assumes I'm starting from absolute zero with query languages. A step-by-step tutorial that uses practical marketing examples—like segmenting an email list or calculating a conversion rate—would be perfect.
I'm willing to put in the time to learn, but I need a path that won't overwhelm me in the first ten minutes. Are there any community guides, video series, or interactive courses you'd recommend for a total non-dev?
Cheers!
trial junkie
I'm in marketing ops at a 200-person SaaS company, and I use HQL daily to pull custom audience segments and track campaign ROI from our Hailuo instance.
If you need beginner resources for HQL, here are the options I evaluated:
Official Hailuo Academy: This is free with your license and contains the "HQL for Business Users" course. It's built for non-devs, using examples like lead scoring and email open rates. However, the video pacing is slow, and the interactive exercises are limited to about 20 pre-built queries.
Third-party platform Udemy: There's a "Hailuo HQL in 6 Weeks" course, often on sale for $12-$18. It's more hands-on with downloadable datasets, but the examples are generic e-commerce, not martech. You'll need to adapt the logic to your own schemas.
Community-led "HQL Cookbook": This is a free, crowd-sourced GitHub repo. It wins for practical, copy-paste snippets for tasks like calculating channel attribution or cleaning form data. The limitation is inconsistent explanation quality; some entries assume you know what a WHERE clause is.
Hailuo Support & Services: If your contract is enterprise (typically 50k+ annual), you can request a dedicated onboarding session. At my last shop, this included two 90-minute training calls tailored to our data model. For mid-market or below, ticket-based support will only link you back to the basic docs.
My pick is to start with the official Hailuo Academy course, then immediately switch to the Community Cookbook for your specific tasks. The course gives you the foundation without cost or setup, and the cookbook provides the real marketing examples you need. Tell us if your company has a premium support tier, and how your customer data is structured (single table or many joined sources), and I can suggest a more specific path.
You've nailed the core issue. The official docs are engineering references, not learning tools. I disagree with the Udemy recommendation for your position - adapting generic e-commerce logic to your specific martech schema is the hardest possible starting point.
The community cookbook user584 mentioned is your best bet, specifically the "Audience Segmentation" and "Campaign Funnel" recipe sections. They use your actual table names, like `lead_scores` and `email_events`. Start by copying those queries verbatim into your Hailuo query editor and running them. Then, change one filter value, like the date range, and see what happens. This breaks the conceptual wall between abstract "SQL learning" and your concrete job.
Your idea of a step-by-step using real marketing examples is correct, but those resources don't exist formally. You'll have to build it yourself by deconstructing those cookbook recipes. Focus entirely on SELECT and WHERE clauses for the first month; ignore JOINs until you can reliably pull a clean list of last week's webinar registrants.
Benchmarks or bust.
Everyone is telling you to copy other people's work. That's how you learn syntax, not logic.
The actual beginner step is to open your query builder, build a simple audience filter using the UI, and then switch to the 'view HQL' tab. You'll see exactly how your mouse clicks translate to code. Do that five times before you ever touch the cookbook.
Your first query shouldn't be a campaign funnel, it should be 'show me everyone who opened an email last week.' Build it in the UI, flip to HQL, stare at it for a minute. Then change 'last week' to 'last month' in the code.