As a marketing leader, you know that data is key to your success. But unless you're Neo from The Matrix, it can get tricky turning all those 1s and 0s into superpowers for your marketing strategy… which is too bad.
Underutilizing the goldmine of data your marketing actions produce could leave you coughing up your competitors' dust. But don't worry — that's where marketing analytics tools come in.
These tools are essential for understanding how your marketing efforts are performing and identifying areas for improvement. In this blog post, we will discuss ten tools that will help your business grow — so you can find the best marketing analytics tool for you.
5 Benefits from Marketing Analytics Insights
Marketing analytics software can be a hefty investment, so you might wonder if venturing beyond your basic metrics dashboard is worth it.
Here are five reasons it is:
1. Understand your target audience and their needs
Audience data can offer insights into purchasing behaviour, demographics, and even how they found you in the first place. You can use this information to improve marketing strategies, target new audiences, and create more relevant content.
2. Better understand your competition
By tracking your competitor’s campaigns and understanding their audience, you can adjust your marketing strategy to better meet your target market's needs.
3. Optimize your marketing campaigns for better results
Crucially, tracking your marketing campaign analytics can help you identify areas for improvement. This could be anything from the time of day you send your emails to the call-to-action in your blog post.
By understanding what works and what doesn’t, you can make small changes that will significantly impact your marketing ROI.
4. Measure the return on investment of your marketing campaigns
As a marketing leader, measuring your return on investment is essential to a sustainable strategy. Marketing analytics software can help you track marketing campaign costs and performance, so you can see which campaigns provide the most ROI.
5. Make more informed decisions about your marketing strategies
You can make more informed decisions about your marketing strategies by tracking marketing analytics. For example, if a particular social media campaign is performing poorly because of a surprise viral event, you can quickly reallocate funds accordingly. Data-driven decision-making will help you improve your marketing ROI and grow your business.
These are just a few reasons marketing analytics tools are crucial for businesses! If you’re not already using these tools to track your campaigns, now is the time to start.
The 10 Best Marketing Analytics Tools You Need to Know About
Google Analytics
Google Analytics is a free marketing analytics tool that provides insights into your website traffic and marketing campaigns. Google Analytics can help you track your marketing ROI, understand your audience, and identify areas for improvement in your marketing strategy.
Pricing:
Free! However, if you're looking for a more comprehensive solution, Google Analytics 360 offers several more features along with eight other tools in the Google Marketing Platform. The marketing suite costs $150,000 (USD) annually, billed at $12,500 monthly.
Top features and benefits:
- The low, low price of $0
- Easy reporting for post-click performance, audience demographics, and conversion
Best for: the solopreneur, scrappy startup, and most SMBs.
KISSmetrics
KISSmetrics is a paid marketing analytics tool that offers similar features to Google Analytics but with more advanced tracking capabilities. This e-commerce marketing analytics platform focuses on automating customer engagement.
Pricing: Monthly prices for Kissmetrics' e-commerce product are as follows:
- $299 for 10,000 tracked users
- $499 for 25,000 tracked users
Top features and benefits:
- The platform offers powerful tools for population segmentation.
- Tailor-made for e-commerce, with customer tracking and A/B testing.
Best for: E-commerce companies, especially those between $500,000 and $5 million monthly sales.
Chartbeat
Chartbeat is a paid real-time content marketing analytics tool that helps you understand how visitors interact with your website in real-time and historically. That means knowing how many people are on a page at any given time!
Pricing: $7,000 annually.
Top features and benefits:
- One of the only true real-time marketing analytics platforms.
- On-page metrics and overlays.
Best for: media organizations or businesses with a heavy written content marketing focus.
Mixpanel
Mixpanel is a paid mobile and web analytics platform that provides insights into user engagement and conversion rates. This platform explicitly prioritizes product analytics.
Pricing: Free up to 100,000 users tracked monthly, $25/month for unlimited reports and cohorts.
Top features and benefits:
- Highly-rated account-level analytics
- In-depth funnel viewing and segmentation tools
Best for: early-stage startups, especially SaaS companies. Mixpanel also offers credits to startups under two years old with less than $5 million in funding.
HubSpot Marketing Hub
HubSpot is a paid all-in-one software suite that includes marketing automation, email marketing, and a CRM. It's a popular and well-documented suite that competes with Salesforce globally.
Price:
- $0/month (Free)
- $45/month (Starter)
- $800/month (Professional)
- $3,200/month (Enterprise)
Top features and benefits:
- Comprehensive suite of marketing tools (forms, landing pages, segmentation, automation)
- Easy integration with HubSpot CRM and Sales Hub
Best for: businesses interested in subscribing to HubSpot's entire suite of products. If you chose 'suite' over best-of-breed, this is for you.
Funnel
Funnel is a digital marketing analytics platform that specializes in connecting your data across the various tools making up your martech stack. With Funnel, you can import, transform, and export data wherever you want.
Pricing:
- $399/month (Essentials)
- $999/month (Plus)
- $1999/month (Enterprise)
Top features and benefits:
- Highly-regarded tracking over multiple marketing channels
- Integrates with Salesforce, HubSpot, Marketo, and over 500 other marketing software
Best for: businesses with an established martech stack that needs help connecting the pieces.
(Funnel doesn't make its own dashboards — instead, it transforms and formats your data so you can use any data visualization or reporting tool you want.)
Amplitude Analytics
Amplitude offers several products, including an A/B testing and CDP tool. Their product analytics platform is a strong choice for its segment comparison, account-level journey monitoring, and collaborative features.
Pricing: free for up to 10 million actions monthly, but enterprise plans are custom.
Top features and benefits:
- Event tracking on an account level
- Collaborative and customizable team dashboards
Best for: cross-functional marketing teams in a SaaS organization. User and account level tracking makes this a robust analytics platform choice.
Adobe Analytics
Adobe Analytics is part of Adobe Experience Cloud, the broader product suite including Adobe Marketo and Campaign. With Adobe Analytics, you can expect all of the cutting-edge features you see in other best-of-breed tools; predictive analytics, expert attribution, and 360-degree customer views.
Pricing: As a major enterprise software (usually purchased as part of the broader Adobe suite), prices will vary. However, you can expect to pay anywhere between five and six figures annually.
Top features and benefits:
- Strong custom and standard events tracking
- Powerful integration with other Adobe products
Best for: maturing orgs with emerging marketing and analytics functions. If you're going for one Adobe product, you're probably going for the whole suite — so make sure you're ready for the commitment.
Heap
Heap is a product analytics tool popular for its ability to tie user, session, and marketing data into engineering investments. Like the other marketing analytics tools on this list, it specializes in tracking user sessions and funnel monitoring.
Pricing:
- Free for up to 100,000 sessions
- $3,600 annually for 300,000 sessions
- Custom quotes for larger orgs
Top features and benefits:
- Custom reporting and dashboards, done in real-time or retroactively
- Easy to set up on the administrative side
Best for: A scaling software startup on a budget.
Smartlook
Smartlook offers a different look at customer and marketing data than any other tool on this list. It's a session replay tool that lets you watch user sessions on your app or website. You can also segment and filter that data based on actions taken!
Pricing:
- Free for 1,500 sessions
- $39/mo for 5,000 sessions
- $111/mo for 15,000 sessions
Top features and benefits:
- Well-regarded mouse movement tracking functionality
- Very easy to set up
Best for: product teams working with marketing teams. A tool like this will do wonders to augment synergy between your product people and digital marketers.
Supercharge Your Marketing Analytics Today
Let's do a quick recap of all the tools we've covered so far:
- Google Analytics — for scrappy SMEs (or individuals).
- Kissmetrics — mid-to-large-sized e-commerce orgs.
- Chartbeat — media organizations or content-heavy brands.
- Mixpanel — early-stage SaaS startups.
- HubSpot Marketing Hub — HubSpot suite users.
- Funnel — orgs with mature but disconnected martech stacks.
- Amplitude Analytics — cross-functional SaaS marketing teams.
- Adobe Analytics — maturing orgs with emerging analytics operations.
- Heap — budget-friendly choice for small software companies.
- Smartlook — product and marketing team collaborators.
Finding the right marketing analytics tools for your business can be challenging, but it's a worthwhile task. The right platform will boost conversion, simplify marketing data analysis, and turn business intelligence into business insights.
Need help configuring your martech stack and automation around the best marketing analytics tools? Portage Labs can help! Our team of experts works to maximize your marketing stack and maximize your output. Get in touch today to see how we can transform your campaigns.
Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs)
What are examples of marketing analytics?
Marketing analytics can include several metrics and reports, including conversion rates, retention rates, dropoff points, and heatmaps. Your organization can use marketing analytics tools to monitor and interpret data to generate insights into improving your key metrics.
Which tools are used for analytics?
Several marketing analytics tools are available on the market, each with its own features and benefits. Here are some categories they can fall into:
- Product analytics
- Web and mobile analytics
- Content analytics
Popular marketing analytics tools include Google Analytics, Kissmetrics, Chartbeat, Mixpanel, HubSpot Marketing Hub, Funnel, Amplitude Analytics, Adobe Analytics, Heap, and Smartlook.
