Marketing analytics ensures that your organization can develop a smart, data-driven marketing strategy. If you’re looking for a general overview of the field, check out our previous article “What is Marketing Analytics?”.
So far, we’ve discussed marketing analytics in the abstract: what marketing analytics is, and the various marketing analytics techniques. But how can you go about implementing it within your organization by choosing the best marketing analytics tools?
Below, we’ll offer a comparison of the best marketing analytics tools. The 8 tools listed below are all intended for different use cases: some are more general-purpose, while others are fine-tuned for a specific marketing channel. No matter what your needs are, there’s a marketing analytics tool out there that matches them.
1. Mixpanel
Mixpanel is a software suite for web and mobile analytics. It offers a variety of features for analyzing customers’ behavior, including:
- Path tracking to understand how users explore your products and websites and achieve a given objective.
- Customer segmentation and behavioral analysis in terms of retention, churn, and loyalty.
- Data visualizations, reports, and customizable monitoring and alerting to help track important metrics and KPIs.
The good news is that Mixpanel is free to use for up to 1,000 monthly tracked users. Even better: Mixpanel is a low-code solution, which means that your non-technical employees can get just as much out of the platform.
2. Crazy Egg
Crazy Egg is a website optimization platform that’s packed with features for user testing. The features of Crazy Egg include:
- “Snapshots” of a given page over a defined period of time.
- Visualization features such as heatmaps, scrollmaps, and “confetti maps” that track cursor activity and clicks.
- A/B testing features to compare different changes to your website and determine the impact that each one will have on user behavior.
The Crazy Egg software offers a free 30-day trial, as well as multiple pricing tiers starting at $24/month.
3. BuzzSumo
BuzzSumo is a marketing analytics tool that measures the performance and engagement of your content on social media, including platforms such as Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, and Reddit.
The BuzzSumo dashboard quickly provides insights into which topics are trending on social networks over a given duration. After you enter a keyword or topic, BuzzSumo returns a list of content that inspires the most engagement.
Each link within BuzzSumo receives an “Evergreen Score,” which measures how much attention the content is still receiving after 30 days. What’s more, BuzzSumo can help you identify relevant social media influencers who can collaborate with you and spread your message.
BuzzSumo is available for a free trial, as well as multiple paid tiers starting at $99/month.
4. Moz Pro
Moz Pro is a marketing analytics tool specifically intended for search engine optimization (SEO). The all-in-one Moz Pro software suite includes:
- The Keyword Explorer tool for performing keyword research, determining which questions users have and which search queries they enter.
- The Site Crawl tool for finding hidden issues that may be harming your SEO.
- The Link Explorer tool for identifying opportunities to insert links to relevant content.
- Rank tracking for measuring how your website ranks according to different keywords, tracking your performance over time.
You can start a 30-day free trial of Moz Pro today, with paid tiers starting at $99/month.
5. SEMrush
SEMrush is a popular alternative to Moz Pro for SEO, but it also includes features for PPC (pay-per-click) marketing, display advertising, and lead generation.
One of SEMrush’s biggest selling points is its competitor analysis tool, which gives you a wealth of insights into your business rivals. For example, you can see the keywords and ad copy that other advertisers are using in their Google Ads campaigns, as well as new competitors that have risen in your market.
SEMrush also includes other valuable features, such as:
- A social media dashboard for posting to all of your accounts at once.
- A brand monitoring tool for assessing your brand reputation and identifying new opportunities.
- An “SEO writing assistant” that measures the readability and SEO-friendliness of your content.
Like Moz Pro, SEMrush pricing starts at $99/month.
6. Cyfe
Cyfe is a marketing analytics tool that provides business intelligence and analytics dashboards for your most important metrics and KPIs. Whether you want to measure your marketing and sales efforts or your social media engagement, Cyfe makes it easy to spin up a dashboard that turns data into beautiful visualizations.
The use cases for Cyfe dashboards include sales and marketing, web analytics, and social media (as well as others such as IT, finance, and project management). Cyfe automatically integrates with third-party tools such as Moz, Google Analytics, Alexa, Salesforce, and Mailchimp.
Cyfe is free for a single user and two dashboards, with paid tiers starting at $29/month.
7. Birst
Birst is a BI and analytics solution that can be used as a marketing analytics tool. The Birst platform is likely most useful when you want a powerful, enterprise-grade solution that can combine marketing analytics with other BI and analytics workloads.
The analytics available within Birst include:
- First-touch, last-touch, linear, and time-decay attribution models
- ROI and performance metrics for marketing campaigns
- Marketing operations analytics, including average cycle time and lead aging reports
- Revenue generation metrics per each channel and campaign
- Web analytics, including page traffic, unique page visits, and conversion rate
Pricing information for Birst is not publicly available; however, the software directory ITQlick suggests that the price is roughly $1,500/year per user.
8. Nielsen Marketing Cloud
Best known for its ratings of TV audiences, Nielsen is now offering the Nielsen Marketing Cloud, a marketing analytics tool that provides access to Nielsen audience data.
The Nielsen Marketing Cloud platform makes use of artificial intelligence and adaptive learning in order to evaluate the success of your marketing campaigns and make adjustments accordingly. According to Nielsen, the Marketing Cloud platform can assist you at every stage of the marketing process, from planning and customer segmentation to data management.
Nielsen Marketing Cloud does not offer a free trial, and pricing information is not publicly available. However, Capterra reviewer Juan Cesar G. suggests that “the price is somewhat high.”
Final Thoughts on Analytics Tools
Although they’re all quite different in practice, the marketing analytics tools above all have a common goal: helping you make better, smarter use of your enterprise data.
Still undecided about the best marketing analytics tool? As digital marketing experts, we know the best ways to optimize your marketing efforts. Get in touch with the ironFocus team today to schedule a chat about your business needs and objectives, so we can help you set off on the right path.
Comments are closed