What are Marketing Analytics Tools?
Marketing analytics tools help marketers measure and manage marketing performance. The goal is to maximize the effectiveness of marketing activities and justify the investment. In other words, marketing analytics tools help marketing teams both improve their efforts and prove their worth.
Marketing analytics tools can gather data from all channels in the marketing mix, and report on them together. They allow marketers to create reports without relying on data scientists, as well as perform competitive analysis and track campaign success.
Businesses use marketing analytics tools and the dashboards they provide to address the three key areas of marketing performance management: optimization, attribution, and justification.
Marketing Mix Modeling
Any Business Intelligence tool can handle the multivariate regression analyses needed for marketing mix and attribution models. But marketing analytics platforms allow marketers to interpret the data themselves.
Here’s how it works:
- Cross-channel marketing efforts are analyzed in terms of dollars spent, time spent, and results.
- Mixed or omni-channel KPIs are created.
- The tool then measures campaign performance against target goals.
- The report finally directs marketers’ decisions about how to optimize efforts. Often this is by redistributing time and money to the most successful campaigns.
Marketing Analytics Tools Features & Capabilities
Marketing Analytics tools might include the following features and capabilities:
- Multi-Channel tracking
- With-in Campaign, With-in Company, and Cross-channel campaign comparisons
- Campaign ROI
- Optimization & predictive analytics
- Customer analytics & segmentation
- Competitive analysis
- Attribution modeling
- Revenue funnel analysis
- Forecasting
Types of Marketing Analytics Tools
There are a few different types of vendors that offer marketing analytics capabilities. First, there are point solutions specializing in marketing analytics.
Some web analytics platforms offer viable marketing analytics capabilities. This includes Adobe Analytics and IBM Digital Analytics. Google now offers an attribution tool via its acquisition of Adometry.
Other vendors may handle just one part of marketing analytics.
For example:
- Competitive analysis products like Rival IQ and TrackMaven
- Customer journey and segmentation products such as Pitney Bowes with their Portrait offerings
Some SEO and marketing automation tools offer decent marketing analytics as part of their broader platforms. Many BI and predictive analytics products are just a module or add-on away from entering the marketing analytics space in the future. Some marketing analytics tools support an account-based marketing approach.
How to Choose Free Marketing Analytics Tools?
Running a business requires considerable planning and foresight. And that means having access to a lot of data. Information about your consumers with marketing analytics tools can help you understand everything from where they are and how they shop to knowing their preferences.
More importantly, to remain competitive and profitable, you need to monitor and analyze your marketing strategies as well. Knowing what works and what doesn’t can help your business become more efficient. And since running a business requires responding to consumers in real-time, you’ll be in a better position to make smarter decisions more quickly. Moreover, you’ll also be able to assess your competitor’s strategies. In addition, there is a lot of marketing analytics tools free to analyze your marketing data.
What is marketing analytics software and what is it used for?
Marketing analytics platforms keep digital marketers organized and successful in their marketing efforts, such as customer data, user behavior, and website analytics. Also, with the help of analytics software, they can collect the data from every channel they use, such as search engines, social media, email marketing and many more.
So yeah, a data-driven marketing approach can offer a holistic perspective. But with the sheer quantity of data, how can you make sense of it all? This is where best marketing analytics reporting tools come in handy.
A marketing analytics tool allows you to tap into the full potential of your data. Being able to collect, organize, manage, and take control of various information can optimize the efficiency of the business. Therefore, you can understand what drives growth, boost overall performance, reach business goals faster, and improve your bottom line.
In order to avail these benefits and more, you must select the right analytics software for your marketing needs. But there are so many tools available. Evaluating all the pros and cons of each to identify which one aligns with your business goals can help you find the best marketing analytics tool. To make the task easier for you, here are a few features that you need to consider.
8 Free Marketing Analytics Tools for Startups in 2021
Here is the list of the Free Marketing Analytics Tools that you can consider incorporating into your marketing strategy:
1. Google Analytics
This is a basic and free website analytics tool provided by Google. You can use it to track the traffic on your website, know where your web visitors are coming from, how they came to know your website, the amount of time they spent on your website, etc.
Google Analytics can also be integrated with other tools like Google AdWords and Google Data Studio for a deeper analysis of your marketing data. However, it is complex to define and track new conversions, and it doesn’t provide an option to track individual user sessions and know how users actually use your site.
The basic version of Google Analytics is free and is fit for most companies. It also comes with a premium version that costs about $100K annually with advanced data analytics capabilities and full support from Google.
2. MixPanel
The goal of MixPanel is to track the events on your website, mobile app, or product. This way, you can know what users are doing on your mobile app or website.
Once you add an event to MixPanel, you will see the trends, count, the users who used them and in what order. It also offers funnels and A/B testing for different versions of your mobile app. MixPanel expects you to add the events that you need to track and focus on.
You can do this using a visual selector or by adding code annotations. After the selection, the events that you want to track will be shown on your dashboard and the metrics of choice will be presented. It offers a free Starter plan and two other plans that require you to pay a monthly subscription fee.
3. The AdWords Performance Grader
PPC is a common way of reaching new customers and growing businesses among marketers.
However, there are many factors that will determine your success as a PPC marketer. It can even be overwhelming to determine the right areas to which you should pay attention. That’s why PPC marketers need AdWords Performance Grader.
The Adwords Performance Grader helps you evaluate the strength of your Google Ads account quickly and securely. Once the tool has performed an audit of your account, it will give you a detailed report that shows the strengths and weaknesses of your account.
This can help you know the account elements that need more work. You can use this tool for free.
4. Heap Analytics
Heap is a web and mobile analytics tool, with similar functionalities as MixPanel. Also; Heap Analytics helps you track all the activities taken by your website visitors. You can also use it to select the events that you need to analyze and preview on your dashboard. It can help you to track the individual user behavior and segment users based on their behavior.
It has a free plan and two other plans that require you to pay a monthly subscription fee.
tools support an account-based marketing approach.5. BuzzSumo
BuzzSumo is a versatile content and social media analysis dashboard that provides its users with data about the topics that are trending on the major social media platforms. It allows you to analyze data from a range of different time periods, like for the previous 12 hours or spanning many months.
This way, you can now the topics in your industry that are getting the most social traction. It also offers advanced keyword search operators, backlink information, content type filters, and influencer marketing features. You can then export the data into another format and analyze it to a greater depth.
It has three pricing plans, with the cheapest plan going for $99 per month.
6. SEMrush
SEMrush is a marketing analytics tool that can help you see what your competitors are doing.
It can provide you with a way to outrank your competitors in search results and offers its users with a simple way to monitor their competitors’ social media accounts, brands, etc.
You can also use it to track your own brand. SEMrush has an analytics reports tool that shows the keywords that your competitors are using in their AdWords campaigns. You can also use it to analyze the keywords that you want to use in your ad campaigns to know how competitive they are.
It is a good tool for marketers who need to increase their search engine traffic and monitor their competitors’ activities. SEMrush offers 3 pricing plans, with the cheapest plan costing $99 per month.
7. Optimizely
Optimizely is a good tool for carrying out A/B tests on web pages and products to know which version is the best.
The A/B tests can be visual or textual, and Optimize makes it easy for you to change the design of the pages without changing the code. It can also be integrated with other analytics tools like Bizble, Google Analytics, and Clicktale. Such experiments make it easy for you to track your Optimize experiment results in other dashboards together with additional data segmentation.
It is a good tool for any marketer who cares about the performance of his website and online marketing results. Its A/B testing capabilities can help you know how to better convert your users and increase your ROI. It has different pricing plans that are based on traffic needs.
8. Cyfe
Cyfe is an all-in-one dashboard that allows marketers to integrate data from various marketing tools and see all of it in one place.
You can use it to track data from all your social media marketing platforms, sales platforms, pay per click marketing channels, and others. It has pre-built widgets that you can use to connect to Google Analytics, Google AdWords, and SalesForce accounts.
Cyfe can then collect all the data that you need from these platforms and display it on one dashboard. Cyfe has a free plan and three other plans that require you to pay a monthly subscription fee.
Conclusion Free Marketing Analytics Tools for 2021
If you are looking for a marketing analytics tool to help with the aggregation of your data into a single destination, you will probably want to check over this list of platforms in detail.
