12 Analytic Tools You Need In Your Marketing Arsenal

Here’s every weapon you must have in your analytics toolkit.

There’s a plethora of analytics solutions to choose from, and each has its own set of functionalities. To streamline the options, we’ve narrowed our list down to the most used tools in each marketing channel. From SproutSocial to Moz Pro to Salesforce, let’s review the capabilities and advantages of each analytic platform.

Web Analytics

Web analytics is the process of collecting, processing, and analyzing data from websites, web applications, and other web products. It’s typically used by product strategists, marketing specialists, and user experience designers to understand user behavior so that web performance can be optimized.

The most popular web analytics programs are Adobe Analytics (AA), Google Analytics (GA), and Amplitude.

Adobe Analytics

AA is a paid web analytics solution in the Adobe Marketing Cloud that allows you to collect data in multiple web channels to generate valuable insights.

Top Features:

Freeform Workspace: With AA’s Analysis Workspace, you can simply drag and drop components such as segments, metrics, and dimensions, into your canvas to analyze and interpret data.
Excel Integration: You can seamlessly integrate Excel into AA with its Excel Report Builder Tool; use it to extract insights by applying analytical functions to raw data.
Anomaly Detection: This platform uses statistical modeling to filter data and detect anomalies or unexpected trends.
Conversion Tracking: AA can track different types of conversions and analyze more than a hundred conversion goals simultaneously.
Advanced Attribution: AA offers different rules-based attribution approaches for different channels.

Google Analytics

GA is a free-to-use platform that helps you collect web data in real time and convert it into customizable reports. Its most recent iteration is the GA4, set to replace the Universal Analytics, which will be sunsetted in October 2023.

Top Features:

Predictive Analytics: GA uses machine learning to help you predict user behavior based on metrics like conversion, revenue, and churn rate.
Single ID Tracking: It allows you to track users individually and see how each one behaves at each touchpoint.
Smart Goals: Its Smart Goals feature helps you optimize your web performance based on pre-configured goals.
Tag Management: Google Tag Manager (GTM) can be smoothly integrated into GA to help you track and deploy tracking codes on webpages.
Privacy Protection: More GDPR-compliant, GA’s latest iteration offers additional granular privacy controls for data collection and usage.
Google Integrations: GA can be smoothly integrated into other Google solutions such as Google Ads, Google Optimize, and Google Search Console to help improve your web performance.

Amplitude

With its modern interface, Amplitude is an easy-to-use software for organizing and analyzing behavioral data of web and mobile users. Compared with other software, this platform is more focused on measuring events-based data.

Top Features:

Cohort Creation: Amplitude lets you conveniently build behavioral cohorts to integrate into your customer analysis.
Behavioral Graph: Get an in-depth visualization of your customers’ user paths across different levels of precision.
Extensive Tracking: Track conversion rates using funnels that reveal specific points of conversion in users’ journeys.
Team Collaboration: Through Amplitude’s Notebooks, team members can provide detailed reports and findings and conveniently share them with others.

Social Analytics

Social analytics involves the analysis of data on social networking sites such as Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, and Google+. The collected data from this type of analytics is valuable to social media analysts, content strategists, and marketing professionals as it helps inform their social media efforts.

HootSuite, SproutSocial, and Keyhole are among the most popular social analytics tools today.

HootSuite

HootSuite is a subscription-based platform that allows you to track, measure, and analyze your social media performance across 30+ different platforms. It’s used by numerous medium to large enterprises and widely regarded as a reliable social media management tool.

Top Features:

Account Management: HootSuite enables you to manage different social media accounts on a single platform. It also allows you to create drafts, schedule posts, and respond to queries efficiently.
Social Listening: Track what your audiences are talking about, from topics they post about to key terms they use.
Performance Metrics: See how your content is performing across different social media metrics including engagement, impressions, reach, and more.
Team Collaboration: You can add collaborators and assign tasks within the platform for a better workflow.

SproutSocial

SproutSocial is a powerful tool for collecting, consolidating, and interpreting data from different social media accounts. This subscription-based tool offers different plans, ranging from standard to advanced.

Top Features:

Centralized Workspace: All your messages are consolidated in a single location. Data from all your social profiles can be easily accessed through a filterable dashboard.
Competitor Analysis: You can generate competitor reports and see how your rivals are doing in terms of impressions, engagements, shares, and more.
Social Listening: Measure the audience’s sentiments based on keywords and phrases. You can also track the performance of hashtags.
Mobile Access: View stats, reply to messages, and publish posts using SproutSocial’s mobile version.
Pre-Built Reports: Generate presentation-ready reports across channels. You can also export unlimited numbers of PDF and CSV reports through this program.

Keyhole

Keyhole is a paid solution that offers access to real-time social media data. It’s used by over 7,000 global brands and offers three basic packages, ranging from $44 to $99 per month.

Top Features:

Historical Data: Access historical data from your social media profiles as old as 20 years.
Influencer Reporting: Monitor and compare the performance of influencers’ posts based on engagement levels.
Hashtag Analysis: See how your hashtags are performing and discover popular hashtags relevant to your campaign in real-time.
Competitor Analysis: Track your competitors’ campaigns and see their performance across key metrics.

Sales Intelligence

Aside from web and social analytics, there are analytics tools that are focused on sales-related data. These specialized programs are called sales intelligence solutions. They’e also known as customer relationship management (CRM) systems.

While there are many platforms, HubSpot, Salesforce, and Zoho are the most commonly used programs.

HubSpot

HubSpot is a sales intelligence platform that helps you consolidate and manage customer information from disparate sources. This free-to-use platform is used by over 30,000+ companies worldwide.

Top Features:

Extensive Storage: It can store up to 1 million contacts with no time limit and consolidate them in a centralized location.
Email Integrations: Connect HubSpot with email services like Gmail, Office 365, and Outlook to track email performance.
Built-In Analytics: Monitor marketing efforts with its built-in analytics and generate custom reports.
Customer Support: Chatbots allow you to communicate with your customers in real-time.

Salesforce

Salesforce is a cloud-based program for tracking leads, storing customer data, and managing customer relationships. This popular CRM also boasts task management, leads monitoring, and sales forecasting capabilities. Salesforce has different pricing plans, ranging from $25 to $300 per month.

Top Features:

Marketing Automation: It uses machine learning to collect data from customer interactions, identify qualified prospects, and create customer segments.
Application Building: You can create custom apps using either Salesforce Classic or Lightning Experiences, or get apps created by other companies from an app marketplace called AppExchange.
Sales Forecasts: Through its Forecast Hierarchy, you can predict future sales performance based on your sales pipeline.

Zoho

Zoho is used to support marketing and sales functions. It offers functionalities like contact management, workflow automation, and analytics reporting. Zoho is used by over 250,000 businesses worldwide.

Top Features:

Automated Workflow: You can automate sales processes like scheduling tasks, sending emails, and scoring leads to improve productivity.
Data Analysis: Zoho offers different ways to interpret and analyze customer data, such as cohort analysis, quadrant analysis, and KPIs.
Email Integration: Integrate Gmail, Outlook, and Yahoo! into Zoho to manage and schedule email communications within the platform.
Process Builder: With a simple drag and drop, Zoho lets you create a process blueprint for your team members.

Campaign Analytics

Campaign analytics tools are mainly used to measure and track your paid and organic efforts, specifically your search engine optimization (SEO) performance. From position tracking to competitor analysis, these solutions monitor how you’re performing on search results to inform your SEO strategies.

Some of the most popular campaign analytics solutions are SEMRush, Moz, and SpyFu:

SEMRush

With over 55+ tools, SEMRush is a great tool for boosting different areas of your marketing performance: SEO, content marketing, paid advertising, and social media. While it has many plusses, SEMRush is best used for its advanced capabilities in tracking and improving SEO standings.

Top Features:

Keyword Research: Get access to its keyword database, which has over 22 billion terms, to expand your keyword list and get content ideas. You can also see the terms your competitors are bidding on for paid.
Competitor Analysis: Get access to your competitors’ traffic and audience data, as well as content strategies.
Content Research: Use its topic research tool to identify topic ideas and headline options to optimize your content.
Site Audit: Run audits on your web pages to reveal technical issues you need to fix. Get reports on their loading speed, crawlability, security, and more.

Moz Pro

Moz Pro is a subscription-based SEO program equipped with tools for keyword research, rank tracking, analytics and reporting, and more. With a pricing package ranging from $99 to $599 per month, this solution is normally used by mid-market and large corporations.

Top Features:

Link Research: Through its Link Explorer, which has an index of 40 trillion links, get an extensive analysis of your website’s backlink profile.
Site Audit: Using its own site crawler, gauge the technical health of your web pages and get relevant recommendations to improve your SEO performance.
Keyword Research: Discover traffic-driving keywords you can use to boost your rankings and see your competitors’ keywords and standings as well.

SpyFu

SpyFu offers extensive insights to help optimize your organic and paid campaigns. Similar to SEMRush and Moz Pro, SpyFu helps you conduct keyword research, competitor analysis, and technical SEO to improve your search rankings. It offers three subscription schemes, ranging from $39 to $299 per month.

Top Features:

Bidding History: With the help of Google Ads Advisor, get insights into your competitors’ ad histories to inform your PPC campaigns.
Keyword Research: While it’s not as powerful as SEMRush, SpyFu helps you find, upload, and sort large quantities of keywords. You can also see each keyword’s ranking history to guide your decision-making.
Competitor Analysis: With 13 years’ worth of data, it provides comprehensive reports about competitors’ organic and paid search performance to inform your strategies.
Link Research: See your competitors’ backlink performance to discover quality backlinks you can use to improve your standings.

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