Marketing without analytics is like training without a plan — sure, you may be making progress, but you’re likely not investing your workout efforts and hours in the most efficient way. It is directionless and prone to aimless grind, often yielding unpredictable or suboptimal results.
But you already know that, so you have Google Analytics in place to track your website performance metrics. You may also be regularly looking at your email and social media marketing platforms’ built-in analytics tools to monitor how your content and ads are performing.
Is that enough, though? Especially when you want to rally your marketing team around specific campaign goals — and perhaps — long-term brand goals. And, especially when your team comprises members working from different geographies, necessitating you to monitor employees working from home.
As an enterprise or marketing agency handling multiple clients, in order to truly understand which marketing channels, content formats, ad copies, keywords, and topics are working for your business (or your client’s), you need to bring together your analytics data and work collaboratively to optimize your efforts. That’s where dedicated marketing analytics tools help.
Here are five great analytics tools you can use to improve your marketing efforts as a distributed team.
1. Supermetrics
Supermetrics is a popular data integration and reporting tool that lets you create a single source of truth from all your marketing data. It integrates numerous data sources, including Google Analytics, Google Ads, Facebook Ads, LinkedIn Ads, Shopify, and many others.
As an Extract, Transform, Load (ETL) platform, it enables you to connect data from all your marketing and advertising channels, blend and transform it into a meaningful format, and export it into a spreadsheet or BI tool (Google Sheets, Microsoft Excel, Looker Studio, etc.) to create a data warehouse for your team to collaborate on.
Key features:
- Data Transformation: You can transform and manipulate data within Supermetrics to suit your specific reporting needs. It offers options for data cleansing, filtering, and calculations, enabling marketers to create custom metrics and dimensions.
- Data Monitoring: You can set up regular data refreshes and alerts to get notified if something unexpected happens, such as your ad campaigns suddenly overspending. This lets you better monitor your performance and budgets across all channels and react in real-time. As an agency, you can gain complete visibility on marketing data across all client accounts and data sources.
- Automated Reporting: One of the standout features of Supermetrics is its automated reporting capabilities. You can schedule reports to be generated at specific intervals and delivered to stakeholders via email or in various formats, including Google Sheets, Excel, or Data Studio.
Pricing:
Supermetrics charges based on the number of data sources and destinations you wish to connect, ranging from $19/month to $69/month, along with custom pricing for data warehousing for which you need to contact sales. You can try any Supermetrics connector or destination free for 14 days.
2. Mixpanel
Primarily a product analytics platform, Mixpanel offers a powerful way to combine your marketing and product data to understand your user’s journey and measure the effectiveness of all your marketing efforts.
If you’re marketing a SaaS product or a software application, this tool can be invaluable to better understand your user behavior, feature adoption, retention, and more.
In May 2023, the company announced Mixpanel Marketing Analytics, which is an event-based data model that helps marketers analyze the endless user behavioral data around everything from ads to purchases across channels and campaign effectiveness by cohorts. It’s essentially a major upgrade over free marketing analytics tools like Google Analytics.
Key features:
- Event Tracking: Mixpanel allows you to track user interactions with your digital products and services as discrete events. These events can be customized to monitor specific actions, such as button clicks, form submissions, or page views. This detailed tracking provides insights into how users engage with your platform.
- Funnel Analysis: Funnel analysis in Mixpanel enables you to visualize user journeys step by step. You can identify where users drop off or convert within your revenue marketing and product funnels, helping you pinpoint areas that need improvement.
- Retention Analysis: Mixpanel helps you understand user retention by tracking how often and for how long users return to your product after their initial interaction. You can segment users by different criteria, allowing for targeted retention strategies.
- A/B Testing: This feature facilitates experimentation with different versions of your product or website. You can test variations to determine which performs best and drives desired user behaviors. It’s particularly useful for optimizing conversion rates.
- User Segmentation: Mixpanel enables you to create user segments based on various attributes and behaviors. This segmentation helps you tailor your marketing strategies and content to specific user groups for more personalized engagement.
Pricing:
Mixpanel’s Starter plan is free for up to 20M monthly events with unlimited integrations and collaborators. The paid plans start at $20/month and go up to $833/month for enterprises. What’s more, startups that were founded less than five years ago, with up to $8M in total funding, can receive their first year free on the Mixpanel Growth or Enterprise plans.
3. TapClicks
TapClicks is an enterprise marketing operations platform that lets you automate the ingestion of huge volumes of data from various sources to discover trends and opportunities with its analytics capabilities. Its core strength lies in its reporting for agencies, which allows you to visualize, optimize, and share your data-driven insights with clients in the form of automated custom dashboards and reports.
Key features:
- Integrations: The platform supports integration with hundreds of marketing tools, CRMs, and analytics tools, which facilitates data connection from various sources without manual input.
- Unified Dashboard: TapClicks offers a centralized dashboard that integrates data from multiple marketing channels, tools, and platforms. This gives you a holistic view of their marketing performance.
- Automated Reporting: You can schedule and automate the generation and delivery of reports. This ensures the timely delivery of insights to your clients.
- Customizable Visualizations: You can create custom charts, graphs, and visual representations of data to better understand and communicate marketing performance and evaluate the ROI of various marketing initiatives.
- Data Management: TapClicks offers tools to manage and organize large volumes of data, which can be particularly useful for agencies managing multiple client accounts.
Pricing:
TapClicks offers a one-on-one evaluation and demo to tailor a custom price based on your goals. You can try the platform free for 14 days to see its features in action.
4. Porter
Porter is a no-code business intelligence tool similar to Supermetrics that facilitates marketing reporting without coding.
In today’s fast-paced marketing landscape, teams often don’t have the luxury of waiting for developers to create custom reports. Porter’s no-code platform empowers your marketing team to generate KPI-driven insights without needing coding expertise, facilitating rapid decision-making.
Key features:
- Daily Data Refresh: For teams operating in different time zones, it’s crucial everyone accesses the latest data. Porter ensures that data is updated daily, providing all team members with up-to-date insights irrespective of their location.
- Integrations: Integrating various tools (for PPC, CRM, email, etc.) can be a technical challenge. Porter simplifies this process, eliminating the need for an engineer. This is particularly beneficial for distributed teams that might rely on multiple platforms and channels specific to their region.
- Data Blending: Marketing campaigns span several channels. Porter’s ability to blend data (such as conversions, ad spend, ROAS, etc.) from these channels means teams can derive comprehensive insights, ensuring all members, no matter where they are, have a holistic view of campaign performance.
- Intuitive Metric Calculation: The platform’s similarity to Google Sheets ensures a familiar environment for many marketers. Distributed teams can thus collaborate on metrics without the steep learning curve of a new platform.
- Filter & Segment: Understanding performance at a granular level — be it by client, channel, or campaign — enables localized decision-making, especially important for teams in varied markets.
- Goal Visualization: For distributed teams, understanding and visualizing the overarching marketing goals is essential for cohesion. Porter provides tools that not only set these goals but also visually represent them.
Pricing:
Porter’s pricing ranges from $14.99 to $99.99 per month, offering three plans: Solo, Teams, and Agencies. The Solo plan at $14.99 per month allows connection to one account from 15 data sources. The Teams plan at $39.99 per month facilitates connection to five accounts, with an option to add up to seven extra accounts for $7.9 each. There’s also an Agencies Pro plan at $180 per month that allows 40 accounts. All plans offer unlimited users and a 14-day free trial. You can opt for monthly or annual payments, with the latter providing a 17% discount.
5. Funnel
Funnel is a marketing data hub designed for managing and analyzing marketing data. It allows you to connect data from various sources, securely store it, transform raw data for analysis, and share data with teams or tools, aiding in optimized spending and effective reporting.
It is particularly useful for distributed marketing teams as it facilitates collaboration and sharing of data and insights quickly and securely, making it a central point for marketing data management and analysis.
Key features:
- Centralized Data Collection and Storage: Collect data from over 500 marketing and sales platforms swiftly. It offers a reliable hub for all original data and any custom fields created, ensuring data is up-to-date, complete, and ready for reporting and analysis.
- Data Organization: Funnel provides prebuilt and custom rules to prepare data for analysis effortlessly. You can apply transformations without affecting the underlying data, granting notable analytical flexibility.
- Seamless Data Sharing: Funnel ensures marketing data reaches any destination including reporting tools or data warehouses. You have complete control of this central marketing data hub while enabling your team to share data effortlessly across various platforms.
Pricing:
Funnel.io offers four pricing plans catering to different needs: Free, Starter, Business, and Enterprise. The Free plan provides basic features with 350 flexpoints (flexibility to allocate or reallocate resources based on your usage), 230+ core connectors, and 3 destinations. The Starter plan, at $400/month, expands capacity to 700 flexpoints. The Business plan, starting at $1100/month, offers 1000 flexpoints, 9 destinations, and additional features like multiple workspaces.
The Enterprise plan, tailored for large-scale operations, includes 1500 flexpoints, 10 destinations, advanced setup guidance, and features like Enterprise Single Sign-On and data region choice among others.
Wrapping up
You won’t be hard-pressed to find more such marketing analytics tools that coalesce your marketing data from multiple sources and help align your distributed team.
These five ones, however, do a fine job of doing just that, and you can take them for a spin by signing up for a free trial or the free plan to determine which one’s right for your team.
So, take your pick and get cracking with collaborative marketing analysis to drive better results from your budget, no matter where your team members are working from.
Written by our guest writer Hazel Raoult, a freelance marketing writer who works with PRmention.
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