Marketing Analytics Tools for B2B Marketers

Tech marketers spend a major portion of their budgets on different promotions, be they ads on Facebook, development and distribution of whitepapers, a variety of other efforts or some combination thereof.

But throwing money at the effort isn’t enough, a tech marketer also needs to track the promotion to see if it is as effective as expected, if more should be spent on that channel or if marketing spending needs to be reconsidered and redistributed in some other way.

That’s where marketing analytics come into play.

“Data from analytics tools enhances visualizations and helps provide B2B tech marketers with more data in one place to simplify campaign analysis, said Colleen Shifflett, Merritt Group digital marketing manager.

“Although Hubspot isn’t an analytics tool first, it does include convenient dashboard options as a part of its Marketing Hub that can help bring data together from disparate sources such as web, email, advertising, and sales metrics that we’ve seen be a great help to B2B marketing teams looking for a way to take full advantage of the data they have.”

Tech marketers we talked to cited the following as their top marketing analytics tools, many are used in tandem with other analytics and marketing (CRM, etc.) tools.

B2B marketing automation tools

Without further ado, here are some prominent marketing automation tools to look into:

Call Rail

The basics: The business analytics and communications platform that helps businesses improve customer experience and marketing performance. Serving more than 180,000 businesses, CallRail’s platform fits into existing workflows, integrates with several major marketing and sales solutions including HubSpot, Facebook, Salesforce and Google Ads and Analytics.

Cost: $45 a month and up

Website: https://www.callrail.com

Google Analytics

The most commonly used analytics tool is likely Google Analytics, which comes as a free version as well as a premium version (GA360) that comes with an SLA agreement (and soon to be a new GA4 version).

As with any Google tool though, it is constantly changing and requires some ongoing management to ensure data cleanliness, according to Lara Miller of Lara Miller PR.

“When used correctly, can offer very valuable insight from marketing traffic mix, return on investment, attribution model comparisons, and audience insights. Most marketers can easily access and use this tool with the help of a quick, online crash course/certification. Some of my favorite features are the availability of custom events (to track beyond just your standard conversions or purchases), ability to track your audience across multiple channels, custom channel grouping, and the ability to save and share custom dashboard views with other members of your team.”

Miller added: “In my opinion, the value of the GA Client ID is under appreciated. With it, you’re able to trace back to individual session data to understand your traffic activity, diagnose potential web or tracking issues, and in some cases, link frontend and backend data together to paint the full picture.”

Pricing: Free trials; $399 a month and up

Website: https://analytics.google.com/analytics/web/provision/#/provision

Hubspot

Hubspot is a favorite tool for many tech marketers.

The basics: HubSpot’s traffic analytics tool to view website traffic data. This includes viewing traffic by source, topic cluster, device type, country, etc.

Pricing: Analytics included in Hubspot Professional ($800 a month and up) and Enterprise ($3200 a month and up)

Website: https://www.hubspot.com/resources/analytics

Hotjar

The basics: Hotjar enables users to visualize how users engage with a site. Hotjar uses interactive heatmaps of their clicks and actions, recordings of sessions, and collection of visitor words from survey and feedback polls to help build a strong, data-backed understanding of what exactly people are using a site forand how they’re using it.

Pricing: Limited free version available; other plan start at $39 a month and up

Website: https://www.hotjar.com/

Heap.io

The basics: Heap.io automatically collects data on where customers, click and where they go. The data science layer scours information to pinpoint the events and behaviors that most impact the digital experience. The low-code platform is designed to enable individuals and teams to locate the insights they need, with minimal need for analysts or engineers.

Pricing: Limited free version; other plans have “custom quotes”

Website: https://heap.io/

Smartlook

The basics: Smartlook is a qualitative analytics solution for web and mobile helping over 200,000 businesses of all sizes and industries answer the “whys” behind users’ actions — why do users churn, or why aren’t they using a feature, or why are they skipping onboarding? Now you can eliminate the guesswork. With a unique feature set, Smartlook provides a way to understand user behavior at the micro level.

Always-on visitor recordings show what every visitor does on a website or app. Heatmaps provide mass data about where most people click and scroll. Automatic event tracking informs the user how (and how often) your visitors do specific things, while conversion funnels take those events to provide conversion analytics.

Pricing: Free version for personal use; business version, $39 a month and up

Website: https://www.smartlook.com/