Best Marketing Measurement Tools Shortlist
Here’s a shortlist of the marketing measurement tools I picked that will help you ensure your campaign’s results are aligned with your objectives and enhance your marketing effort’s effectiveness.
- Google Analytics
- Google Search Console
- Adobe Analytics
- Mixpanel
- Kissmetrics
- HubSpot Marketing
- Tableau
- Hotjar
- Datorama
- SEMrush
- Moz Pro
- Ahrefs
As a marketing professional, you’re not just responsible for creating and executing new campaigns; you also need to prove that your efforts are worthwhile. After all, you don’t want to see all of your efforts go to waste because you’re having issues measuring marketing ROI.
Using the best marketing measurement tools make it much easier to measure your most crucial and relevant key performance indicators (KPI). In this article, I used my marketing experience, real-world reviews, and in-depth research to find the marketing measurement tools that I believe are worth extensive consideration.
What Are Marketing Measurement Tools?
Marketing measurement tools are software teams can use to track their campaigns’ performance, outreach, and conversion. These platforms provide extensive data to show marketers how to have better communication with their audiences. As a result, they’ll improve their marketing efforts, reach more leads, and increase their customer base.
Overviews of the 12 Best Marketing Measurement Tools
Here are the overviews, including summaries, screenshots, features, and pros and cons of each, that I recommend for anyone searching for new marketing measurement tools.
1. Google Analytics - Best for measuring website performance
Google Analytics is the ideal measurement tool that allows marketing teams to monitor website performance from a single dashboard. It allows you to see what is bringing visitors to their site, where sales come from, how long audiences stay on parts of a website, and many more beneficial metrics.
Why I picked Google Analytics: I chose this marketing measurement tool because it’s widely considered to be the standard platform for monitoring your website’s performance. Google Analytics is best for tracking metrics such as visitors, referrals from other channels, and conversion rates. With this information, you can identify areas of your website that are performing well and where you need to make improvements.
Google Analytics Standout Features and Integrations
Features include the ability to collect comprehensive demographic data regarding your audience. When implementing content marketing strategies, Google Analytics can measure engagement to help you determine which topics are most popular. You can also rely on the platform to measure your social media marketing efforts and other custom campaigns’ effectiveness.
Integrations include over 1,000 native connections with tools to help increase your team’s productivity. These integrations include platforms such as Freshservice, GetResponse, HoneyBook, Jotform, Mailchimp, Orange Logic, Outgrow, Salesforce, SEMrush, Zendesk, and other software options.
Google Analytics is free to use.
Pros
- Customizable data.
- Effectively tracks campaigns.
- Easy to implement.
Cons
- Doesn’t capture user-level data.
- Amount of data is overwhelming.
2. Google Search Console - Best for search engine performance
Google Search Console helps businesses understand how their website is performing on search engines during their search engine optimization campaigns.
Why I picked Google Search Console: For those who are implementing search engine optimization (SEO) strategies to rank their website on search engines, I added Google Search Console for consideration. As many marketers know, content is king, and Google Search Console is a great tool to optimize your site and your content so your target audience will find your business. It’s an excellent measurement tool that will help improve your SEO across your entire site and track your content’s ranking, and it will help you improve your site’s user experience by optimizing its performance.
Google Search Console Standout Features and Integrations
Features include tools that allow you to see which search terms bring your site the most visitors. It also provides features that will help you analyze your website’s clicks, impressions, and search engine position.
Integrations include over 70 native integrations, with some of the most popular tools used by marketing teams. These integrations include platforms such as AgencyAnalytics, Ahrefs, AIOSEO, BacklinkSEO, Bold BI, Elite Site Optimizer, Keywords Everywhere, Marketing Miner, Reportz, Semrush, and other software options.
Google Search Console is free to use.
Pros
- Provides valuable insights.
- Tracks and analyzes website errors.
- Enhances website visibility.
Cons
- Data reporting can be delayed.
- Interface isn’t user-friendly.
3. Adobe Analytics - Best diverse marketing measurement technologies
Adobe Analytics uses various technologies to provide accurate marketing campaign insights.
Why I picked Adobe Analytics: Analyzing a vast amount of data is a necessity for some marketing teams, and Adobe Analytics can help you process this information by using various technologies such as artificial intelligence, machine learning, and advanced data analysis. I added Adobe Analytics because it uses its capabilities to turn all of this data into insights that your entire team can act on. It’s beneficial for larger enterprises because it can turn all this information from multiple channels and use it to prove return on investment to better direct marketing spend.
Adobe Analytics Standout Features and Integrations
Features include an Analysis Workspace tool that provides a robust, flexible place that allows you to build custom marketing analysis projects. Adobe Analytics also provides an open measurement protocol that will collect data from almost any source available, such as voice, audio, video, customer relationship management tools, and other valuable resources.
Integrations include over 100 native connections to help pass vital data for analysis. These connections are some of the standard platforms used by different-sized marketing teams, such as Amplitude, Campaigner, Conversionomics, Convert Experiences, Hootsuite, Improvado, Rambox, Rank Ranger, RELAYTO, Uptempo, and other software options.
Adobe Analytics offers pricing upon request and a free demo.
Pros
- Detailed web traffic insights.
- Tracks all relevant KPIs.
- Effective marketing campaign suggestions.
Cons
- Lack of metric flexibility.
- Slow to load reports.
4. Mixpanel - Best for analyzing customer behavior
Mixpanel is a marketing measurement tool that helps teams understand how visitors find their business. The platform will help companies visualize where people are dropping off throughout the entire marketing lifecycle and measure conversion rates across every step.
Why I picked Mixpanel: I wanted to add Mixpanel to this list of organizations that are providing digital SaaS products. Digital designers, developers, and marketing professionals can use Mixpanel to get an overview of digital product metrics, such as app opens, log-ins, sign-ups, and other critical KPIs, to determine visitors’ behavior. Your marketing team will have access to interactive reports that visualizes this critical information in real-time, which makes it easier for everyone to recognize trends and behavior, enabling you to make data-driven decisions for future marketing campaigns.
Mixpanel Standout Features and Integrations
Features include segmentation capabilities that allow your teams to be more strategic with visitor communications. Mixpanel also offers simple methods for implementing A/B testing to help you measure your campaign’s success compared to what you were doing before.
Integrations include connections with various third-party tools that enable your teams to experience interactive event analysis. You can connect Mixpanel with platforms such as Convert, Figma, GrowthBook, Help Scout, HubSpot, Mailchimp, Marketo, Productboard, Slack, Zoho Commerce, and other software options. If you have a paid Zapier account, you can create custom integrations with the tech stack you’re currently using.
Mixpanel costs from $20/month for up to 100 million monthly events. They have a free plan available for up to 20 million monthly events.
Pros
- Tracks daily user activity.
- Significant number of marketing integrations.
- Easy to learn.
Cons
- Documentation isn’t updated.
- No individual user session tracking.
5. Kissmetrics - Best for fine tuning specific digital marketing campaigns
Kissmetrics provides actionable insights that help marketing teams identify the channels that bring the most revenue. Marketing professionals can use these insights to finetune specific marketing campaigns.
Why I picked Kissmetrics: I added Kissmetrics for your consideration because of its ability to help marketing teams measure the effectiveness of their campaigns. Kissmetrics provides valuable insights that highlight which channels are bringing in the most revenue and line them up next to each other for comparison. With the Kissmetrics Funnel Reporting tool, you can identify which campaigns are hampering your growth by segmenting traffic to see which campaigns are converting the most visitors, which allows you to grow that ideal audience and reach out to individual segments with tailored messaging.
Kissmetrics Standout Features and Integrations
Features include A/B testing that will help you identify what’s working well and what isn’t performing as expected. Kissmetrics also provides tools that allow you to get an overview of visitors’ actions on your website or digital product.
Integrations include over 40 different connections with some of the top tools used by marketing teams that will allow you to run reports from one area. These integrations include native connections such as Desktop.com, Freshpaint, GetResponse, HubSpot CRM, Mailchimp, Rambox, Sitejet, Slack, WordPress, Wrike, and other software options.
Kissmetrics costs from $299/month for up to three users and has a free demo available.
Pros
- Excellent visualization options.
- Provides a significant amount of data.
- Quick setup.
Cons
- Steep learning curve.
- Integrations are complex.
6. HubSpot Marketing - Best for measuring inbound marketing campaigns
HubSpot Marketing helps businesses track and measure the results from inbound marketing campaigns. Businesses can monitor campaigns and see which campaigns are bringing customers to their websites.
Why I picked HubSpot Marketing: Many consider HubSpot Marketing to be one of the top choices for marketing campaigns, so I wanted to add it to this list. Not only does HubSpot Marketing provide effective tools for implementing marketing campaigns, but it also provides the tools you need to see how your campaigns are performing. At a glance, you can see how your websites, landing pages, social media channels, and calls to action are performing, including metrics such as how your campaigns are performing compared to your competition.
HubSpot Marketing Standout Features and Integrations
Features include tools that allow you to turn quantitative data from social media, SEO, and lifecycle campaigns into effective actions. HubSpot Marketing also allows you to create details marketing reports about every marketing asset, such as websites, emails, social media and blog posts, and other crucial assets.
Integrations include over 500 options to help simplify your marketing measurement needs by connecting with your current systems. These include GetResponse, Improvado, Miro, monday.com, Nutshell CRM, Outgrow, Pipedrive, ProjectManager, Wrike, Zendesk, and other software options.
HubSpot Marketing costs from $18/month and has a free plan available.
Pros
- Simple user interface.
- Straightforward integration with marketing channels.
- Provides all marketing tools in one place.
Cons
- Steep learning curve.
- Executing some tasks is complex.
7. Tableau - Best for handling enormous amounts of marketing data
Tableau can help businesses with enormous amounts of marketing campaign data and process it for organization-wide analysis. The software can display relevant information in attractive reports and charts.
Why I picked Tableau: I put Tableau on this list for consideration by large organizations with vast amounts of marketing measurement data. Tableau can process your entire dataset in a matter of minutes instead of waiting days or weeks. This is important as your marketing department collects more data since Tableau can handle it all without impacting performance.
Tableau Standout Features and Integrations
Features include the ability to collect data from multiple organizational departments and develop efficient visualizations. The data highlighter feature allows you to quickly identify the information you’re looking for without any difficulties.
Integrations include excellent native connection options that allow you to deploy the data you want to connect to. These native integrations include Anaplan, Box, Databricks, Dropbox, Google Analytics, Kognitio, OData, Oracle Eloqua, QuickBooks, Salesforce, and other software options.
Tableau costs from $15/user/month and offers a 14-day free trial.
Pros
- Simple user interface.
- Numerous display possibilities.
- Connects to multiple data sources.
Cons
- Adjusting dashboard views is complex.
- Training is a paid subscription.
8. Hotjar - Best for understanding how visitors experience websites
Hotjar provides methods to help marketing teams see what users are doing on a website. Businesses can use this information to improve visitors’ experiences on their sites.
Why I picked Hotjar: Many of the tools I added to this list measure the results of your marketing strategies, but what makes Hotjar different is its ability to show you exactly how people experience your website after finding your campaign. Hotjar’s tools allow you to see how your audience navigates through your entire website. By mapping out your visitor’s journey on your website, you’ll be able to identify what areas of your website that need improvement.
Hotjar Standout Features and Integrations
Features include gathering holistic, actionable insights through tools such as heatmaps, surveys, and conversion funnels. Hotjar can also record real audience sessions on your website so you can get a firsthand view of their experience.
Integrations include native integrations with third-party tools such as Google Analytics, Google Optimize, HubSpot, Microsoft Teams, Mixpanel, Omniconvert, Optimizely, Segment, Slack, Unbounce, and other software options. If you have a paid Zapier account, you can create custom integrations with applications such as Airtable, Asana, ConvertKit, Mailchimp, Miro, Pipedrive, Salesforce, Smartsheet, Trello, Zendesk, and other software options.
Hotjar costs from $32/month and offers a 15-day free trial + free plan.
Pros
- Shows how to improve websites.
- Powerful and user-friendly.
- Easy to use.
Cons
- Effects website speed.
- Navigating the dashboard is complex.
9. Salesforce Marketing Cloud Intelligence - Best for artificial intelligence
Salesforce Marketing Cloud Intelligence helps marketing teams capitalize on which strategies are working best and optimize what isn’t working by using artificial intelligence.
Why I picked Salesforce Marketing Cloud Intelligence: I added Salesforce Marketing Cloud Intelligence for your consideration because of its artificial intelligence capabilities that allow you to uncover insights you wouldn’t find manually. The artificial intelligence and natural language capabilities will automatically turn your marketing data into visual explanations to help you understand your insight’s meaning. The information your teams will receive from Salesforce Marketing Cloud Intelligence will help you spend less time analyzing the data and more time acting on the artificial intelligence’s recommended actions.
Salesforce Marketing Cloud Intelligence Standout Features and Integrations
Features include automated reporting capabilities across multiple marketing channels and marketing dashboards to visualize relevant, in-depth KPIs. Salesforce Marketing Cloud Intelligence will provide a 24/7 interactive reporting experience that enables your team to monitor and improve campaigns. You can also customize dashboards and reports for each stakeholder involved in your marketing strategies to help them make smarter decisions.
Integrations include over 100 connections with third-party integrations to improve productivity and data-sharing processes. These include common marketing tools such as Brevo, censhare, Contentsquare, Driftrock, Google Analytics 360, HubSpot Marketing Hub, Instapage, Mention, Pipeliner CRM, Teamgo, and other software options. If you have a paid Zapier account, you can create custom integrations with your current systems.
Salesforce Marketing Cloud costs from $3,000/month and offers a free demo.
Pros
- Excellent out-of-the-box reporting.
- Integrates with other Salesforce tools.
- Perfectly showcases data and KPIs.
Cons
- Historic data limitations.
- Customer service needs improvement.
10. SEMrush - Best for measuring content marketing results
SEMrush provides tools to help marketing teams measure the results of their content marketing campaigns and monitor their ranking on search engines. The data from SEMrush can help marketing departments improve their overall content marketing strategy.
Why I picked SEMrush: What I like best about SEMrush is its content optimization tool that provides a quantitative score and optimization recommendations. The tools that SEMrush provides will help increase your business’s visibility on major search engines. You can start by inputting your article into SEMrush, adding the keyword you’re looking to rank for and get a quantitative score with helpful optimization suggestions.
SEMrush Standout Features and Integrations
Features include keyword research tools that will help you find the best keywords to target with your digital marketing strategies. SEMrush’s competitor analysis feature allows you to compare your marketing strategies’ performance against your competition by providing advertising research, traffic analytics, and social media tracking capabilities.
Integrations include connections with the platforms that many marketing teams use to implement their latest strategies. These integrations include native connections with tools such as AgencyAnalytics, AIOSEO, Bramework, Databox, monday.com, Respona, Supermetrics, Surfer, Whatagraph, Zoho, and other software options.
SEMrush costs from $99.95/month. They have a free trial + free plan available.
Pros
- Analyzes significant amounts of data.
- Helps all organization levels.
- User-friendly interface.
Cons
- Price is high.
- Steep learning curve.
11. Moz Pro - Best for SEO auditing
Moz Pro provides features that enable marketing teams to audit their website to determine what improvements to make to help it rank well on search engines.
Why I picked Moz Pro: When creating an SEO marketing strategy, you will need to understand what changes to make on your website to help it rank on search engines. The SEO audit tool from Moz Pro will crawl your entire site and discover what you need to do to optimize it for search engine ranking. The site crawl tool will place the issues it finds under critical or warning categories that will help you find and fix critical technical SEO issues immediately.
Moz Pro Standout Features and Integrations
Features include a link explorer tool that allows you to get the information you need to perform more effective link-building campaigns. The Fresh Web Explorer feature will help you find recent mentions of your brand on the internet.
Integrations include Google Analytics and WebCEO to help you connect more data to Moz Pro and get even deeper insights. Moz Pro also provides an API that you can use to create custom integrations.
Moz Pro costs from $79/month for up to three campaigns. They have a free 30-day trial.
Pros
- Provides detailed SEO data.
- Excellent backlink analysis.
- Simplifies finding technical SEO issues.
Cons
- User interface isn’t user-friendly.
- Free trial has limited features.
12. Ahrefs - Best for measuring competitor’s marketing campaigns
Ahrefs provides tools that help businesses measure their competition’s digital marketing efforts and see how they can overtake them.
Why I picked Ahrefs: Not considering your competition’s marketing efforts when creating a marketing strategy is a huge mistake. With Ahrefs, you can get an overview of your competitors’ ranking strategies, including their organic traffic, backlink, and paid traffic campaigns. You can also analyze your competition’s content pieces and replicate their best work for your campaigns.
Ahrefs Standout Features and Integrations
Features include auditing tools that help you identify technical SEO and content optimization opportunities. Ahrefs’ keyword research feature will help you identify the keywords your customers search for and track where you rank in the search engine results for those terms.
Integrations include over 30 native connections with some of the most popular business applications. These include platforms such as AgencyAnalytics, DashThis, Databox, Desktop.com, Google Search Console, Klipfolio, Marketing Miner, Rambox, Rank Ranger, Reportz, and other software options. Ahrefs also provides an API that allows you to create custom integrations.
Ahrefs costs from $83/month and has a free demo available.
Pros
- Excellent for keyword discovery.
- Essential for search engine presence.
- Crucial for rank tracking.
Cons
- No free trial or plan.
- Doesn’t check bulk search engine ranks.
Other Marketing Measurement Tool Options
To make this article more in-depth, I researched other valuable marketing measurement tools that are worth a look at. Here is a quick list of other platforms and a brief description of their top features.
- Monday.com Marketing - Best for marketing workflow analytics.
- Crazy Egg - Best for measuring website visitors’ experiences.
- Piwik PRO - Best for measuring visitors’ behavior.
- SimilarWeb - Best for measuring all digital marketing activities.
- Unbounce - Best for measuring the results of A/B tests.
- Optimizely - Best for testing customer experiences.
- LinkedIn Analytics - Best for measuring LinkedIn Page performance.
- Mailchimp - Best for measuring email marketing campaign performance.
- Clicky - Best for discovering how visitors use a website.
- Woopra - Best customer journey analytics tool.
- Brandwatch - Best for measuring social media conversation metrics.
- Sprout Social - Best for collecting social media insights.
Selection Criteria for Marketing Measurement Tools
Here’s a short summary of the main selection and evaluation criteria I used to develop my list of the best marketing measurement tools for this article:
Core Functionality
The following is the core functionality of marketing measurement tools and how they will help your marketing teams:
- Ability to measure marketing project and campaign data, be it the length of time it takes to get a project task done (plan, graphics, text, and launch) or the backend metrics of, say, an ad campaign or social media post.
- Ability to connect to the different systems you will need to collect marketing data from, like websites, social media, ad accounts, and project management apps.
Key Features
There are a countless number of marketing measurement tools available on the market today. But any software you decide to use should have the following features:
- Segmentation: This will identify who your visitors are, where they’re from, and their interests, which you can use to provide personalized experiences to those segments.
- Behavior Tracking: The right marketing measurement tools will allow you to track visitors’ behaviors and actions throughout your website or content to help you pinpoint the actions that lead to success and identify which elements need to be optimized.
- A/B Testing: This is a great tool for collecting customer feedback by comparing multiple versions of campaigns and flows instead of guessing which efforts resonate with audiences more.
- Data Dashboards: Your marketing data can be messy and confusing, so your marketing measurement tools should display data visualizations to help you understand your data with little effort.
Usability:
Your marketing measurement tool should be easy to use when your teams need to make sense of the data it collects. Any platform you use will require some amount of time to get used to it, but it doesn’t make sense to use a tool that your team finds difficult. When researching the best options, I wanted to ensure that I add as many options as possible that make it easy to not only translate the data, but also allow your teams to find the features they need via simple navigation capabilities.
Software Integrations:
It was important to me to spend significant time looking for tools that provide as many native integrations as possible with other systems that marketing teams typically use, such as marketing automation software, SEO tools, and content management software. The vendor should also provide an API or allow marketing teams to use third-party tools, such as Zapier, to create custom connections. This will help your systems effectively communicate with your new marketing measurement tool and create an ecosystem where everything shares data with each other, and eliminate silos where data is collected but isn’t accessible.
Value for Price:
Implementing new marketing measurement tools is a serious investment for your organization. Determining the value of what you’ll be paying for a specific platform won’t be an easy task. So, when evaluating the tools for this list, I made a point to pay attention to as many options as possible that allow new users to test drive their system to get a good understanding of its value. Since you’ll be using these systems to evaluate your marketing campaigns, at a minimum, you should be able to import data either from your computer or via an integration with other tools, to assess whether you’ll get the value for the money you would be investing.
People Also Ask
You might have some questions to ask to determine whether or not a marketing measurement tool is right for you – and you’re not alone! Many people ask the same or similar questions when researching new marketing measurement tools, so I determined which questions are most common and provided an answer to help you.
What are marketing measurements?
What are the benefits of marketing measurement tools?
What are the different types of marketing measurement tools?
What happened to Facebook Analytics?
Other Marketing & Analytics Tools Reviews
If you need more marketing analytics tool options, I encourage you to check out the following software lists. These will give you a head start in understanding other options that are available to your organization, including more specific analytics tools.
Marketing Management
Marketing management software streamlines marketing efforts with planning, execution, and evaluation, using a centralized platform for efficient campaign management and resource allocation.
Marketing Analytics
Marketing analytics software offers businesses data-driven insights to measure and optimize marketing campaigns for improved results.
- Marketing Measurement Tools
- Marketing Analytics Tools
- Marketing Attribution Software
- Social Media Analytics
- Marketing Dashboard Software
- Marketing Segmentation Tools (audience analytics)
- PR Analytics Tools
Conclusion
Digital marketing is a popular and successful method for organizations to make and increase sales. But every marketer needs to know which tools to use to measure their campaigns’ success. The tools I added to this article will access a lot of data to help you create more focused and effective campaigns. So be sure to choose the right marketing measurement tool to supercharge your future marketing campaigns.
If you need more marketing advice or want to get started with other marketing tools, sign up for The CMO newsletter. As a subscriber, you will receive the latest advice from the top marketing professionals and software suggestions to help you handle other functions in your marketing department.