Skip to main content

With so many different marketing measurement tools available, figuring out which is right for you is tough. You know you want to gather data on various metrics such as customer engagement, conversion rates, and return on investment—but now need to figure out which tool is best. I've got you! In this post, I'll help make your choice easy, sharing my personal experiences using dozens of different marketing measurement software with brands of all sizes, with my picks of the best marketing measurement tools overall.

What Are Marketing Measurement Tools?

Marketing measurement tools are software and applications designed to track and analyze the performance of marketing campaigns. They provide key metrics such as engagement rates, conversion rates, ROI, and customer behavior patterns. The purpose is to enable businesses to quantify the effectiveness of their marketing strategies, identify areas for improvement, and understand customer responses.

Overviews Of The 10 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.

Best for measuring competitor’s marketing campaigns

  • No free trial
  • From $99/month when paying month-to-month or $83/month when billed annually
Visit Website
Rating: 4.6/5

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.

Pros and cons

Pros:

  • Crucial for rank tracking
  • Essential for search engine presence
  • Excellent for keyword discovery

Cons:

  • Doesn’t check bulk search engine ranks
  • No free trial or plan

Best for measuring website performance

  • Free to use
  • Free to use
Visit Website
Rating: 4.5/5

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.

Pros and cons

Pros:

  • Easy to implement
  • Effectively tracks campaigns
  • Customizable data

Cons:

  • Amount of data is overwhelming
  • Doesn’t capture user-level data

Best for SEO auditing

Visit Website
Rating: 4.4/5

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.

Pros and cons

Pros:

  • Simplifies finding technical SEO issues
  • Excellent backlink analysis
  • Provides detailed SEO data

Cons:

  • Free trial has limited features
  • User interface isn’t user-friendly

Best for handling enormous amounts of marketing data

  • 14-day free trial
  • Pricing starts from $70/user/month (billed annually). This reflects the starting price for their individual plans, providing access to Tableau's comprehensive suite of tools.
Visit Website
Rating: 4.4/5

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.

Pros and cons

Pros:

  • Connects to multiple data sources
  • Numerous display possibilities
  • Simple user interface

Cons:

  • Training is a paid subscription
  • Adjusting dashboard views is complex

Best for understanding how visitors experience websites

  • 15-day free trial + free plan available
  • From $59/month
Visit Website
Rating: 4.4/5

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.

Pros and cons

Pros:

  • Easy to use
  • Powerful and user-friendly
  • Shows how to improve websites

Cons:

  • Navigating the dashboard is complex
  • Effects website speed

Best for fine tuning specific digital marketing campaigns

  • 30-day free trial + free demo
  • From $299/month (billed annually)
Visit Website
Rating: 4.1/5

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.

Pros and cons

Pros:

  • Quick setup
  • Provides a significant amount of dat
  • Excellent visualization options

Cons:

  • Integrations are complex
  • Steep learning curve

Best diverse marketing measurement technologies

  • 30-day free trial
  • From $33.99/month

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.

Pros and cons

Pros:

  • Effective marketing campaign suggestions
  • Tracks all relevant KPIs
  • Detailed web traffic insights

Cons:

  • Slow to load reports
  • Lack of metric flexibility

Best for analyzing customer behavior

  • They don’t offer a free plan.
  • From $20/month for up to 100 million monthly events

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.

Pros and cons

Pros:

  • Easy to learn
  • Significant number of marketing integrations
  • Tracks daily user activity

Cons:

  • No individual user session tracking
  • Documentation isn’t updated

Best for artificial intelligence

  • Free demo
  • From $1,250/month, billed annually

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.

Pros and cons

Pros:

  • Perfectly showcases data and KPIs
  • Integrates with other Salesforce tools
  • Excellent out-of-the-box reporting

Cons:

  • Customer service needs improvement
  • Historic data limitations

Best for measuring inbound marketing campaigns

  • 30-day free trial
  • Starts from $45/month

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.

Pros and cons

Pros:

  • Provides all marketing tools in one place
  • Straightforward integration with marketing channels
  • Simple user interface

Cons:

  • Executing some tasks is complex
  • Steep learning curve

The Best Marketing Measurement Tools Summary

Tools Price
Ahrefs From $99/month when paying month-to-month or $83/month when billed annually
Google Analytics Free to use
Moz Pro No price details
Tableau Pricing starts from $70/user/month (billed annually). This reflects the starting price for their individual plans, providing access to Tableau's comprehensive suite of tools.
Hotjar From $59/month
Kissmetrics From $299/month (billed annually)
Adobe Analytics From $33.99/month
Mixpanel From $20/month for up to 100 million monthly events
Salesforce Marketing Cloud Intelligence From $1,250/month, billed annually
Hubspot Marketing Hub Starts from $45/month
Preview Image - <h2 class="c-block__title b-summary-table__title c-listicle__title h3" > Compare Software Specs Side by Side</h2>

Compare Software Specs Side by Side

Use our comparison chart to review and evaluate software specs side-by-side.

Compare Software

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.

  1. Google Search Console

    Best for search engine performance

  2. Semrush

    Best for measuring content marketing results

  3. Woopra

    Best customer journey analytics tool

  4. Crazy Egg

    Best for measuring website visitors’ experiences

  5. Unbounce

    Best for measuring the results of A/B tests

  6. Sprout Social

    Best for collecting social media insights

  7. SimilarWeb

    Best for measuring all digital marketing activities

  8. MailChimp

    Best for measuring email marketing campaign performance

  9. monday.com

    Best for marketing workflow analytics

  10. Optimizely

    Best for testing customer experiences

  11. Brandwatch

    Best for measuring social media conversation metrics

  12. LinkedIn Analytics

    Best for measuring LinkedIn Page performance

  13. Clicky

    Best for discovering how visitors use a website

  14. Piwik PRO

    Best for measuring visitors’ behavior

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?

Marketing measurements are the key performance indicators (KPIs) or metrics that you should track to measure the success of your marketing campaigns. Here are some marketing KPIs to monitor that tie directly to your goals and how well your marketing attracts paying customers.

  • Customer Lifetime Value (LTV): Your customer’s lifetime value is the amount you profit from them over time, and your marketing measurement tool should show you the sales a typical customer makes over the course of their business relationship with you.
  • Website Traffic: Tracking website traffic is beneficial because it shows you whether your marketing efforts are increasing the number of visitors your site receives.
  • Organic Search Traffic: If search engine optimization (SEO) is a strategy you’re using to market your organization, this KPI measures how much organic traffic your website receives from people who find your business through search engines, such as Google.
  • Sales Team Response Time: The faster your sales teams respond to leads, the more likely it will be a quality lead, and this KPI will help you improve your rep’s performance.
  • Traffic to Lead Ratio: Knowing how many website visitors convert and become leads is important, so measuring this KPI will help you understand the quality of your website’s traffic and your site’s conversion rate.
  • Social Media Reach and Engagement: If you’re using a social media strategy for your marketing campaign, this KPI will help you understand how audiences interact with your content.
  • Email Marketing Performance: Measuring your email marketing KPI will help you pay attention to delivery, open, unsubscribe, click-through, and conversion rates, as well as how many subscribers forward and share your emails.
  • Inbound Link Building: Links to your website from other website means you’re building an excellent reputation in your industry; the more people linking to your site, the better your site will rank on search engines and get more traffic from organic search.
  • Landing Page Conversions: Your landing pages should get people’s attention and convert them into leads; the landing page conversion KPI will help you see the number of people who are visiting them and whether your call to action is converting them.
  • Blog Posts Visits: This KPI will help you assess how well your blog posts are performing, so you can gauge what your audience enjoys reading and when they prefer to read them so you can create more content based on what your customers want and need.

What are the benefits of marketing measurement tools?

Using marketing measurement tools to analyze your campaigns has some significant benefits, including:

  • Personalizing Customer Journeys: Marketing measurement tools provide an enormous amount of information about how customers interact with your campaign, which can help you provide exactly what they’re looking for in the format they prefer and at the most convenient time for them.
  • Effective Data-Driven Decisions: 37.7% of CMOs use marketing analytics tools before making a decision, and your marketing measurement tool will be a significant factor in every decision you make for your campaigns, which will help you see better results.
  • Better Budgeting: If you’re investing a significant budget into a specific campaign or strategy, your marketing measurement tool will show you whether they’re delivering the results you want or if you should stop wasting money and divert the funds elsewhere.

What are the different types of marketing measurement tools?

There are two primary types of marketing measurement tools depending on how you collect data. On-site or hosted measurement tools use a piece of code that’s installed on your site to generate unique analytics related to your site. Third-party or off-site measurement tools collect insights from third-party sources, such as search engines, to generate data analytics about multiple websites. Within these two groups, marketing measurement tools fall into the following five categories:

  • Traditional Analytics: These provide quantitative website traffic data, such as page views and bounce rate.
  • Behavior Analytics: This category involves individual or aggregate qualitative website visitor behavior data.
  • Customer Journey Analytics: You can use marketing measurement tools in this category to monitor customer touchpoint data across multiple channels.
  • Content Analytics: These are editorial analytics that will measure website content performance.
  • SEO Analytics: This category provides data on keyword performance, search traffic, backlinks, and competitors.

What happened to Facebook Analytics?

If you’re implementing a social media strategy, you’re likely using Facebook as a platform to promote your brand. Those with experience might notice that Facebook Analytics is no longer available. This is because, as of July 1, 2021, Facebook retired the analytics platform. But Facebook still provides marketing measurement solutions that provide the insights and data analysis features you need from the Meta Business Suite, where you can get detailed overviews about your content, audience, and trends.

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.

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.

By Stephanie Hood

Stephanie Hood is an experienced marketing professional and Editor of The CMO. With nearly a decade spent as Marketing Manager at Discover Holidays and Executive Editor at VIVA Lifestyle & Travel, she built her career leading editorial and marketing teams and strategies that turn six-figure budgets into seven-figure profits. She now enjoys connecting with the world's top executives to learn their secrets to business success, and shares those insights right here with her community of like-minded professionals. Curious what she’s uncovered? Be sure to sign up for The CMO newsletter.