10 Best Performance Marketing Platform Shortlist
Here's my pick of the 10 best software from the 20 tools reviewed.
There are so many different performance marketing platforms that making a shortlist of the best can be tricky. You want tools for tracking, analyzing, and optimizing campaigns in real-time, allowing marketers to adjust strategies for maximum effectiveness—and now need the right solution for your brand and team. I've got you covered! In this post, I share from my personal experience using many different performance marketing tools, and share my picks of the best performance marketing platforms overall.
What Is Performance Marketing Platform
A performance marketing platform is a digital tool that helps businesses track and optimize their marketing campaigns based on specific performance metrics like clicks, conversions, and sales. The purpose is to provide real-time data and analytics, enabling marketers to make informed decisions and adjust strategies for better results. Performance marketing tools integrate various marketing channels and software, streamlining campaign management and enhancing efficiency.
Overviews Of The Best Performance Marketing Platform
Below, you’ll find my evaluation of the best performance marketing platforms to help you learn more about each option, including its standout features, pros and cons, pricing, and a screenshot of the tool.
Brand24 is a performance marketing platform that equips businesses with real-time monitoring and analytics tools to track and optimize their online marketing campaigns and brand mentions across the web.
Why I picked Brand24: Brand24 serves as an effective performance marketing platform by offering businesses the ability to closely monitor and analyze the performance of their marketing campaigns in real-time across various online channels. By tracking brand mentions, keywords, and hashtags related to specific campaigns, Brand24 provides valuable insights into audience engagement, reach, and sentiment.
Brand24 Standout Features and Integrations
Features include highly customizable dashboards, which enable marketers to tailor their monitoring and analytics views to focus on key performance indicators (KPIs) that matter most to their campaigns. Whether it's tracking engagement rates, sentiment analysis, or influencer activity, these personalized dashboards provide at-a-glance insights that help marketers optimize their campaigns more effectively.
Integrations include Slack and SEMrush.
Pros and cons
Pros:
- Strong competitor analysis
- Affordable pricing makes for businesses of all sizes
- Real-time alerts let you respond to mentions quickly
Cons:
- Only supports a limited number of languages
- Could use more integrations
Google Analytics is a comprehensive website performance monitoring solution that tracks a website’s data to provide marketers with visitors’ behavior.
Why I picked Google Analytics: The platform is one of the most well-known and widely used performance marketing platforms that helps your marketing team monitor website performance. Google Analytics uses a tracking system you can use to log pre-defined marketing goals, such as website purchases. When using Google Analytics, you and your marketing team will get a clear, in-depth overview of metrics, such as conversions, sales, and leads, to determine which of your site’s pages are converting and why, identify audience behavior, and more.
Google Analytics Standout Features and Integrations
Standout features include multichannel insights that use customer data from your different marketing channels to show and predict various insights. You can also use Google Analytics to find where your traffic is coming from, such as websites, search engines, and social media pages.
Integrations include connections with over 1,700 applications and tools, such as GetResponse, Google Ad Manager, Hevo, HoneyBook, Mailchimp, Odoo, Outgrow, Semrush, Zendesk, Zoho CRM, and other software options. You can use the platform’s API or a paid Zapier account to create custom integrations with your marketing systems.
Pros and cons
Pros:
- Great customer support
- Quickly tracks website performance
- Easy to implement in existing projects
Cons:
- Real-time reporting is limited
- Set up requires expert knowledge
6sense helps B2B marketing teams get performance intelligence across their account-based campaigns to help enhance their strategies.
Why I picked 6sense: The platform is a comprehensive B2B account-based performance marketing platform that helps marketing teams identify demand that might be hidden in their current data. With 6sense, you can uncover buyer signals across your account-based marketing campaigns and increase growth by engaging with key buyers. 6sense accomplishes this through its purpose-built artificial intelligence to help your team understand the accounts worth pursuing and which decision-makers to target.
6sense Standout Features and Integrations
Standout features include an intent data network that tracks an extensive number of buyer signals, such as site visits, content consumption, keyword research, and more. 6sense also offers pipeline intelligence tools to help you understand how to develop high-quality marketing pipelines by using real-time data.
Integrations include connections with the technology many performance marketing teams use to monitor their campaigns, such as Bombora, Bound, Clari, Eloqua, Hubspot CRM, LeanData, Marketo, Outreach, PathFactory, Salesforce, and other software options. You can use 6sense API if you need to make any custom integrations with your systems.
Pros and cons
Pros:
- Excellent customer support
- 6sense Academy is available
- Helpful reporting tools
Cons:
- Could use more customization options.
- Some technical issues can slow execution
Anytrack helps marketing teams automatically track conversion data and attribute the information to various sources, allowing users to collect granular customer details and create more intelligent campaigns.
Why I picked Anytrack: With Anytrack, your marketing teams can track and perfect your organization’s digital advertising campaigns. The platform gives your team helpful insights into your marketing initiative’s performance and empowers your team to make data-driven decisions to maximize ROI. Anytrack can attribute your conversion data to ad information sources such as Facebook Pixels, Google Analytics accounts, and more, enabling you to optimize content, websites, funnels, and ads.
Anytrack Standout Features and Integrations
Standout features include audience-building tools to help your team create custom audiences from the information the platform collects from an ad campaign. Anytrack also offers auto-tracking tools to help you record every marketing action that occurs and analyze it without any manual intervention.
Integrations include connections with ad networks and business tools to quickly pass information to your teams, such as ClickFunnels, Facebook, Google Ads, Google Analytics, Outbrain, Pepperjam, Taboola, Typeform, Unbounce, and other software options. You can also create custom integrations with Anytrack’s API or a paid Zapier account.
Pros and cons
Pros:
- Automates data processes
- User-friendly interface
- Accurate attribution intelligence
Cons:
- Highly dependent on third-party applications
- Advanced customization is complex
Salesforce Marketing Cloud helps marketing teams create a single source of intelligence truth by centralizing performance marketing data.
Why I picked Salesforce Marketing Cloud: The platform helps medium to large-sized organizations centralize their performance marketing intelligence across their preferred channels. Salesforce Marketing Cloud offers an extensive API library, allowing you to connect your data from the most popular platforms to help your team have all the information they need on one screen. With Salesforce Marketing Cloud, you get the flexibility to connect any data source you’re using instantly and use artificial intelligence to identify your dataset within the platform, empowering your team to map all fields and measurements in a consistent, organized fashion so you can focus on the information.
Salesforce Marketing Cloud Standout Features and Integrations
Standout features include a data dashboard that helps you visualize your insights and turn the information into visual explanations so everyone on your team can take action. The platform also uses an automated regression modeling tool along with statistical analysis methods to help you turn a significant number of time of analysis into a few quick minutes.
Integrations include connections with popular business and marketing platforms to help your team collect the data they need, such as Attentive, Brevo, CallRail, censhare, Formstack, Google Analytics 360, Hubspot Marketing Hub, Leadsbridge, Pipeliner CRM, Workfront, and other software options. You can also use the platform’s API or a paid Zapier account if your business needs custom integrations.
Pros and cons
Pros:
- All-in-one marketing tool
- Enables many customization options
- Handle multiple campaigns simultaneously
Cons:
- Steep learning curve
- Not suitable for small businesses
Fluency is a performance marketing platform that enables enterprise organizations to plan and optimize their advertising campaigns.
Why I picked Fluency: The platform helps enterprise-sized businesses enhance their advertising planning and optimization processes. Fluency enables users to plan campaigns for specific markets, messages, and scenarios to make your business a success. Fluency uses a data ingestion engine that allows you to leverage your data to optimize audience reach and relevance to help you grow.
Fluency Standout Features and Integrations
Standout features include end-to-end collaboration tools to help distributed or on-premises teams keep everyone informed of any changes. Fluency also offers A/B testing tools to help your team test content variations and adopt the best versions into future campaigns.
Integrations include a comprehensive connection with ChatGPT.
Pros and cons
Pros:
- Built to scale
- Open to suggestions for new features
- Automates a significant number of ad accounts
Cons:
- Small number of third-party integrations
- Steep learning curve
Twilio Segment helps marketing teams get better targeting information to increase return on ad spend and reduce customer acquisition expenses.
Why I picked Twilio Segment: You can use Twilio Segment to help your marketing team get a complete customer overview by unifying customer touchpoints across channels, allowing them to understand your customer journey. Twilio Segment can help you target the right customer with the right message by building audiences via real-time interactions you collect across your digital journeys. You can also use the platform to engage with audiences in real time instead of waiting to manually reconcile your information and work with other departments.
Twilio Segment Standout Features and Integrations
Standout features include tools that empower your team to track every interaction in real-time so everyone gets a robust understanding of customer behavior. Twilio Engage also offers protocol tools to help you control data quality and ensure your teams are always working with good data.
Integrations include connections with third-party tools and systems to help you empower your tools with the data they need to handle your performance marketing needs, such as Algolia Insights, Contentful, Customer.io, Freshchat, Hubspot, Intercom, Localytics, Perfect Audience, Tableau, Taplytics, and other software options.
Pros and cons
Pros:
- Efficient debugging process
- Great for data collection
- Easy to implement
Cons:
- Documentation is complex
- Billing management needs improvement
Klue is a competitive analysis platform that empowers marketing teams to collect and combine market, competitor, and buy data to find ways to put their organization ahead of the rest.
Why I picked Klue: Competition can be healthy for different industries, but putting your business ahead of your competitors is essential. So, I added Klue to this list for consideration because it’s a competitive insights tool that helps your marketing teams see what needs to be done to get ahead of your competition and win more customers. When using Klue, your marketing team can research competitive positioning and messaging, compare vital digital channel metrics, and stay updated about your competitor’s website changes.
Klue Standout Features and Integrations
Standout features include tools to help your teams automatically collect information from across the internet, allowing them to track reviews, social media, product launches, and more. Klue also offers distribution capabilities that enable your team to share intelligence across different teams and departments that need the same insights.
Integrations include connections with popular marketing and business tools you’re likely already using, making it easier to access and contribute content and intel, such as Gong.io, Highspot, Hubspot, Microsoft Dynamics, Microsoft Teams, Okta, Salesforce, Seismic, Showpad, Slack, and other software options.
Pros and cons
Pros:
- No limit on competitor tracking
- Automates many competitive insight tasks
- Excellent onboarding and customer support teams
Cons:
- User interface can be difficult to navigate
- Text editing tools need improvement
Hubspot Marketing Hub helps organizations track their customer lifecycles, allowing them to use this information to attract more leads from the same audience and convert them.
Why I picked Hubspot Marketing: The platform is designed to be an all-in-one solution to meet the needs of all marketing teams. For performance marketing teams, you can use Hubspot Marketing Hub to identify how every interaction contributes to revenue. You can track all of your website visitors’ actions across the entire customer lifecycle to understand behaviors and trigger automated workflows and processes.
Hubspot Marketing Hub Standout Features and Integrations
Standout features include detailed marketing reports that provide all of the data you need to make more intelligent, data-driven decisions across all marketing assets. Hubspot Marketing Hub also empowers users to create custom, flexible dashboards, allowing everyone to see the metrics that matter most.
Integrations include connections with an extensive number of business applications, such as Airtable, Asana, CallRail, CloudTalk, Mailchimp, Qwilr, Slack, Trello, Unbounce, Zendesk, and other software options. You can use the platform’s API or a paid Zapier account if you need to create custom integrations with your systems.
Pros and cons
Pros:
- Monitors activities across the customer lifecycle
- Excellent customer support
- Simple implementation
Cons:
- Mobile version has limited features
- Lack of artificial intelligence
Adobe Analytics provides marketing teams with actionable performance insights, allowing them to analyze data and use it to build better customer experiences.
Why I picked Adobe Analytics: Adobe Analytics has a place in this list because it can help performance marketing teams collect actionable insights to help your business develop memorable customer experiences. With Adobe Analytics, you can collect marketing data from multiple channels and bring it under one roof, allowing your team to get real-time insights based on customer behavior. The platform also offers attribution capabilities that empower you to see which strategy is behind your conversion rates so you can invest more in what’s working.
Adobe Analytics Standout Features and Integrations
Standout features include artificial intelligence and machine learning tools that help you collect data and identify hidden opportunities. Adobe Analytics also offers ad hoc analysis capabilities that allow you to build custom analysis projects to help you answer your most significant questions about what’s happening with your marketing campaigns.
Integrations include connections with over 100 third-party applications to help share data and save your team’s time, such as Amplitude, Campaigner, Convert Experiences, Freshpaint, Hootsuite, Improvado, Nexoya, Rambox, Skai, Uptempto, and other software options. If you’re looking to create custom integrations, you can use Adobe Analytics’s API or a paid Zapier account.
Pros and cons
Pros:
- High level of customization
- Gathers a wide range of actionable insights
- Robust tracking capabilities
Cons:
- May require additional infrastructure investment
- Not suitable for small businesses
The Best Performance Marketing Platform Summary
| Tools | Price | |
|---|---|---|
| Brand24 | From $79/month (annually) | Website |
| Google Analytics | Free to use | Website |
| 6sense | Pricing upon request | Website |
| AnyTrack | From $50/month | Website |
| Salesforce Marketing Cloud | Pricing upon request | Website |
| Fluency | Pricing upon request | Website |
| Twilio Segment | From $120/month (billed annually) | Website |
| Klue | Pricing upon request | Website |
| Hubspot Marketing Hub | Starts from $45/month | Website |
| Adobe Analytics | From $33.99/month | Website |
Compare Software Specs Side by Side
Use our comparison chart to review and evaluate software specs side-by-side.
Compare SoftwareOther Options
It wouldn’t be right to leave you with the options above when many more performance marketing platforms are available. So, I added an extra list of solutions that are worth some additional consideration during your search.
- Brew
Best for content planning
- Skai
Best for artificial intelligence
- Funnel.io
Best for marketing data collection
- Constant Contact
Best for lead generation analytics.
- Semrush
Best for campaign measurement.
- monday sales CRM
Best for data dashboards.
- Sprout Social
Best for monitoring social media campaigns.
- Tableau
Best for data exploration.
- Pendo
Best for creating better digital experiences.
- Meltwater
Best all-in-one tool for public relations and social media.
Selection Criteria For Performance Marketing Platform
Here’s a short summary of the main selection and evaluation criteria I used to develop my list of the best performance marketing platform for this article:
Core Functionality
While there are performance marketing platforms that provide multiple tools and capabilities or focus on delivering one specific feature, there are particular functionalities these solutions offer. The following brief description discusses the core functionality that makes the options in this list performance marketing software.
- Data analytics; gather, process, and present data from various marketing channels and campaigns. They provide insights into key performance indicators (KPIs) such as click-through rates, conversion rates, and customer acquisition costs.
- Campaign optimization; allow marketers to adjust and optimize their campaigns in real-time based on the insights gained from data analytics. This involves making changes to targeting parameters, budgets, and ad creatives.
Key Features
Before adding the performance marketing solution options to the list above, I researched the top features I found that are beneficial to marketing teams. Here are some of the key features you’ll find in top performance marketing platforms.
- Real-Time Feedback: With performance marketing tools, you will receive real-time data regarding your marketing strategies, which you can use to determine whether you need to make any changes.
- A/B Testing: Reliable performance marketing tools will provide A/B testing tools to help you identify the best campaigns to present to your target audience.
- Campaign Results Tracking: You can use performance marketing solutions to set goals and track the results of your marketing strategies, and assess these efforts to understand whether they’re a success.
- Collaboration Tools: Many performance marketing platforms enhance collaboration among teams, making it easier to make contributions to campaigns while monitoring their work’s impact in real-time.
- Audience Segmentation: You can use performance marketing platforms to segment audiences according to various factors, such as interests, demographics, past purchases, or behavior, allowing you to send personalized content and increase engagements and conversions.
- Compliance and Fraud Protection: Performance marketing tools can include safeguards to guarantee adherence to advertising laws and regulations while also deterring fraud by implementing sophisticated fraud detection algorithms to help monitor and prevent ad fraud.
Usability
When choosing a performance marketing software solution, you want to use a platform that’s easy to navigate without any complications. They should be user-friendly, making it easier to view essential metrics and help you make informed marketing decisions. So, I look for performance marketing platforms that make it easy for users to scale advertising efforts and meet an organization’s requirements. I accomplish this by reading software reviews from recent or current users.
Software Integrations
Integrating the performance marketing solution with your current web tools and other business management solutions is essential. This makes it easier to create a business tool ecosystem that communicates with each other. This ensures your organization’s marketing, sales, and customer support teams don’t have to manually import data between multiple tools, significantly enhancing your team’s productivity. Examples include the ability to integrate with marketing analytics software, marketing dashboards, attribution reporting, and social media management tools.
Dashboards & Reports
When implementing a marketing campaign, your performance marketing platform can collect real-time data and present the information in a centralized area, empowering your team to decide how to optimize campaigns. I look for performance marketing platforms that achieve this by offering data dashboards and reporting capabilities to help your marketing team precisely track and attribute marketing efforts across multiple touchpoints and channels. Dashboards and reports will give you useful information about your campaigns, media, or keywords that are generating the most conversions.
Customization
I look for performance marketing platforms that can provide customization capabilities in two ways. First, it helps you use the information you collect and tailor messages to specific audience segments, allowing you to have different marketing messages for different genders, age groups, or geographic locations. This will help you differentiate your business from your competition, making it more likely that you’ll be noticed by target audiences. Second, as your business grows, you may need more functionality or other capabilities compared to other companies in the same industry. So, I added many options allowing users to customize the platform to their business requirements.
People Also Ask
When looking for performance marketing platforms, many people ask similar questions regarding these tools. So, to make this article more robust, I answered the most frequently asked questions about performance marketing software.
How much does performance marketing platform cost?
The final cost of performance marketing solutions will depend on various factors, such as features, the amount of data you’re collecting, or the vendor. For small businesses that need to monitor small amounts of marketing data and optimize a few campaigns, you can be looking at paying up to $50/month or so. Larger enterprises can expect to have monthly payments in the thousands. But, to give a more specific range, you can pay anywhere between $18/month to $400/month, according to my research above.
What is performance marketing with examples?
Your business can use different types of performance marketing to drive traffic and measure specific actions. The following are some examples of the channels that performance marketing measures.
Example 1: Optimize Your Email Marketing Campaigns
Email marketing is a practical and versatile performance marketing channel businesses use to build trust and loyalty with subscribers, deliver relevant content, and encourage people to take action. It also allows you to segment audiences based on various factors and tailor messages accordingly. When using it for performance marketing, one helpful piece of email marketing advice is setting clear goals and metrics, such as open rate, click-through rate, conversion rate, and revenue per message. You’ll also need to test and optimize your emails’ designs, copy, subject line, CTA (call to action), and timing.
Example 2: Optimize Your Google Ad Words Campaigns
Google Ad Words is a paid search marketing tool that allows advertisers to pay for clicks on their sponsored ads on search engines. They can also pay to place ads on dedicated posts or videos on a website that publishes similar content. From there, your performance marketing tool will help you measure crucial metrics such as cost per acquisition (CPA), cost per click (CPC), cost per leads (CPL), or cost per impression (CPM).
What are the benefits of performance marketing platforms?
Performance marketing platforms are essential tools for businesses aiming to maximize their marketing ROI and achieve measurable results. The following is a list of benefits you can experience when using performance marketing solutions, highlighting how they empower your company to drive cost-effectiveness and create data-driven marketing campaigns that deliver tangible results in an ever-evolving digital world.
- Precise Targeting: Performance marketing platforms can increase your advertising spend ROI through precise audience targeting.
- Measurable Results: Achieve a 73% higher conversion rate by tracking and analyzing every aspect of your marketing campaigns in real-time.
- Cost Efficiency: Reduce customer acquisition costs through performance-based pricing models.
- Data-Driven Decision Making: Marketing executives believe data-driven marketing is crucial for success, which performance marketing platforms can enable.
- Dynamic Optimization: Optimize ad creatives, placements, and targeting on the fly to continuously improve campaign performance.
- Multichannel Reach: Reach audiences across various digital channels, with many consumers making a purchase after viewing a Facebook ad.
- A/B Testing: Implement A/B testing to improve ad performance, with A/B tested emails achieving a higher click-through rate.
- Real-Time Adjustments: React to market changes instantly, as campaigns can be adjusted in real time based on performance data.
- Scalability: Easily scale marketing efforts as your business grows, with scalability being a top benefit of performance marketing, according to marketers.
- Competitive Advantage: Gain a competitive edge by staying ahead in the dynamic digital advertising landscape, where marketers indicate increasing competition.
Other Marketing Analytics Reviews
Other than performance marketing platforms, many marketing analytics tools are available to your business. Here are other marketing analytics tool reviews that offer in-depth detail, much like my list above, discussing the specific type of information you can measure.
- Marketing Analytics Tools
- Marketing Measurement Tools
- Marketing Planning Tools
- Market Intelligence Software
- Social Media Analytics Software
- Marketing Attribution Software
- Marketing Account Intelligence Software
- Email Marketing Analytics Tools
- Content Analytics Software
Conclusion
Marketing trends are showing popularity in all things digital marketing, and performance marketing platforms offer a significant promise for businesses looking to engage and convert prospects at scale for lower costs. Any of the options I evaluated above will help you develop your brand, increase awareness, and engage with customers to create strong relationships.
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