Best Performance Marketing Platform Shortlist
Here’s the shortlist of the best performance marketing platforms I compared and evaluated, including what sets them apart.
- Google Analytics - Best for website performance monitoring
- Anytrack - Best for attribution intelligence
- Hubspot Marketing Hub - Best for tracking customer lifecycles
- Skai - Best for artificial intelligence
- Funnel.io - Best for marketing data collection
- Fluency - Best for ad planning & optimization
- Adobe Analytics - Best for actionable insights
- Salesforce Marketing Cloud - Best for centralizing performance marketing data
- Twilio Segment - Best for audience targeting
- Klue - Best for competitive insights
- 6Sense - Best for account-based marketing teams
- Brew - Best for content planning
The best performance marketing platform can help fuel your business’s success and enhance marketing efforts. As a marketing professional, you’re likely no stranger to tracking customer behavior, campaign results, lead sources, and more. By leveraging these solutions, you can identify your target audience, implement engaging advertisements, and monitor every click and purchase, allowing you to make changes to your strategy in real time. In this article, I’ll review the best performance marketing solutions available to help you determine which option suits your needs.
What Is Performance Marketing Platform
A performance marketing platform is a digital tool or software that enables businesses to plan, execute, manage, and optimize their online marketing campaigns with a focus on measurable and actionable outcomes. This platform typically offers a range of features such as tracking and analyzing key performance indicators (KPIs), facilitating data-driven decision-making, managing various advertising channels (like search, social media, affiliate marketing), enabling precise audience targeting, and providing tools to adjust strategies in real-time to achieve the best possible return on investment and overall campaign success.
Overviews Of The 12 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.
1. Google Analytics - Best for website performance monitoring
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.
Pricing: Free to use.
Pros
- Easy to implement in existing projects
- Quickly tracks website performance
- Great customer support
Cons
- Set up requires expert knowledge
- Real-time reporting is limited
2. Anytrack - Best for attribution intelligence
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.
Pricing: From $50/month.
Free Trial: 14-day free trial.
Pros
- Accurate attribution intelligence
- User-friendly interface
- Automates data processes
Cons
- Advanced customization is complex
- Highly dependent on third-party applications
3. Hubspot Marketing Hub - Best for tracking customer lifecycles
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.
Pricing: From $18/month.
Free Trial: Free plan available.
Pros
- Simple implementation
- Excellent customer support
- Monitors activities across the customer lifecycle
Cons
- Lack of artificial intelligence
- Mobile version has limited features
4. Skai - Best for artificial intelligence
Skai provides marketing teams with AI-powered campaign insights to help enhance productivity and increase marketing strategy performance.
Why I picked Skai: The software gets a place on this list because it can help your business implement artificial intelligence to effectively monitor your marketing campaign’s performance in several ways. You can use Skai’s AI Dayparting tool to help your team know when the best times are, enabling your team to use this information to increase conversions. Skai also allows users to test performance within its Impact Navigator tool to help them identify the effects of specific scenarios and drive growth.
Skai Standout Features and Integrations
Standout features include omnichannel capabilities that allow you to connect data and workflows across several channels to eliminate fragmentation that can limit your growth. Skai also offers social creative insights to help your team understand why your advertisements’ creatives work or don’t work.
Integrations include native connections with hundreds of third-party applications to help you simplify workflows and ensure your teams get the best information, such as Adjust, Branch, CallSource, Datalogix, Google Analytics, Google Ads, Idomoo, Invoca, Khoros, Salesforce, and other software options. You can also create custom integrations with Skai’s API.
Pricing: Pricing upon request.
Free Trial: Free demo available.
Pros
- Creates automatic rules to optimize results
- Simple reporting data
- User-friendly interface
Cons
- Some minor ad spend discrepancies
- API connections can cause issues
5. Funnel.io - Best for marketing data collection
Funnel.io helps marketing teams automatically collect marketing and advertising data across multiple platforms.
Why I picked Funnel.io: I added Funnel.io to this article because the solution can help your organization own its marketing performance. Funnel.io does this by helping your team collect marketing data from multiple sources to answer specific questions. If you repeatedly find yourself asking, “How much did we spend last month?” Funnel.io will help you solve this challenge by collecting your data in a centralized area for analysis and reporting.
Funnel.io Standout Features and Integrations
Standout features include providing users with the ability to access historical data whenever necessary from anywhere to properly evaluate their marketing performance. Funnel.io also simplifies sharing data with your data warehouse or reporting tool so your teams can calculate the metrics they need.
Integrations include native connections with more than 500 marketing solutions through the platform’s data connectors, such as Adobe Analytics, Google Analytics, Hubspot, Klaviyo, Mailchimp, Pepperjam, Pipedrive, Salesforce, Semrush, Shopify, and other software options. You can also create custom integrations through the platform’s API.
Pricing: From $400/month.
Free Trial: Free plan available + free demo available.
Pros
- Exports data based on specific criteria
- Numerous data connectors
- Excellent customer support
Cons
- Steep learning curve
- Setting everything up is time-consuming
6. Fluency - Best for ad planning optimization
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.
Pricing: Pricing upon request.
Free Trial: Free demo available.
Pros
- Automates a significant number of ad accounts
- Open to suggestions for new features
- Built to scale
Cons
- Steep learning curve
- Small number of third-party integrations
7. Adobe Analytics - Best for actionable insights
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.
Pricing: Pricing upon request.
Free Trial: Free demo available.
Pros
- Robust tracking capabilities
- Gathers a wide range of actionable insights
- High level of customization
Cons
- Not suitable for small businesses
- May require additional infrastructure investment
8. Salesforce Marketing Cloud - Best for centralizing performance marketing data
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.
Pricing: Pricing upon request.
Free Trial: Free demo available.
Pros
- Handle multiple campaigns simultaneously
- Enables many customization options
- All-in-one marketing tool
Cons
- Not suitable for small businesses
- Steep learning curve
9. Twilio Segment - Best for audience targeting
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.
Pricing: From $120/month.
Free Trial: 14-day free trial + free plan available.
Pros
- Easy to implement
- Great for data collection
- Efficient debugging process
Cons
- Billing management needs improvement
- Documentation is complex
10. Klue – Best for competitive insights
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.
Pricing: Pricing upon request.
Free Trial: Free demo available.
Pros
- Excellent onboarding and customer support teams
- Automates many competitive insight tasks
- No limit on competitor tracking
Cons
- Text editing tools need improvement
- User interface can be difficult to navigate
11. 6Sense - Best for account-based marketing teams
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.
Pricing: Pricing upon request.
Free Trial: Free demo.
Pros
- Helpful reporting tools
- 6sense Academy is available
- Excellent customer support
Cons
- Some technical issues can slow execution
- Could use more customization options.
12. Brew - Best for content planning
Brew helps marketing teams with their content planning by helping them identify trends, audiences, and topics.
Why I picked Brew: Content marketing is a popular marketing strategy that helps businesses build trust with customers and leads and create content that resonates with them. Brew helps marketing teams plan their content campaigns by staying on top of new trends and creating content for their unique strategies. With Brew, you can identify the best critical topics for your content plan, define a targeting strategy, and develop a brand awareness plan.
Brew Standout Features
Standout features include marketing research tools that will help you learn and analyze your market, competition, target audience, and more. You will also have access to monitoring and reporting tools that will help you track performance over time and against competitor benchmarks.
Pricing: Pricing upon request.
Free Trial: Free demo available.
Pros
- Excellent marketing insights
- Quickly pulls data
- Good customer support
Cons
- Needs more data across social media platforms
- No third-party integrations
Other 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.
- monday CRM - Best for data dashboards.
- Workato - Best for automation.
- HCL Software - Best for enterprise performance marketing security.
- Pendo - Best for creating better digital experiences.
- Tableu - Best for data exploration.
- SEMrush - Best for campaign measurement.
- Singular - Best for calculating marketing ROI.
- Sprout Social - Best for monitoring social media campaigns.
- Marketo Engage - Best for enhancing customer engagement.
- Lead Gen & CRM - Best for lead generation analytics.
- Meltwater - Best all-in-one tool for public relations and social media.
- Omnisend -Best email and SMS marketing
- ContentStudio - Best for centralizing content marketing analytics.
- Madgcix - Best e-commerce advertisement tool.
- Pipedrive - Best for connecting marketing and sales teams.
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?
What is performance marketing with examples?
What are the benefits of performance marketing platforms?
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. No matter where your organization stands in the performance marketing space, there’s always room for improvement and growth. Once you have your goals defined, you can jump in and choose the performance marketing solution that works for you and meets your needs. 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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