Kshitija Desai

What is performance marketing?

September 17, 2024

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0 min read

‍Digital marketing is effective,
result-oriented, and...expensive.

Although by-the-book digital marketing channels contribute greatly to a company 's revenue and overall growth, performance marketing has emerged as a cost-effective alternative in the digital marketing space.

Performance marketing is a result-based marketing strategy wherein the advertising company pays only for every successful transaction or interaction with their target audience. While this may seem like a no-brainer, utilizing performance-based methods can be an excellent way to ensure advertising efforts that translate to solid returns - increased customer engagement, reach on social media platforms, transactions on one's website, etc.

This blog will serve as a handy guide for anyone looking to venture into performance-based marketing, its benefits, types, risks, figuring out whether it's a right fit for your brand and tools that can help with your performance marketing efforts in the future.

What is Performance Marketing?

As opposed to traditional methods of advertising, such as putting up a billboard, or paying for ad space in a popular newspaper, performance marketing ensures that the advertiser pays only when a specific action is carried out by the target audience.

For example, a brand may decide upon a featured ad on Instagram, paying a certain amount only when a user clicks on the post and is taken to the brand's official website. Not only does this model provide marketing efforts that are easy on the bank, but ensure easily measurable outcomes as well.

A brand would find it much harder to track how many users viewed, engaged with, and responded to an ad in a newspaper. On the other hand, paying only when a user clicks on their ad helps form better, more actionable insights using various analytics tools and costs much, much less.

Why is performance marketing preferred over other methods?

As we've covered in earlier sections, one of the biggest advantages of performance marketing is its cost-effectiveness. Budgets for marketing can often be quite tight, and maximizing returns through advertising efforts is on the top of every marketer's list.

Various types of performance marketing include Pay Per Click (PPC), Pay Per Impression, Pay Per Sale, and Pay Per Acquisition. The amount of flexibility these channels provide a brand, whether it's just starting or well-established, trumps other forms of marketing where cost may not necessarily set up your campaign for a higher ROI.

Relatively Risk-Free

When a brand invests before seeing results, there's always a factor of high risk and a low ROI. Questions like

"What are the chances of this campaign running successfully?", "What if we do not receive our target CTR?"

"Will we have to focus on other KPIs if our investment in this campaign is not returned well?"

are asked during all stages of campaign launches. However, utilizing channels that allow brands to pay only once a desired action is completed by the user eliminates a substantial amount of risk.

Better, Clearer Insights

Analytics tools track a wide range of customer insights, starting from their engagement with a brand touchpoint (such as a blog, social media ad, emails, etc).

Traditionally, marketing experts predict/expect a certain CTR, lead conversion, and, customer acquisition based on past campaigns and customer engagement. However, performance marketing takes the "guessing" out of campaign analytics, by showing clearer, more accurate insights of successful click-throughs, downloads, shares, sign-ups, and purchases.

These insights are much more meaningful, as they provide actionable information on the brand's performance, based on the actions (such as signing up for a newsletter, downloading a product guide) the brand's needs and goals.

How does performance marketing work?

Now that we've covered the how's and why's, let's take a look at the various types of performance marketing, and how your brand can utilize these based on your campaign goals.

PPC - Pay-Per-Click

Perhaps the most popular type of performance marketing, PPC is a great way to ensure that your brand spends a certain amount only when your campaigns/ads receive a click from the user, taking them to your target landing page.

A great example of PPC is paid ads on search engines such as Google. Once you bid for your ad campaign to show up in search results every time your target audience searches for a relevant keyword, you end up paying only when they click on your ad - an extremely cost-effective method to ensure you only pay for genuine, promising leads.

PPM - Pay-Per-Impression

The number of impressions your ad has is the number of views it has gained on a platform, such as Instagram or Youtube. CPM involves a brand paying a certain base rate for, say, every 100 views. So, if your campaign received 500 views, you only pay an amount equal to your base rate x 5.

PPL - Pay-Per-Lead, PPS - Pay-Per-Sale & PPA - Pay-Per-Acquisition

In CPL, an advertiser pays only when an action that helps convert a viewer into a lead is undertaken, for example, paying every time a person signs up for a product demo, or a consultancy call with your brand.

Cost-Per-Sale is used most widely in affiliate marketing, when the advertiser pays only when a sale was carried out successfully, after converting a consumer into a lead. Often, influencers and affiliate marketers use referral codes to direct their audience to the company's website, receiving a certain percentage of profits gained through sales.

CPA, on the other hand, is more generalized in nature. The company pays when any desired action is carried out by the consumer, be it visiting the landing page, sharing their email ID, signing up for event reminders, etc.

Where Can You Use Performance Marketing?

Digital marketing is an extremely diverse space, with efforts being distributed across social media platforms, search engines, and emails. Performance marketing, too, can be utilized across a wide range of digital mediums to ensure your marketing campaign reaches your target audience quickly, effectively, and can translate into long-term gains for your growth.

Here are a few niche spots you can target with the strategies mentioned above -

Affiliate Marketing

Got a product or service to sell? Bring in affiliates to help spread the word! Affiliate marketing is a fast-growing method that ensures better reach, boosted sales, as well as higher customer engagement due to local and personalized reach. Establishing a PPS framework with affiliates is the best way to move forward.

Social Media

With over 58.4% of the world's population on social media, these platforms are a goldmine for boosting brand reach. Designing solid social media strategies on popular platforms such as Instagram, Pinterest, Facebook and TikTok and directing interested users to a relevant campaign can do wonders for your brand. What's more, you only pay when a user completes an action you want them to carry out - visiting your website, downloading your newsletter, etc!

Targeting Search Engine Results

For search engine marketing, there's two ways your brand can gain more visibility -

Organic efforts (SEO) and
Paid ads and features

Search Engine Optimization, or SEO, is a tool that you can use as part of your content strategy to boost organic growth over time. Targeting the right keywords for your brand, including them in your content, metadata, headings, and descriptions can help your website rank higher every time a user searches for a relevant keyword or phrase.

On the other hand, designing ad campaigns on search engines such as Google help drive greater traffic to your website due to its high visibility. To top that, ad campaigns are usually based on a PPC model, so that means you pay a certain amount only when a user clicks on your ad!

Things to keep in mind

While performance marketing may seem like the solution to all of your marketing issues, keep in mind that not all of your campaigns should be focused on performance-based models. Clearly defining your company's overall and campaign goals is essential before charting out a marketing strategy.

Here are a few questions you should ask yourself before venturing into performance marketing -

What are my goals for this campaign?
Is it to drive more user traffic?
Is it to rank higher on search engine results?
Is it to boost sales of a certain product/service?
How much risk am I willing to take with this campaign?
Who is my target audience? What are their needs?
Is my campaign addressing their needs or simply promoting a product or service?

In conclusion...

The world of digital marketing can be a tricky one to navigate, especially with the endless number of solutions that can be applied to a brand's ad efforts. However, performance marketing is emerging as a successful, popular, and easy-on-the-budget option for most business models and ad campaigns.

Tools like Affise, AnyTrack, and ClickMeter are popular tools that can help you measure, inspect, and manage your performance-based efforts across various platforms. Alongside these tools, utilizing methods such as PPC, PPM, PPA, and PPS is the boost your brand needs this year!

What is Heap Analytics? Heap.io Overview

September 17, 2024

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0 min read

Now more than ever, marketing analytics is essential to B2B organizations. A robust analytics framework is a must to better understand how prospects make decisions in the buying journey and plug gaps in the sales funnel.

However, B2B marketing teams rarely have the resources to build out this framework to collect, analyze, and present data in-house. This is where analytics software comes into play.

Heap is a product and web analytics tool that helps you visualize the buyer journey. But is tracking web analytics enough to get clarity on how prospects make buying decisions?

In this blog, we discuss everything you need to know about Heap and whether it's the right fit for your business needs.

What is Heap Analytics?

Heap was founded in 2013 in San Francisco and has since become one of the top product analytics software for brands across various niches. ‍

Heap collects data from every part of your website and collates it into easy-to-grasp data analysis using line graphs and funnels. It focuses on customer engagement and activity, highlighting areas in the customer's journey that are not-so-smooth—actionable insights that every brand must own.

What does Heap do well?

Real-time tracking

Perhaps Heap's most significant advantage is its real-time data collection and analysis, which allows marketers to view visitor activity reports in real time.

‍This feature can be particularly useful after a website's UI change or a new marketing campaign. Tracking activity in real time can provide immediate insights on what's going well, whether there are any glitches in the customer journey and quick updates on campaign performance across the website.

Retroactive analysis

Heap performs retroactive analysis, which means it tracks every click and action your visitor takes on your website without you having to instruct it to do the same.

‍This feature saves an enormous amount of time and effort and provides a large data library for reference at any point in time. Once you integrate Heap with your website, you can examine all of your site's activity and derive insights accordingly—all of this without having to manually set up Heap to track each type of user activity!

‍Multiple devices

It's no surprise that users interact differently with a website on a mobile phone than they do on a desktop or laptop. Optimizing one's website for various device types is a great way to ensure a good visitor experience without losing viewers to glitchy interfaces or incomplete website layouts.

Heap's software tracks website performance across various device types to help you understand where improvement is needed. Marketers can greatly benefit from this feature because solid insights guarantee an effective action plan, which in turn leads to better customer engagement.

Events + Filters

Customizable building blocks are the greatest tool for any marketer, as each brand has unique goals it wishes to fulfill via an analytics tool. For example, while one brand might want to use Heap to identify friction in the sales funnel, another might want to understand its website heatmap after a marketing campaign and improve website traffic.

Heap offers features called "Events" and "Filters," which help you visualize your customer journey exactly as you want it, from Stage X to Stage Y, for example.

Why Heap May Not Be The Best Choice

While Heap offers many effective analytics features, there are a few disadvantages that every website owner must consider when choosing it or any other analytics tool.

Costs of Data Storage

Due to its size, storing all of this data can be a hassle for a tool that tracks every single movement across your website, including footer buttons, web page scrolls, hovers, etc. The more data you have in your store, the more complicated it can get to calculate data privacy and protection costs, storage and archiving, and backing up data after regular intervals. Heap may be a good option if you're prepared to store large amounts of website data.

Tricky UI

Not all marketers are tech wizards, and Heap's UI, although highly interactive and comprehensive, is difficult to master. The learning curve for anyone wanting to manage their site's Heap dashboard well is quite steep, which is why many marketers opt for analytics tools that are beginner-friendly, user-friendly, and easy to learn, such as Factors and Oribi.

Limited to website analytics

Website data is just one aspect of tracking analytics. If you truly want to know how prospects make buying decisions, you must capture intent signals from multiple sources, such as LinkedIn and review sites like G2. Only when you get the complete picture can you optimize your marketing campaigns and sales outreach, thereby growing your revenue.

Why Factors.ai over Heap?

Helps build overall GTM motion

While Heap is an excellent tool to uncover the customer journey, Factors gives your entire GTM team the insights it needs to build out its sales and marketing engine. Factors offers actionable insights through accurate attribution, making it the perfect tool for your sales and marketing teams to identify and optimize the channels contributing to revenue.

Comprehensive tracking and reporting

While your website plays a crucial role in attracting prospects, you need deeper insights into how you can turn website visitors into paying customers. Combined with account intelligence and attribution features, Factors allows you to track and consolidate data across your website, CRMs, and MAPs to get a full overview of how you can optimize your offering on your website – a feature currently unavailable in Heap.

Factors also has robust reporting capabilities, where you can track your KPIs for specific channels. Heap does not track any data beyond your website, so you’ll only get pieces of the puzzle and not the completed picture.

💡Learn how you can use Factors to measure the impact of your marketing campaigns

Cost Effectiveness

While Heap doesn’t reveal its pricing on its website, we’ve researched and found that its estimated price starts from $3600 per year. Factors offers a more cost-effective solution for companies looking to track their performance not just on their website but also in overall marketing efforts.

💰Check out our pricing here

Invest in the right analytics tool

If you’re looking for a tool to track website analytics, Heap is a good place to start. However, if you want to go beyond the ordinary and grow pipeline for your business, your search ends with Factors. Speak to our team today to understand how Factors can help you turn intent signals into sales.

Content Marketing Metrics

September 17, 2024

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0 min read

Content is king, and a solid content marketing strategy is your key to B2B success.

According to studies, over 88% of all B2B brands currently utilize content marketing for their everyday efforts, while another 76% of them intend to do so in the future as well.

As per definition, content marketing refers to using a strategy that involves creating and sharing valuable, meaningful content (such as videos, articles, and infographics) with your target audience. This sharing promotes audience engagement, value-addition to your marketing efforts, and above all, a positive brand image.

To explain this better, here's a thumb rule - the more value you provide to your customer, the more likely they are to opt for your products and services. Half-hearted marketing efforts are a thing of the past now, and paying attention to your content strategy is just as important as other aspects of your branding journey.

However, here's a question that you might ask yourself while starting with content marketing - "What metrics do I use to track the performance of my content strategy?"

Well, your search ends here.

In this blog, we'll cover the top content marketing metrics you must track, why these metrics are important as well as FAQs on content marketing metrics.

What Are Content Marketing Metrics and Why Are They Important?

The biggest factor that sets content marketing apart from other strategies is that its goal is not to promote the brand's products or services but to provide value to the customer's journey.

Engaging your audience's interest with industry insights, product reviews, Ask-And-Answer events, infographics, and niche-specific content works wonders for your sales funnel.

The first step of a marketing funnel is "Awareness". While a traditional ad campaign or search engine campaign may drive in customers, a robust content marketing strategy will hook your audience right in, and keep them engaged for a long time. As mentioned above, the more value you provide to your audience, the more curious and eager they will be to consider your brand while opting for a product/service.

To measure your strategy's success, you must track certain metrics that can help evaluate past performance, predict future trends, as well as help you optimize your current efforts.

6 Content Marketing Metrics You Must Track

Impressions

This metric is particularly useful on social media platforms. Put simply, the number of impressions your post garners is the number of times your audience has viewed it. A higher number of impressions indicates a higher level of reach and potential user engagement.

Sometimes, understanding what type of content your audience would like to see on their feed plays a vital role in the impressions gained. Hosting regular polls and surveys can help your brand deliver content that your audience wants, likes, and shares with their network.

Page Traffic

Page traffic or website traffic is the most important indicator to see how well your content is performing across various channels. This metric is closely related to others such as CTR, which we'll take up later in this blog.

Apart from tracking how much page traffic you're getting, it's important to know where this traffic is coming from. Is it your company blog page? Is it your social media posts that are bringing in more users? Is it your newsletter or your tutorials on YouTube? Understanding which content channels are bringing in the most (and least) number of customers is a handy insight to have.

Once you know which efforts need optimization and which need more (or less!) investment, you can modify and create a better content strategy accordingly.

CTR

Your Click-Through-Rate measures the number of clicks your ad/content receives, as compared to the number of times it is shown. Are your customers visiting your blog page via your latest Instagram post? Is your audience signing up for that newsletter you advertised in your latest email? Is your audience clicking on your website for your latest paid ads campaign on a popular search engine? Did they reach your product page through an infographic?

Measuring your CTR provides insights into whether your strategy is successful at nudging your audience into the next step of your sales funnel, or whether there are gaps and leaks in the funnel that you need to fix.

Conversion

You've set up a content marketing strategy, and are driving in a good amount of traffic to your website and social media pages. But what next?

Measuring how many of these visitors are converting into leads, and how many leads are converting into paying customers is an essential metric to track.

Enter conversion.

Your conversion rate measures what percentage of your audience in a certain stage of your sales funnel is "converting" into users in the next stage. A higher conversion rate is an excellent indicator of your strategy's success, while a lower one indicates the need for optimization of your current strategy.

If your content does not provide any real value to your customers' journey, you can expect a dip in your conversion rates as well as overall website traffic.

Tip: Pay attention to the path your customers take before they make a purchase, i.e., the touchpoints that are most effective in the conversion process for better insights. Here's how you can use Factors.ai for the same.

SEO metrics

Where there's digital marketing, there's SEO. If your content is created optimized for SEO( or Search Engine Optimization), it will rank much higher on relevant keyword searches on both search engines and special media platforms.

Identifying top keywords that are relevant to your brand or content group, using keywords in your website copy, meta descriptions, headings, subheadings, and even alternate text help boost organic reach. For example, a blog on dog food will stand a higher chance of ranking on Google's first page if its heading says "The Best Foods For Your Dog" than "Feeding Your Dog".

SEO metrics such as keyword search volume and page rankings help you understand which keywords need to be worked upon, which keywords your content is ranking well for, and which sections of your website or social media page need to be optimized for better organic reach.

Content Shares

"We just went viral!" - the one sentence every brand wants to hear after posting content on digital platforms. Be it social media or search engines, aiming for a high amount of shares from your audience is at the top of every content marketer's list. For search engines like Google, the more your content (such as blogs) is shared, the more authority it is assigned, leading to a higher search ranking the next time a user searches for related keywords or phrases.

A good way to build authority and boost shares is by using backlinking strategies. Backlinks are created when one website links to another. For example, the statistic we mentioned at the very start of the blog is linked to a page by the Content Marketing Institute. For social media platforms, creating bite-sized content that your audience will want to share with their network is the best way to increase page awareness and boost traffic.

The takeaways?

Make sure your content is share-worthy, i.e., of high quality and adds value to your customer's journey.
Backlinks, backlinks, backlinks

User Engagement

Be it email marketing campaigns or your latest Reel on Instagram, tracking and studying user engagement is the best way to understand how well (and how often) your users interact with your content.

One can track email open rate, likes, shares, page follows reposts, and retweets, as well as sign-ups for notifications about your upcoming posts. However, an important aspect of audience engagement that most brands miss out on is this - interact with your audience regularly.

Respond to their comments, answer their queries, and host Q&A sessions on your social media pages. Engaging with both the brand and its content on various platforms creates an excellent customer ecosystem, boosting engagement rates, brand awareness, and a positive brand image.

FAQs

How can I measure content marketing metrics?

One can measure such metrics with the help of analytics software, such as Google Analytics, Factors, or Oribi. These tools can be customized according to your campaign goals, content channels, campaign types, etc. For social media platforms, keep an eye on your analytics dashboard that tracks user traffic, post impressions, total reach, social media campaign metrics, and more.

Why are content marketing metrics important?

Tracking these metrics helps you measure how well your content strategy is working across different channels, where you need to optimize your efforts, and most importantly, they help you understand audience behavior better.

Wrapping Up

Content marketing is becoming every brand's top priority, simply because of the potential, it carries for brand growth and audience engagement. Measuring your strategy's performance with these metrics is the best way to know what's working well for your brand, and which efforts need optimization.

6 B2B marketing mistakes to avoid

September 17, 2024

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0 min read

As a B2B marketing team, there are a few common mistakes that should be avoided. Not focusing on branding enough, or ignoring the potential solid audience research holds for your brand can all negatively affect your brand's growth in the long run.

The growth of online marketing strategies, various tools, and software, and even a shift in audience preferences have all led to a change in B2B business's marketing journeys. However, there are timeless mistakes that every B2B marketer should know about while crafting a marketing strategy.

In this blog, we'll cover the top 6 mistakes that a majority of B2B marketers make - mistakes you should try not to make throughout your marketing journey.

#1 A Lack of Focus on Branding

You may think, "What's branding got anything to do with B2B? Isn't branding only needed when interacting with a non-business audience like B2C brands?" This notion could not have been farther from the truth. Most B2B brands do not focus on branding as much as they should, since they do not see the contribution it provides to your brand and your customers in the long run. Put simply - branding is important. Creating a strong connection with your present and potential customers with a solid brand identity, voice, and emotion-centric branding efforts is the best way you as marketing can avoid making this first mistake. Tips:

Creating a brand from scratch takes the same (if not more) amount of effort as creating a company.
Emotion is key. The more you relate to your customers' feelings, emotions, and needs, the more customer-centric your brand will be able to be.
Consistency is key. Creating a brand is not an overnight process, so putting in effort regularly is the best thing you can do for your B2B brand.

#2 Being unaware of your true target audience

Be it a business or an individual on social media, knowing what your target audience is essential for B2B success. B2B brands often miss out on defining their target audience early on in their marketing efforts, simply because it does not seem important at that stage. However, businesses too, comprise your target audience and need personalized, impactful marketing efforts that might motivate them to opt for your brand's products/services. Understanding your target audience is highly useful for your marketing, advertising, sales, product development, and even service departments, as the better you know who and what your audience comprises, the better you will be able to cater to their needs.

Tip: Buyer personas are a must. Take some time out to divide your customers into personas that you can use to create better targeted and more efficient marketing campaigns. After all, better B2B marketing efforts potentially lead to better brand and revenue growth!

#3 Using unnecessary jargon

Often, B2B brands (and marketers) use unnecessary jargon to sound more "authoritative and professional" in front of their target audience. However, this is the biggest mistake you could make as a B2B marketer. Content marketing efforts such as a company blog, weekly newsletters, free industry resources, and whitepapers are a goldmine for B2B brands. No matter how useful and valuable the content inside each of these may be, using jargon and complicated terms to interact with your audience will be nothing but negative for your brand growth.

Keeping it simple, not bland, is a mantra every B2B marketer should know.

Here are a couple of ways to stop making this mistake.

Write like your audience. Conduct thorough research on the types of content your audience prefers, and create content accordingly. It always helps to keep in mind their preferred level of technicality, subject understanding, and voice in mind!
Ensure you ask for lots of feedback from your audience after they view/interact with the content you've put out. Asking for feedback before publishing the content is a great way to ensure you don't publish content that is not audience-friendly in the long run.

#4 Analytics, analytics, analytics
(or a lack thereof)

As any B2B marketing will tell you, analytics tools are THE way to track and measure brand performance over time. Be it website conversions, newsletter sign-ups, or even the number of visitors that signed up for a demo call, analytics are essential for a rocking marketing strategy. B2B brands often ignore this aspect of marketing, which is perhaps the most important one - tracking results. Understanding which channels are bringing in better, more promising leads, and which channels need optimizing are useful insights to have while allocating budgets and brainstorming strategies for each of these channels.

Opting for the right analytics software based on your brand needs is equally important, and the only way you can do this is by conducting lots of research on the various options available. Social media platforms too, provide separate analytics dashboards for business accounts, and these are a great place to understand audience behavior.

#5 A Poor Definition of your Brand’s USP

Your brand's USP, or Unique Selling Proposition, is what sets it apart from your competitors. Not understanding your USP leads to poor use of marketing potential, and a potential dip in the amount of traffic your sales funnel sees. What's more, marketing your USP well creates a lasting impression on your audience, which is nothing but beneficial for your B2B brand. Understand your audience's needs, tie them in with your USP, and market it in a way that makes it about what your brand can do for them.

#6 Ignoring UI and Design

Here's a TL;DR - If your User Interface sucks, you're not doing it right. Apart from your service or product, your overall user experience is what helps clinch the deal. Be it a mobile application or your website, focusing on a smooth, user-friendly, and responsive design is key for a glowing UX.

Ensure you test out all of your website pages, applications, and landing pages on multiple devices and network speeds. Optimize your images and videos so that they load quickly on slower networks, and ensure that your website is accessible (and readable) on both desktop and mobile devices.

Supermetrics: Features, Alternatives & more

September 17, 2024

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0 min read

In recent blog posts, we’ve talked about marketing analytics, why they are important for your business, and which marketing analytics tools you should be tracking depending on certain business goals. But gaining data insights is only the second step in the process.

Before you derive insights from your firm’s multiple sources of data from different vendors, be it through reports or visualizations, bridging the gap between data collection and clean data insights is essential.

Here’s an example - you’re a marketing and advertising firm that receives a ton of data from multiple vendors and clients, all of which send their data using different methods of data collection and sorting. Standardizing all these reports and graphs can be an exhausting task, taking up precious time and resources.

Don’t you wish you had a tool that could help you integrate multiple data sources into a single platform that you could then use for cutting-edge insights?

Enter: Supermetrics.

While this tool works quite differently from standard analytics tools such as Google Analytics, it’s been widely used and recommended by B2B firms and their marketing teams - simply because it simplifies the process of having to manually transfer data from multiple sheets and files into a single actionable platform for better analysis.

Supermetrics Features

Supermetrics, if defined simply, is a data-automation tool that allows you to pull data from various sources (such as social media platforms, Google Adwords, and Google Analytics) and feed it into a platform that can help with data organization and insights, such as MS Excel, Google Data Studio, etc.).

The reason why Supermetrics has proven to be a popular and seamless platform is to bridge the gaps between data and database/analytics software. Let’s now take a look at some of the features Supermetrics is best known for -

1. Eliminate the need for manual copy-and-paste

When we talk about B2B company data, we’re not talking about a couple of Excel sheets, but an enormous amount of data from multiple platforms that the brand uses. Ideally, a B2B brand establishes its presence on various platforms such as Linkedin, Instagram, Google Ads, and Twitter Campaigns, to name a few.

Above all, it can be extremely tricky to ensure that all of the data pulled from these platforms is regularly updated, to avoid any snags or data errors while feeding it for data insights or performance reports. Supermetrics helps with exactly that. Once you set up your Supermetrics account, it automatically starts gathering data and pasting it into any tool you opt for analytics, such as Excel or Google Data Studio.

Be it weekly or yearly reports, Supermetrics makes sure you spend a lot less time on the grunt work, and utilize that time to better study and understand the data the tool has pulled, resulting in better, actionable insights.

Pull data from hundreds of sites and platforms

One of the biggest advantages of Supermetrics is that it can pull data from multiple sources in a matter of seconds, and create reports that otherwise would have taken days to prepare. Here are a few of the sites and platforms that Supermetrics can set up to pull data from daily

Facebook Ads
Google Ads
Criteo
Taboola.
Linkedin Ad Campaigns
Twitter Ad Campaigns
Hubspot
Instagram

And on the other side of the process, here are the platforms that Supermetrics feeds your data into so that you can immediately create reports, sort, filter, and study reports from the data that you no longer have to manually grab and drop from the channels mentioned above.

MS Excel
Snowflake
Google Sheets
Google Data Studio
API
BigQuery

3. Marketing Data Visualization

Once Supermetrics has pulled data from one platform, it feeds it into another. However, while doing so, it creates visualizations that can be customized according to the brand’s needs.

For example, if you feed data from your Google AdWords campaign into an Excel spreadsheet, Supermetrics will automatically convert your campaign performance data into line charts, bar graphs, and or plotted graphs, according to your needs. In the event of updated data, the platform immediately updates its visualizations, instead of you having to manually update your database every time there’s an update or change.

Apart from these features, Supermetrics is commonly used to track PPC campaign data across various platforms and create automated reports that can be fed into brand new presentation software such as Microsoft PowerPoint, eliminating quite a lot of manual effort.

Limitations with Supermetrics

Just as any other analytics or data-grabbing software, Supermetrics comes with its pros and cons. Before making a choice, it is important to know all of these pros and cons, so that you can align your brand needs with the features of the software, and make an informed decision.

1. No clean-ups for marketing data errors

We talked about how Supermetrics can pull data from hundreds of platforms in one click, and regularly update the database platform you’ve chosen for insights. But if you have to ensure that all your data is clean and filtered through regularly for errors, you might just have to do that manually.

Supermetrics as a platform does not help weed out any data errors. All it does is pull data from one platform, paste it onto another, and create visualizations for the data received. Platforms like ChannelMix help set up rules and conditions for data grabbing, so that all of your data passes through a certain filter, ensuring a slim chance of data errors in your final reports.

2. Unintuitive marketing analytics software

While Supermetrics as a tool is extremely useful, learning how to navigate through the platform and use its features according to your brand needs can be a bit tricky.

Lots of user reviews state how steep the learning curve is for Supermetrics, and that learning how to integrate Supermetrics with multiple sites can be quite time-consuming and difficult.

3. Lack of scalability

An important distinction one must make is that while Supermetrics is an excellent data-grabber, it does not provide any services for long-term data storage, unlike data warehouses. In the event that your brand wants to scale up, or derive long-term insights from past data, it may be time to consider another tool.

The reason behind this limitation is that Supermetrics is simply concerned with pulling and feeding data from one platform to another. It does not focus on long-term data storage that multiple teams in your organization can focus on.

It might be easy in the short term to set up a data warehouse with Supermetrics, but since the warehouse is not part of the product itself, you’ll spend a lot more time, money, and effort trying to maintain and update the warehouse from time to time.

4. Supermetrics pricing

A make-or-break factor for many organizations, the cost is one of the features where Supermetrics falls short when compared to other data-grabbing tools. To ensure you pay for the service you need, and don’t end up paying more than your budget allocates, make sure to check out the pricing page on Supermetrics’s website, compare their pricing with other tools, and book a free trial of the tool so that you know exactly what you’re paying for if you choose to opt for Supermetrics in the future.

How Does Factors Help with B2B marketing analytics and revenue attribution?

1. Data-Grabbing and Insights across the customer journey

While Supermetrics is a data-grabbing tool, a robust marketing effort needs more than just data-grabbing. While Supermetrics is a connector, simply relying on such a software tool does not provide a comprehensive viewpoint that you can use to optimize your efforts. Factors, apart from pulling data from multiple sites and platforms, helps analyze and optimize efforts with KPI reporting, customer journey funnels, and revenue attribution, to name a few.. helps with connecting the data you’ve pulled and shows you just how much value and traffic each of your channels is bringing in.

While data-grabbing is an excellent way to understand the trends in channel performance, Factors help understand why a source/platform performed as well as it did, and how you can use those insights to build a better marketing strategy.

2. Customizable Attribution Modeling

Just as every business has its own goals and needs, keeping a close eye on the channels and platforms that can help you get there is essential. While pulling in data from multiple sources, it can be difficult and time-consuming to figure out which source is bringing in the most profitable audience, and which source(s) need more work.

With Factors’ customizable attribution model, you can select to track and study your sales pipeline the way you want to, according to your goals. To read more about attribution and why you need to use it in your B2B marketing strategy, visit our Blog section!

3. Cost Effectiveness

The Factors pricing model is built for all types and sizes of teams so that you pay only for the services you need, based on your team size. Cost-effectiveness is a make-or-break factor for many brands, and not choosing the right tool for the right price does more harm than good in the long term.

4. User-friendly interface

One of the biggest advantages Factors holds over Supermetrics is how easy it is to use, even if you’re just starting in the world of analytics and data insights. Our interface is created keeping the customer in mind and can be picked up quite easily.

Wrapping Up

There are hundreds of analytics and data-grabbing tools that you might opt for for your B2B brand. However, understanding what your brand needs are, your ideal budget, the time allotted to learning the software, and the quality of insights gained with the help of your chosen software are all factors you should keep in mind while opting for a tool.

7 Full Circle Insights Alternatives and Competitors

September 17, 2024

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0 min read

Full Circle Insights is a marketing attribution tool that provides a detailed overview of your campaigns. It lets you identify top-performing channels and touchpoints that are more likely to generate and convert leads.

The tool provides seamless integration with Salesforce and other marketing automation tools. It can capture data across various channels, such as ad platforms, social media, etc., and use them to attribute revenue accurately. Though the tool provides these benefits, it also has some limitations. These include the absence of a support team, lack of flexibility, etc.

All these matters have led users to look for alternatives and competitors.

In this article, we will take you through some of the Full Circle Insights alternatives and help you select the best one based on your requirements.

Why do users search for Full Circle Insights alternatives and competitors?

Following are some of the most common challenges users face with Full Circle Insights.

Time-consuming:

Though the tool is good for understanding customer journeys, it’s highly time-consuming. In fact, it takes over 20 hours to rebuild attribution models.

Difficult to Implement:

Even users who are full of praise for Full Circle Insights seem to have issues with its implementation process. In addition, this tool is technically complicated and requires developers’ intervention, even for minor changes to dashboards.

Absence of an Account Management Team:

The absence of an account management or support team makes Full Circle Insights a difficult tool to use. It’s imperative that users receive the necessary guidance and support to adopt the tool and fully reap its benefits. But without a support team, users will feel lost and unable to utilize the tool’s full potential.

The drawbacks mentioned above are some of the major factors driving users to look for an alternative.

We have created a list of the top 7 Full Circle Insights alternatives to simplify your search.

7 Full Circle Insights alternatives for businesses in 2023

Here is a list of the 7 best alternatives and competitors to help marketers and sales professionals in 2023. Explore each tool to understand how it can improve your marketing performance.

1. Factors.ai

An overview of Factors.ai’s customizable dashboard

Factors is an AI-powered revenue attribution and marketing analytics tool designed for B2B sales and marketing teams. This tool enables B2B teams, irrespective of size, to attribute conversions to various marketing efforts across the buyer’s journey.

Sales and marketing teams can use insights from the platform to find effective channels and campaigns that drive awareness and conversions, and generate revenue. In addition, it allows them to make data-driven decisions and optimize budget allocation to increase the campaign's performance further and boost ROI.

With Factors, Marketing ops can

Gain complete insights into their campaign initiative, current pipeline as well as MQL coverage.
Track and analyze all KPIs in one place using a customizable dashboard.
Ensure that marketing goals are in sync with business objectives

Also, content teams get real-time insights into how the content is performing and its impact on generating MQLs. Factors can automatically collect data and analyze it to identify the content pieces that are working and those that aren’t.

Features

Multi-Touch Attribution:

The tool provides a range of attribution models and allows marketers to compare and choose the right one for their business. It can track and identify online and offline touchpoints and help attribute revenue to the most influential channels.

AI-Powered Insights:

Factors' AI feature “Explain” can provide automated insights for a defined goal. If the goal is to understand what prompts the customers to reach the pricing page, this feature can identify what’s helping and hurting to achieve it.

Account Identification:

Factors also has a account identification capability powered by 6Sense. This feature allows SaaS businesses to deanonymize companies engage with the website, reviews, ads, and more.

Marketing Analytics:

Factors enables businesses to analyze campaign data, website traffic, sales and marketing funnel, and the buyer journey in a single platform.

LinkedIn Tracking:

This feature allows you to find out which companies viewed your LinkedIn campaigns. With this information, marketers can identify and select the most effective campaign and track its effect on pipeline.

Customer Reviews

Integrations

Factors can seamlessly integrate with the following list of tools and softwares.

Hubspot
Facebook Ads
LinkedIn Ads
Google Ads
Salesforce
Segment
Bing Ads
Rudderstack
Marketo
6Sense
Clearbit
Leadsquared
Drift
Google search console
Slack
Google spreadsheet

Pricing

Factors offers three services, and each has its own pricing patterns:

Analytics & Attribution:

Factors offers website analytics, events and form tracking, multi-touch attribution, and more. The pricing for this is as follows.

Starter – $399/Month.
Growth – $799/Month.
Custom and Agency – Contact for a quote.

Deanonymization:

The tool allows you to identify anonymous website visitors, analyze user behavior, and generate high-intent leads.

Starter – $99/Month.
Professional – $149/Month.
Growth – $499/Month.
Enterprise – Contact for a quote.

Professional Services:

Factors also provides expert analytics, consulting, and technical support tailor-made for B2B marketing teams. The pricing plan for the service is as follows.

Tier 1 – $500 for 10 hrs/Month.
Tier 2 – $900 for 20 hrs/Month.
Tier 3 – $1200 for 30hrs/Month.

2. Adobe Marketo Measure [Bizible]

Bizible or Adobe Marketo Measure provides one of the best enterprise-level attribution solutions. It helps marketers visualize the different stages of the B2B customer journey with granular insights across multiple channels.

Even though the tool is one of the front runners in attribution solutions, users have found some drawbacks, such as limited integrations, longer implementation periods, and higher pricing.