Ranga Kaliyur

B2B marketing strategies that maximize growth

B2B marketing may be in trouble. Research suggests that B2B organizations are inadvertently transforming marketing into a supporting tool for the sales function. In reality, however, marketing is at the very core of a business. With the right principles securely in place, B2B marketing may well transform into the growth engine of B2B organizations. 

It’s about time we rethink the principles of marketing 

Linkedin’s B2B institute recently conducted wonderful research using B2B effectiveness data in collaboration with Peter Field, Les Binet and the IPA. The primary motivator of this research was to identify the best marketing principles that correlated with growth. Keep in mind that in this case, growth does not mean improving CTR, impressions, engagements or other traditional digital marketing metrics. Instead, we’re referring to growth in terms of market share, revenue, profitability, and other bottom line business metrics.

What makes this research especially special is the fact that it's never been done before through the lens of B2B marketing. That is, of course, until now. The following series will delve into each of these principles one article at a time with hopes of providing an intuitive, straightforward explanation of cutting-edge B2B marketing research.

If you had to take away one thing from this series, it’s this:

Extensive research and anecdotal evidence point to one thing — The key to marketing-sourced growth is balance. While this may seem obvious, the truth is that modern B2B marketing is almost always unbalanced. They tend to involve solely short-term, volume-based endeavors that play to logic and reasoning as opposed to a balanced view of short AND long term strategies that consider volume AND price, logic AND emotion, awareness AND fame. 

With that out of the way, let’s finally move on to the first principle of B2B marketing strategies that maximize growth.

Brand Building Vs. Sales Activation

A. Have Your Cake & Eat It Too:  Brand Building and Sales Activation I

In their research, Binet and Field identify two types of marketing: 

1. Sales activation: Sales activation definitely provides short-term growth. But while sales activation captures existing demand, it does not create it. Results with sales activation often produce results that decay just as fast they appear – which isn’t necessarily a bad thing, just something to keep in mind for the long term.

2. Brand building: Brand building provides long-term growth. In a sense, this creates and captures demand together. Note that when executed well, brand building delivers short-term growth as well. So the big takeaway is that you don’t have to pick between one or the other. In a sense, brand building contributes to future demand to ensure a durable pipeline of future sales and profits.

Ideally, a combination of both types of marketing will yield the best results. If you had to pick one, however, the choice is easy. Brand building is the only strategy that delivers both short-term and long-term growth. 

B. The 60/40 Rule: Brand Building & Sales Activation II

In B2C marketing, organizations with the most short-term and long-term growth spend most of their budget towards branding (60%) as opposed to sales activation (40%). In most B2B orgs, this marketing investment is skewed in the opposite direction; with most spend being allocated towards activation (54%). 

What might explain this variation? Put simply, B2B sales is harder. It involves several touch points across several stakeholders over several months. It also necessitates far more exposition around the product, use-cases, functional benefits, and more. There’s no doubt that in B2B, sales activation, especially in early-stages, has an important (albeit expensive) role to play. But as the novelty and needs of a new business fades, marketing needs to mature towards a brand-focused distribution to ensure sustainable growth.

C. Flip The Funnel: From ToFu/BoFu To In/Out Market

The funnel is a well-known construct in B2B marketing. The conventional B2B funnel depicts a voluminous top-of-the-funnel that wittles down along each step of the funnel towards the bottom of the funnel. Interestingly, Binet and Field suggest flipping the funnel. Rather than ToFu and BoFu, they recommend thinking of the funnel as “in market” buyers and “out market” buyers. In this case, activation spend is mostly for limited market  buyers while branding spend is for the much larger, out market buyers. 

This approach tends to be more customer-centric because:

1. Customers don’t think of themselves as being in the “brand building” phase or “sales activation phase”. Instead, customers think of themselves as being “in-market” to buy a product or “out-market” to not buy a product at this moment. 
2. Marketers have two customers: Your external customers and your internal finance team. Thinking about the funnel as current cash flow customers and future cash flow customers will help align marketing with the CFO or finance team as well. 

D. Different Stroke For Different Folks: 

Of course, in-market buyers are inherently very different from out-market buyers. This necessitates different approaches for creative, distribution, and measurement.

For in-market approach:

• Rational Messaging - for immediate ROI and value
• Narrower targeting - for a narrower market
• Sales metrics - revenue and pipeline are the most relevant KPI for in-market

For out-market approach: 

• Emotional Messaging - for long term brand retention
• Broder targeting - for a larger market
• Memory metrics - brand sense is an example of a relevant memory metric 

And there you have it. The first principles delved deep into the pros and cons of Sales Activation and Brand Building. While employing both approaches in unison are crucial to long-term success, the verdict is that, at the end of the day, the goal should be to prioritize brand building. We also highlight an unconventional perspective of the good old sales funnel. Join us next week to go over the second principle: Awareness vs Fame.

All our homies LOVE HubSpot. No doubt, it's a reliable CRM and marketing automation platform. In fact, Factors.ai integrates seamlessly with HubSpot to deliver full-path analytics and attribution across campaigns, website, and CRM. That being said, HubSpot’s own in-platform analytics and attribution engine, is fraught with serious limitations. The following article highlights these issues with HubSpot — and how you can overcome them with Factors.ai. Ultimately, we find Factors.ai to be a far better fit for data-driven B2B marketers.

Before we jump into the limitations of HubSpot analytics and attribution, it’s only fair to address a couple of positives. Although premium reporting (advanced analytics, revenue attribution, etc) is only available on HubSpot’s enterprise plans, it delivers a robust range of multi-touch attribution models in a simple, user-friendly framework. Additionally, if your company uses HubSpot CRM, MAP, and life cycles stages religiously, HubSpot could possibly be an effective all-in-one solution for reporting. As we shall now see, however, most teams do not use HubSpot in the dedicated manner that’s required for it to function well.

Limitation #1: Rigidity & Inaccuracy

1.1. Fixed Lifecycle Stages

One glaring limitation with HubSpot’s in-platform analytics solution is its rigidity around the sales funnel — and especially its life cycle stages. HubSpot analytics only offers fixed definitions for events and stages along the customer journey — Subscriber, Lead, MQL, SQL, Opportunity, Customer, and Evangelist. Now, this set of stages may fit in perfectly with your organization’s funnel structure; but in reality, most B2B teams follow unique customer stages based on the nuance and particulars of their business model. B2B SaaS firms for example, may care about including a “Demo Done” stage to flag high intent leads. HubSpot’s analytics engine does not provide the flexibility to include, or even edit lifecycle stages to match this preferences. 

If your team does not adhere to HubSpot’s predetermined structure, Factors.ai may be the right fit for you. On Factors, users have limitless flexibility to set, track, and analyze their own internal life-cycle stages.

1.2 Inaccurate Lifecycle Stage Tracking

In continuation with the previous point — not only is HubSpot’s lifecycle stage tracking rigid, it’s also blatantly inaccurate. Rather than considering the leads in lifecycle stage “B” to be a subset of the previous lifecycle stage “A”, HubSpot only counts the contacts in a particular stage at that point in time. Here’s an example to illustrate:

Say you have 50 leads tagged MQLs. 20 of them become SQLs. This, of course, does not mean that you now only have 30 MQLs. Rather, it means that the set of 20 SQLs are a subset of the total set of 50 MQLs. 

This is a major issue with HubSpot analytics — leading to inaccurate readings, insights, and ultimately; marketing decisions. Rest assured, Factors.ai ensures no such fallacies in logic. You can also guarantee a far wider range of filters, breakdowns, and visualization techniques on Factors.ai as compared to HubSpot analytics. 

Limitation #2: Attribution Troubles

2.1 Campaign Attribution

It’s impossible to create attribution reports on HubSpot at a keyword level across campaigns and ad groups. If you want to look at keyword level attribution reports on HubSpot, you’ll need to examine keywords within a specific ad group from a specific campaign. Why is this an issue? Well because a specific keyword can (and usually does) belong to multiple campaigns

On Factors, you can do what HubSpot attribution does AND look at keyword attribution reports across campaigns and ad groups for granular, and more importantly, accurate insights.

2.2 Attributing Offline Events

Offline touchpoints are those touchpoints along the customer journey that cannot be tracked digitally. These include outbound emails, webinars, in-person events, corporate gifts, etc. While HubSpot does enable you to document these “events”, it is not possible to analyze or visualize them within HubSpot analytics. As a company scales, it’s likely to have a good combination of digital and offline touchpoints, making it imperative to account and analyze for both in union. 

Factors.ai makes it possible to track, analyze, and attribute offline touchpoints by fetching contact tags and UTMs. These touchpoints are also completely customizable with no-code. Needless to say, unlike Factors.ai, HubSpot does not enable users to attribute custom properties, events, or KPIs. 

2.3 Comparing Attribution Models

Factors.ai is one of the few attribution solutions that allows users to compare attribution models against each other. B2B sales cycles can be complex, and the ability to compare results across first-touch and multi-touch models gives marketers an unequivocal advantage in identifying trends accurately. Unlike Factors.ai, HubSpot does not offer the ability to compare attribution models. 

Limitation #3: Lack of Granularity 

Another major drawback with HubSpot analytics & attribution is that it considers lead source only at a channel level. That is, lead sources may be viewed as “Organic”, “Paid ads”, “Social” and so on. We all know that the devil’s in the details — and channel level data simply will not cut it in this day and age. How is one to know which campaigns or content to scale, if they are unable to view performance data for the same? Factors.ai is all about granularity. We ensure detailed analytics at a channel, campaign, ad group and keyword level to help you make the best possible marketing decisions. Our extensive line of no-code integrations across the most popular ad platforms guarantees a proper data-driven marketing experience. 

Limitation #4: Data Integration Woes

So here’s the thing: you can integrate HubSpot with third-party data-sources, including other CRMs like Salesforce — but it’s no easy task. It requires tedious onboarding, strict vigilance, and developer dependency. You need to make sure all your sales data is either on or linked to HubSpot. If you use a combination of HubSpot and Salesforce or LeadSquared or Marketo, a platform like Factors.ai would make your life a lot easier. IF, however, you religiously use HubSpot exclusive products — CRM, MAP, Website, etc, then HubSpot may be a more convenient option for you.

Limitation #5: It’s The Little Things…

By design, Factors.ai is a robust, intuitive marketing analytics, attribution, and journey mapping platform. Above all, we pride ourselves on delivering the best possible experience to our users. This entails end-to-end onboarding support, sustained customer success management, and smooth, reliable performance. The same, unfortunately, cannot be said about HubSpot analytics. 

Here’s why Factors.ai has the edge over HubSpot when it comes to user experience:

1. HubSpot imposes limited users or seats per hub. Factors grants unlimited seats, free of charge. 
2. HubSpot requires tedious, developer dependent onboarding and training over several weeks, if not months. You can get started with Factors.ai in 30 minutes.
3. HubSpot charges an independent fee for tech support. Factors.ai is an extension of your team — with dedicated customer success management guaranteed.
4. HubSpot aggressively up-sells its features to nickel and dime existing customers. Factors.ai recommends tailor-made plans based on the scale and growth of your team. 

And there you have it. Still curious to learn why Factors.ai would be better suited for your B2B team over HubSpot Marketing Hub? Book a personalized demo here to see our work in action.

Website Account Identification with Factors.ai

Table of Contents:

1. Introduction
2. How does website account identification work on Factors?
3. How can website account identification help?
4. Why Factors?

Your B2B website is a goldmine. Here’s how you can make the most of it.

Now more than ever, B2B marketers & sales folk are being asked to do more with less. Teams are constantly on their toes trying to make limited resources stretch a long way. What’s more? As buyers become increasingly adept at spotting campaign & sales pitches from a mile away, it becomes that much harder to build new relationships from scratch.

The solution? Making the most of what you already have — like the goldmine of acccount data buried away in your website. 

Your website is arguably the most voluminous, high-traffic touch-point for B2B buyers. That being said, only about 1-5% of this traffic actually converts. So what happens to the remaining 95% of accounts you’ve worked tirelessly to drive to your site? We can’t just let all that potential pipeline slip-away, can we?

The following blog highlights how you can identify anonymous companies already visiting your site using cutting-edge account deanonymization and website  tracking technology. 

Factors.ai’s account identification tool identifies who your B2B audience is and how they engage with your brand — so you can reach out with the right message at the right time. But how does account identification work? And what makes Factors.ai the best account identification solution for B2B teams? Let’s find out. 

How does Factors work?

Account identification like Factors use reverse DNS lookup to discover companies visiting your site based on their IP addresses. In short, reverse DNS identifies the host name of a particular IP address to provide company location information. 

Factors ai matches IP data with an extensive database to identify which company visited your site as well as other firmographic features like revenue, employee headcount, industry, etc. Note that Factors is a privacy-compliant intelligence platform that does not identify, collect, or distribute anonymous user-level data.

How can account identification help?

For sales: 

1. Find ready-to-buy accounts: Accounts that visit your website are aware of your brand. And accounts that are aware of your brand are far more likely to convert as compared to those that are yet to hear of you. With account identification, sales can reach out to otherwise anonymous prospects, capitalize on an untapped pool of buyers, and prevent low hanging revenue from slipping away. 

2. Close better deals, faster: The early bird gets the worm and the early salesperson closes the deal. It’s no secret that time is off the essence when it comes to B2B sales. With Factors, sales teams can reach out to high-intent prospects before they have a chance to interact with competitors.

3. Create better sales pitches: Sales can see exactly what content — features, blogs, case-studies, use-cases etc — prospects are engaging to anticipate their needs and personalize sales interactions accordingly. 

For marketers: 

1. Delight your sales team: Make your sales team happy with a list of high-intent, high-quality prospects for your sales team to engage with. And the best part? These are leads generated with zero additional ad spend as they’re simply companies who already visit your site.

2. Understand traffic sources: Learn which channels and traffic source high-quality accounts come from. Scale the right campaigns and close the gap between impressions and revenue. This benefit is all the more pronounced when account identification is used in unison with Factors’ end-to-end attribution and journey mapping.

3. Improve website engagement: See how companies engage with content on your website and understand what topics and themes resonate most with buyers. Gauge what’s helping and hurting website conversions and optimize performance accordingly. 

4. Optimize retargeting: Once you understand which accounts are visiting your site and what they’re looking for, it becomes that much easier to retarget the right audience. Don’t waste your ad budget retargeting everyone who visits your site — just the select few who show real buyer intent. 

Why Factors?

Well, because Factors.ai is the most accurate, cost-effective, and well-integrated account identification software for B2B companies:

1. Data accuracy

Factors.ai delivers the most accurate IP-matching in the industry. In a case wherein customers provided 22,000 unique IPs (where the answers were known), different vendors were asked to match IPs with companies and provide firmographic information. Factors.ai’s cutting-edge IP-technology delivered a whopping 64% match rate and nearly 30% more matches than the nearest competitor. Factors provide a matchrate that’s 10-15% better than alternatives like Clearbit, Kickfire, and Demandbase.

2. Cost-efficiency

Factors.ai is one of, if not the most cost-effective de-anonymization solution in the industry. Learn more about our pricing here: factors.ai/pricing

3. Unified account analytics

Another benefit with Factors is the wide range of complementary features it has to offer along with account identification. End-to-end marketing analytics, revenue attribution, journey mapping and more — all of which provide a layer of depth and direction once you identify which accounts are visiting your site. Answer questions like:

• What campaigns are driving the most traffic to my website?
• What channels should I scale to improve demo conversions on my website?
• What content resonates most with my target audience? 
• How do our customers progress from impressions to revenue? 
• How does marketing performance vary by buyer persona and firmographic features?

4. Website behavior and account timelines

Along with knowing which company is visiting your site, Factors light-weight script will also shed light onto what accounts are engaging with on your site. Understand website activity — including page views, button clicks, time spent, scroll depth and more. All of this data is collected using only first-party cookies — so there’s no impact on third-party restrictions.

What's more? Factors provides intuitive account timelines and user journeys to visualize, in real-time, how accounts are progressive from awareness to intent. This is a valuable feature for B2B marketers to identify buyer intent and strike with marketing material, targeted campaigns, or a simple email while the iron's still hot.

It’s no secret that the B2B SaaS funnel involves several touchpoints across campaigns, website, offline events, and CRM. Given that customer journeys are complex and nonlinear, measuring and optimizing marketing’s impact on revenue may seem like a daunting task. To solve for this, there’s been an influx of plug and play B2B marketing attribution and analytics tools in recent years. 

While there’s no shortage of marketing attribution tools out there, each solution has its own unique set of features, strengths, and limitations. This blog compares two popular B2B marketing attribution tools — Dreamdata and Hockeystack — to help readers decide which solution may be better suited to their needs.

Note that this blog won’t cover the basics of what marketing attribution is. Instead, you can find a wide range of resources on marketing attribution here:

• A Comprehensive Guide To Marketing Attribution
• B2B Marketing Attribution
• Challenges With B2B Attribution (And How To Get Over Them)

About Dreamdata

Dreamdata is a Denmark-based B2B revenue attribution platform that works to connect and crunch revenue related data across the customer journey.  At a high level, much like any other competent marketing analytics tool, Dreamdata helps teams identify what GTM effort drives revenue, where to cut costs, and how to scale the right campaigns. 

As following sections highlight, Dreamdata provides a robust analytics suite, a wide-range of integrations, and a strong customer success experience. That being said, the platform seems to fall short when it comes to implementation, custom reporting and dashboarding, and ease of use. Each of these features and limitations are covered in detail below. 

About HockeyStack

HockeyStack is a B2B analytics and attribution platform that helps teams track data across campaigns, website, and CRM to measure marketing ROI, view account-based intent signals, and improve budget allocation. 

HockeyStack claims a rapid implementation process and customizable dashboards. That being said, HockeyStack offers fewer integrations and limited granularity when it comes to reporting. Again, each of these features and shortcomings are highlighted in detail below.

Dreamdata vs. HockeyStack: Key Features

Both Dreamdata and HockeyStack are effective marketing attribution tools in their own right — but no product is perfect. The next couple of sections examine key features, strengths and limitations of each solution. Naturally, there’s bound to be significant overlap; but the devil is in the details. After covering a few key common features, we explore where each platform outperforms the other.

#1 Tracking & Analytics: 

As most analytics solutions do, both Dreamdata and Hockeystack unify marketing and revenue data under one roof. Both tools also provide a wide range of analytics capabilities to help teams make well-informed decisions across campaigns, website, content, and more. 

Both solutions employ javascript codes that are added to a website to track visitor interactions and engagement. They can measure standard website performance metrics like pageviews, scroll depth, clicks, form submissions, and more at an account and user level. In turn, teams can gauge customer behavior and learn how different content and webpages influence pipeline by cohort. 

Dreamdata and HockeyStack also integrate with ad platforms, marketing automation platforms, and CRMs to consolidate campaign metrics, offline events, and revenue metrics. This helps marketing teams monitor their efforts and understand what’s helping or hurting bottom line conversions. Note that Dreamdata currently provides a wider range of integrations than HockeyStack — more on this later. 

#2 Multi-touch attribution

Attribution analysis is at the core of Dreamdata and Hockeystack. Unsurprisingly, both solutions do a good job of measuring performance across marketing activities and attributing each touchpoint back to revenue.  

They can stitch and credit measurable touchpoints across channels, campaigns, website, and offline events (from CRM) based on their influence on pipeline. Using a range of multi-touch attribution models, marketing teams can quantify their impact on revenue from first-touch to deal won at an account level. Here are a few use-cases multi-touch attribution on Dreamdata and Hockeystack can solve for:

• Measuring ROAS across ad campaigns
• Attributing revenue back to marketing channels 
• Tracking the impact of organic social and SEO efforts
• Learning which content and channels drive bottom-line metrics

#3 Journeys

Journeys analytics is a relatively recent feature that’s not as common amongst other marketing analytics and attribution tools. That being said, both Dreamdata and HockeyStack offer variants of journey analytics.

In short, journey analytics helps teams visualize complex, non-linear customer journeys by mapping each stakeholder’s touch-points at an account level. Why is this helpful? It provides an intuitive timeline of profiles, behavior, and intent across each account within the pipeline. This information may in turn be used to personalize further marketing efforts, optimize retargeting campaigns, customize sales pitches, and identify buying patterns. 

HockeyStack and Dreamdata work well for all three features covered above. Still, both tools have their own strengths and limitations. The following section highlights stand-out reasons why users may prefer one over the other. 

What Dreamdata Does Better

1. Out-of-the-box Integrations

Dreamdata offers a wider range of out-of-the-box integrations as compared to HockeyStack. While both solutions provide integrations with the most popular ad platforms, CRMs, MAPs, and CDPs, Dreamdata goes the extra mile to cater to relatively niche platforms and data warehouses as well. 

Key integrations supported by Dreamdata and HockeyStack*: HubSpot, SalesForce, Google Ads, Facebook Ads, Linkedin Ads, Marketo, Pardot, Intercom, Segment

Key integrations supported by Dreamdata but not HockeyStack*:  Zoho, G2, Zapier, Outreach, AdRoll, Google Data Studio, BigQuery 

*based on HockeyStack website

Pro Tip: Note that in case Dreamdata and HockeyStack doesn’t support an integration for a specific platform, both tools offer custom integrations as per demand. 

2. Detailed & Granular Reporting 

Although this isn’t necessarily a drawback with HockeyStack, users have complained about its lack of granularity. Reviews compare HockeyStack’s reporting capabilities to that of Google Analytics (GA4) — decent, but not detailed enough. Given that Dreamdata is a relatively mature product, their reporting capabilities provide deeper insights across conversion rates, customer lifetime value, and revenue attribution, and more. 

3. Customer Success

B2B analytics and attributions platforms are complex. While tools are becoming increasingly intuitive, it’s important for non-technical users to have easy access to timely, effective CSM. Fortunately, Dreamdata seems to support robust customer success servicing. This is especially valuable since Dreamdata’s implementation is reportedly an involved process. 

4. Templatized Reporting + UI

This is a double edged sword. Dreamdata delivers a structured, non-customizable dashboard and event framework that offers little room for flexibility. Dashboards are broadly grouped into the following categories: Engagement, Content, Performance, Journeys and Revenue. 

On one hand, this may be beneficial to smaller SaaS teams with limited technical resources as it’s likely to cater to most of their analytics and reporting needs. 

However, as the business starts to scale, its requirements may include custom dashboards and events that are company-specific. At this point, Dreamdata’s templatized reporting may be a drawback.

Although reviews suggest that Dreamdata involves a steep learning curve, it’s fair to assume that its UI is a step ahead of HockeyStack. HockeyStack is a relatively younger product and users tend to find the platform a little rough around the edges. That being said, reviews also suggest that they’re showing quick improvement. It’s likely only a matter of time before both platforms are on par with each other.

What HockeyStack Does Better

1. Implementation

HockeyStack makes strong claims about its rapid implementation process, suggesting that users can onboard and get started in a matter of minutes. This is in stark contrast to Dreamdata, which, as a more sophisticated tool, requires an involved, drawn-out implementation process. HockeyStack’s intuitive onboarding is a big advantage to smaller teams that don’t have the resources for dedicated onboarding or maintenance support. 

2. Custom Dashboards

Dreamdata’s platform focuses on solving the most common SaaS use-cases. As a result, the platform tends to be relatively less flexible. HockeyStack, on the other hand, promotes far more customizations across events, reports, dashboards, and visualizations. HockeyStack provides the option of preconfigured templates, but lets users build reports from scratch as well. While granularity may be lacking when compared to Dreamdata, this ability for flexible dashboarding may be helpful for teams looking for tailor-made, high-level reports. 

3. Funnels, Surveys & Impression Tracking 

Along with the key analytics and attribution features discussed, HockeyStack provides a few features that Dreamdata doesn't.

The most valuable of these features is probably Funnels. Funnels is a powerful analytics technique that helps users graphically visualize different stages of the sales cycle. These stages can be configured by users to, for example, see how website visitors are progressing from the home page, to the pricing page, and to a blog before scheduling a demo. 

Surveys is another feature that, as the name suggests, allows users to create surveys for self attribution. Finally, Linkedin Impression Tracking is another nifty feature that enables users to identify companies viewing Linkedin campaigns.

Dreamdata vs. HockeyStack: Pricing

[December 2023 Update]: Both HockeyStack and Dreamdata have revised pricing since this article was published. While HockeyStack have increased their starting price, Dreamdata have decreased theirs. Here's an updated rundown of pricing:

• Dreamdata pricing now starts at $599/mo for up to 30,000 MTUs
• HockeyStack pricing now starts at $1399/mo for up to 10,000 monthly visitors

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[Pricing as of February 2023]

• Dreamdata’s paid plans start at $999/month for 10 seats and up to 10,000 MTUs
• HockeyStack’s paid plans start at $949/month for 10 seats and up to 10,000 monthly visitors
• HockeyStack offers a 14-day free trial 
• Dreamdata offers a free web analytics tool as an alternative to Google Analytics

Still On The Fence About What B2B Attribution Tool To Go With?

And there you have it. A breakdown of Dreamdata and HockeyStack, and the reasons why one could be a better fit for you over the other. Still On The Fence About What B2B Attribution Tool To Go With? Here are a few reasons why you might want to consider Factors as well:

• Rapid, no-code integrations across ad platforms, CRM, MAP, and more 
• Granular, end-to-end analytics, attribution, and journeys across ad campaigns, website content, offline events, organic content, and more 
• Fully customizable events, properties, dimensions, and dashboard
• Dedicated customer success management 
• Funnels, path analysis and website tracking

And…

• Website visitor identification
• AI-fueled conversion insights
• Real-time Slack alerts
• Cost-effective analytics pricing plans starting at $399/month

Amplitude Vs. Factors.ai: What’s The Right Tool For You In 2023

B2B go-to-market teams are increasingly relying on marketing and website analytics tools to track and optimize performance. In response to this growing demand, established product analytics tools like Amplitude and Mixpanel are attempting to introduce their own versions of website analytics, marketing funnels, and multi-touch attribution. 

There’s no doubt that Amplitude is great at what it does. In fact, it’s rated as one of best product analytics solutions in the market today. But how does a tool that specializes in product analytics fare against a purpose-built marketing analytics solution like Factors.ai? And more importantly, what’s the better choice for your use-case? 

This blog compares Amplitude vs Factors.ai. Here’s what we’ll be covering:

• Marketing Analytics vs Product Analytics
• Comparing Common Features
• What Amplitude Does, That Factors Doesn’t
• What Factors Does, That Amplitude Doesn't
• What’s The Right Tool For You? 
• Comparison Table

tl;dr:

Marketing Analytics vs Product Analytics

Before diving into the comparison between Amplitude and Factors.ai, it’s worth highlighting the difference between marketing analytics and product analytics. 

Marketing analytics tools are geared towards tracking and optimizing performance across campaigns, website, and CRM. Popular marketing analytics tools you may have heard of include Google Analytics, Factors.ai, and Adobe Analytics. Marketing analytics can help answer questions such as:

• Which marketing efforts drive the most ROI and pipeline? 
• Which campaigns should be scaled or cut to optimize budgets?
• What marketing channels attract high-quality accounts to the website?   
• How are visitors engaging with the website? What’s helping and hurting conversions?
• What is the impact of content on pipeline? Which blogs resonate most with visitors?

Product analytics tools like Amplitude, Mixpanel, and Heap are better suited to tracking event-based data within web and mobile products. These tools help understand how customers use specific features within a product. Product analytics can help answer questions like:

• Which product features are most popular? How does usage vary by customer type? 
• How long do customers spend using a specific feature every week?
• Which customers are most likely to convert to higher tier plans? 
• Which customers are most likely to churn based on engagement?
• How can the product road map be finetuned based on product usage? 

Needless to say, marketing analytics tools are better suited to marketing & sales teams while product analytics tools are more helpful to product teams. Here’s a quick brief about Amplitude and Factors. 

About Amplitude

Amplitude is an established product analytics platform that works with commercial and enterprise-level companies like Atlassian, Dropbox, and Adidas. The platform is divided into three products: 

1. Amplitude Analytics 
2. Amplitude Experiment 
3. Amplitude CDP.

About Factors

Factors is an AI-fueled marketing analytics and attribution platform that works with SME and mid-market B2B companies like Razorpay, Chargebee and Clickhouse. The platform is divided into 4 broad categories: 

1. Marketing and website analytics
2. Marketing attribution 
3. Journeys analytics 
4. Visitor identification.

As Amplitude begins to dip its toes into website analytics, it makes sense to compare the two solutions. Here's a breakdown of thei common features:

Amplitude vs Factors.ai: Comparing Common Features 

1. Website Analytics

As discussed, Amplitude is primarily a product analytics platform while Factors.ai specializes in marketing and web analytics. However, since both solutions rely on event-based analytics, a comparison makes sense.

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1. Data

On paper, Amplitude offers a wider range of integrations than Factors. That being said, most of these integrations are geared towards product analytics use-cases. 

As a result, Amplitude’s integration with ad platforms (Google, Linkedin, etc) and CRMs (HubSpot, SalesForce, etc) tends to be limited. In turn, Amplitude’s functionality as a website analytics platform comes into question.

For instance, Amplitude cannot stitch website data with CRM data such as lead stages (MQLs, SQLs, etc), offline events (sales calls, emails, etc), or revenue figures (deal size, LCV, etc). Instead, Amplitude users are limited to website analytics that’s in isolation to the rest of the buyer journey. As B2B marketing teams become increasingly responsible for driving bottom line metrics, siloed website data is a serious limitation. 

Factors integrates with ad platforms, CRMs, and CDPs. As a result, it’s capable of linking website touchpoints, campaign data, and CRM events for holistic analytics and reporting. 

2. Metrics & KPIs

Businesses rely on a wide range of metrics to measure website performance and guide the decision-making process. Standard metrics like bounce rates and monthly visitors are available on both Factors and Amplitude. However, granular metrics like scroll depth or engagement rates become tedious to configure on the latter.

Given that Factors.ai is designed for B2B website analytics, it offers the ability to track a wide range of KPIs and metrics out-of-the-box. Furthermore, creating custom KPIs  is easier on Factors, involving zero developer dependency. 

Overall, both Amplitude and Factors do a good job of basic website analytics and reporting. But if you’re really trying to identify visitor behavior, track top-performing content, and drive BoFu conversions — Factors is probably the better choice.

2. Funnels

In short, a funnel is a sequence of steps taken by users across campaigns, website, CRM, and product. Here’s a funnel of prospects visiting the pricing page, submitting a demo form, qualifying as an SQL, creating an opportunity, and closing the deal:

Even before trying its hand at marketing and website analytics, Amplitude delivered powerful funnels for product analytics. With Amplitude, product teams can learn how to improve onboarding, see how customers progress from free plans to paid ones & more. 

Amplitude is now offering a similar, event-based funnel feature for websites. At the moment, Amplitude provides more room for funnel configurations and breakdowns as compared to Factors.

Factors is on par with Amplitude for most B2B funnel use-cases. That being said, Amplitude offers a few advanced functionalities that Factors doesn’t. For example only Amplitude can exclude specific events between funnel steps and compare multiple events at a single step.

Note that while Amplitude’s funnel capability is more flushed out than Factors, it is unable to bring in CRM data. As a result, Amplitude cannot create funnels across website and CRM events.

For instance, Amplitude and Factors can create the following funnel: 

Homepage -> Pricing page -> Features page -> Newsletter signup -> Demo request

But only Factors can create a funnel to visualize this journey:
Homepage ->  Demo request -> Opportunity created -> Deal created -> Deal won

Amplitude’s funnel is mature and better suited to product teams. Factors’ funnel showcases the wider picture and is better suited to GTM teams. 

3. Path Analysis

In short, path analysis or Pathfinder helps track aggregated customer flows across website and product. It helps map out events fired by users as well as the sequence of those events taken by users within a specific time period.

Pathfinder is a core feature in Amplitude. As a result, it's currently better than Factors’ path analysis in terms of refinement and functionality. Given that path analysis is a recent feature on Factors, it’s a matter of time before both tools are on par with each other. 

4. Marketing Attribution

In short, B2B marketing attribution is an analytics technique that measures the influence of various marketing touchpoints on desired conversion goals such as demos, pipeline, and revenue using a range of multi-touch attribution models. 

While Amplitude is a well-established brand in product analytics, it’s only just entering the marketing attribution space. Unlike Amplitude, marketing attribution has always been a cornerstone feature for Factors.ai. Given that this is Factors’ expertise, it outperforms Amplitude comprehensively when it comes to marketing attribution.  

Here are a few limitations with Amplitude’s marketing attribution that Factors solves for:

• Limited conversion milestones: As previously discussed, Amplitude cannot integrate with CRM data for marketing attribution. As a result, conversion milestones are limited to website events such as page views or form submissions. It is not possible to attribute marketing’s influence on key metrics like SQLs, pipeline, or deals using Amplitude. This makes for highly ineffective attribution for B2B marketing teams that are looking to prove their impact on revenue.

• No revenue attribution: Continuing with the previous point, Amplitude cannot attribute marketing touchpoints to revenue/spend metrics like ad spends, deals closed, deal size, etc. Given that a major use-case for B2B marketers is to measure ROI and improve resource allocation, this limitation hinders Amplitude’s attribution functionality in B2B settings. 

• No account-level attribution: Amplitude’s attribution is at a user-level as opposed to at an account-level. Unlike B2C transactions, B2B deals involve lengthy sales cycles and several stakeholders from a single buying account. Naturally, it makes sense to attribute marketing touch-points at an account level rather than by individual users. Since Amplitude does not support account-level analytics, its attribution tool remains largely ineffective for B2B teams.

• Limited granularity: At the moment, Amplitude can attribute marketing channels and campaigns to website events. No doubt, having high level data at a channel and campaign level is helpful. However, in order to really optimize marketing ROI and scale the right efforts, it’s essential to have granular attribution at an ad group and keyword level as well. Currently, this is not supported by Amplitude.

• Limited touchpoints: Currently, Amplitude’s attribution modeling  only considers paid ads and digital marketing touchpoints. Factors has the ability to attribute conversions to offline touchpoints such as events, webinars, and sales calls. This is a crucial piece of the puzzle for B2B marketers. 

Factors counters each of these limitations by delivering multi-touch attribution across keywords, ad groups, campaigns, channels, website, and CRM events at an account-level. All in all, Factors is the better choice when it comes to B2B marketing attribution.

So what’s the right tool for you? The answer depends on what you’re looking for. To break it down further, here are a few pointers on what each platform does that the other doesn’t. 

What Amplitude Does, That Factors Doesn't

• Product analytics: As discussed at the top of the article, Amplitude is a leading product analytics tool with exceptional retention analytics and cohort analytics. If these use-cases are important to you, look no further than Amplitude.‍
• Mobile analytics: Amplitude is capable of tracking event-level data on mobile (app-based) products as well. Since Factors focuses on web-based event analytics, it cannot analyze mobile events whatsoever.‍
• Experiments (A/B testing): Amplitude offers Amplitude Experiments to conduct A/B testing within the product and website. This is a valuable feature for product and design teams to test hypotheses on messaging, product features, and design.‍
• CDP: Amplitude provides a native customer data platform. The CDP helps improve data quality, identify new audiences, and connect behavioral data. At the moment, Factors can integrate with third-party CDPs like Segment for similar use-cases.

What Factors Does, That Amplitude Doesn’t

• Integrates marketing, CRM, and revenue data: This point has been discussed multiple times in this blog but it’s worth highlighting again. Unlike Amplitude, Factors can easily integrate data across ad campaigns, website, and CRM. This empowers holistic marketing analytics, funnels, and attribution rather than siloed web and product analytics.
• Intuitive UI & low-lift implementation: Any analytics tool involves a learning curve. That being said, Factors is significantly easier to implement and use as compared to Amplitude. Onboarding takes minutes as opposed to weeks or months. The platform is far more user-friendly for non-technical GTM teams to create relevant reports and dashboards. 
• Anonymous visitor identification (IP-lookup): A stand-out feature offered by Factors.ai is anonymous visitor identification. In short, Factors uses reverse IP-lookup technology to identify companies visiting your website without requiring the visitor to submit contact information. This is especially valuable to B2B companies looking to identify, track, and convert high-intent accounts that are already visiting the site.
• Automated AI-fueled insights: Factors’ AI-algorithm works to provide intuitive automated insights into what’s helping and hurting custom conversion goals. With Explain and Weekly Insights, teams can drill down into how keywords, campaigns, channels, website content, and offline events are influencing objectives such as increasing traffic, booking demos, ramping up newsletter subscriptions, or driving pipeline. 

So What’s the Right Tool For You?

This is the primary consideration when deciding between Amplitude and Factors — are you looking to monitor and improve your product? If so, Amplitude is the better choice. Are you a B2B team looking to monitor and optimize GTM performance? If so, Factors probably makes more sense. 

In summary...

Still on the fence about which tool may be better suited to you? See Factors in action over a quick demo

Compare Factors.ai with other tools:

1. Factors vs Google Analytics
2. Factors vs Bizible
3. Factors vs Dreamdata
4. Factors vs HubSpot Analytics

Given that B2B deals involve several touch-points and lengthy sales cycles, it has become harder to measure the effectiveness of marketing efforts. Hence attribution has become a crucial part of B2B marketing. 

Bizible is one of the tools at the forefront of attribution technology. Though Adobe has acquired Bizible and is now Adobe Marketo Measure, its attribution solution is still one of the best. 

But upon evaluating the customer reviews of Bizible, we found limitations that hinder the complete adoption of the tool. This blog deconstructs the drawbacks and finds why Bizible users search for alternatives. 

We also evaluate 7 Bizible competitors, their features, reviews, and pricing to help you find the best tool for your business.

Table of Contents

• Why are marketers looking for Bizible alternatives?
• An overview of the top 7 Bizible alternatives and competitors
• Top 7 Bizible alternatives and competitors
• Takeaway

Why are marketers looking for Bizible alternatives?

Bizible (Marketo Measure) is an ideal attribution software for businesses to track the ROI and effectiveness of marketing efforts against revenue or conversion. In addition, it provides insights into the marketing channels or platforms that trigger most customer engagement.

But is it the best marketing attribution software available in the market? Is it the right tool for your company? 

Though Bizible provides many valuable features, it is not the best choice for customers for multiple reasons. We have gone through the customer reviews on platforms like G2, Capterra, etc., and found that -

• Bizible is a costly tool.
• It takes a long time to set Bizible up.
• Bizible’s dashboard is not easy to use and understand.
• Data management in Bizible is complex and hard to understand.

• Bizible provides minimal integrations with third-party tools.

• The range of attribution models available in the tool is limited.
• Its funnel metrics feature’s performance is poor and is hard to filter.

These drawbacks lead businesses to look for user-friendly alternatives that meet their unique requirements and offer better value for money

So here's a list of solutions that are the best Bizible alternative based on user reviews, pricing, and many more factors. 

Top 7 Bizible alternatives and competitors

1. Factors.ai

Factors.ai is a marketing analytics and attribution tool that offers multiple features such as account deanonymization, ABM analytics, and customer journey analytics. The tool is purpose-built for SaaS marketers and can help amplify the marketing ROI.

Its no-code integration makes the onboarding process easy. In addition, Factors consolidates siloed data from multiple sources such as website visitor data, CRM, Clearbit data, and Google Search Console. This centralized data helps both marketing and sales teams to understand their customers, optimize their efforts, and strive for increased conversion rates. 

It has a retroactive data capture function. Once installed, the tool automatically tracks all events. 

Key features

• Multi-Touch Attribution:

Factors enables marketers to compare and choose the best attribution models for their business. It can track all essential touchpoints across multiple channels. This enables enterprises to attribute revenue to the most influential touchpoint accurately. 

• Account Deanonymization:

What makes Factors stand out from the crowd is account deanonymization. It helps B2B marketers identify anonymous account-level traffic and gain information about companies visiting, such as

• Company name
• Industry
• Employee range
• Revenue range. 

The above data can help businesses identify qualified traffic and their customer journey.

• ABM Analytics:

Factors provides a complete suite of analytics techniques to drive account-based marketing efficiently. Its dedicated website analysis can help marketers understand and improve the conversion rate with the following.

• Automated button tracking
• Custom domain tracking
• Granular page analytics

Also, the funnel analytics feature enables marketers to create and analyze data from multiple sources. It further helps marketers gain deeper insights into identifying trends, patterns, and other opportunities to optimize campaigns. 

• Journey Analytics:

Journey analytics helps marketers gain a comprehensive idea of the buyer's journey. The path analysis provides marketers with a vivid picture of the influential user paths, helping optimize marketing efforts. And the ‘Explain’ feature helps identify the variables that positively and negatively impact the defined goal. 

• Unified Dashboard:

Factors provide a customizable dashboard where you can visualize all your valuable customer data at a glance. This centralized customer data and the intuitive dashboard offer seamless tracking of performance metrics, enabling effective alignment across departments.

Pricing

A free trial is available. Paid plans are as follows;

• Starter - $399 per month 
• Growth - $799 per month

They provide two more plans, Custom and Agency. Contact Factors’ team to get more information about each plan.

2. HockeyStack

HockeyStack, a marketing analytics and attribution company, is another Bizible competitor. Its implementation is relatively easy, and you can complete it in two steps.

1. Copy-paste the tracking code of HockeyStack to your website and product. 
2. Connect your CRM, ad accounts, and every other tool in your stack - with one click. 

With HockeyStack, marketers can increase lead quality, track key accounts’ journeys, and measure and optimize ROI. The tool also allows marketers to measure their SEO efforts and understand their effect in the pipeline. 

Key features

• Attribution:

This feature visualizes the customer journey on all touchpoints both before and after the conversion. According to HockeyStack’s website, by attributing all properties in CRM to revenue, HockeyStack can help understand how customer support affects monthly recurring revenue (MRR), what features lead to higher MRR, and more. 

• Funnel Analytics:

It is a powerful analytical feature from HockeyStack that enables users to visualize various stages of the sales cycle. It helps provide visibility into how visitors are progressing within the website up until conversion. It also helps users understand where and why you are losing prospects.

• Unified Tracking: 

Marketers can collect and visualize all their valuable customer data in one place. The feature also provides a comprehensive view of the customers’ journey by tracking every interaction the users have with the website or product. 

• Custom Reports: 

HockeyStack provides several inbuilt templates for creating reports. Users can also make one from scratch. 

Pricing

A free version isn't available for HockeyStack, but they provide a live demo and a 14-day free trial. Their paid plan starts from $949 monthly for 10K visitors for 10 users. To get a clear idea about their plans, please contact the HockeyStack team.

3. Dreamdata

Dreamdata is a revenue attribution platform for B2B businesses. It allows marketers to measure and scale marketing performance across all channels. In addition, the tool can connect and analyze measurable touchpoints across channels, campaigns, and offline events. 

It can also help map the touchpoints in the customer journey and provide detailed marketing analytics reports on revenue attribution. 

Key features

• Multi-touch Attribution:

The feature provides a range of attribution models to determine channels that have the most impact on sales and revenue. It also helps improve the campaigns by identifying the most influential channels and attributing conversions to them.  

• Revenue Analytics:

This tracks and analyzes data from various channels and offers insights into the revenue performance of a business. It identifies the profitable channels and helps optimize marketing spending to ensure maximum ROI. 

• Customer Journey Analytics:

From the first touch to the last, Dreamdata offers complete customer journey details in real-time. It also allows marketers to track each account journey individually and visualizes its timeline. 

• Performance Attribution: 

This feature is specifically for measuring and analyzing the performance of all revenue-generating activities. The activities include paid advertisements on search engines and social media platforms. 

Pricing

Dreamdata offers both a free version and a free trial. In addition, they offer a ‘Team’ plan of $999/month and a ‘Business’ plan that depends on the custom business needs. 

4. Attribution

Attribution offers a complete multi-touch attribution solution for both B2C & B2B marketers. It is easy to set up and provides integration with third-party tools.

Attribution leverages cohort-based reporting to accumulate adequate data and gain insights at a granular level. The tool helps identify overlapping campaigns, visualize user timelines, and more. Their customer support is top-notch and is available 24/7.

Key features 

• Customizable Attribution Models: 

It allows marketers to customize the attribution models with minimal coding. 

• Robust Auditing:  

Attribution has a built-in auditing tool that works round the clock to keep track of revenue allocations and report counterfeit errors. 

• Multiple Built-in Integrations: 

Attribution supports many pre-built integrations to various CRM platforms, and B2B media channels like LinkedIn, Hubspot, Adroll, Outbrain, etc. 

• Delivers Actionable Insights:

Attribution’s simple and intuitive dashboard proactively delivers insights after analyzing customer data. Further, marketers can drill down the reports to improvise their marketing efforts. 

Pricing

Pricing details are not available on the website. Contact the Attribution team to learn more about their pricing plans.  

5. Full Circle Insights

Full Circle Insights is another Bizible alternative that provides full-fledged marketing attribution. It also includes lead management and funnel metrics solutions. 

The tool has native integration with Salesforce to help businesses accurately measure campaign performance. However, implementation takes time, and the usability depends on whether the marketing team is knowledgeable about Salesforce. 

Key features 

• Revenue and Pipelines Analysis:

This feature uses sophisticated pipeline analysis to identify which marketing campaigns contribute to deals. It provides detailed reports that help businesses optimize and improve their marketing strategy. 

• Out-of-the-box Attribution Models:

It provides various attribution models and enables marketers to customize them based on their business’s sales cycle and goals.

• Full Funnel Visibility: 

Analyze funnel metrics at a granular level and track down the lead responses down the funnel to optimize your marketing strategies. 

Pricing

Full Circle insights provide customized pricing plans. So, contact their team for more details.

5. CaliberMind

CaliberMind is a Bizible alternative that provides powerful marketing attribution. In addition, it is customizable, allowing the marketing team to build attribution models that meet their business needs.

The tool brings all customer behavior data across different channels and sources together in a single location. Also, the tool is adaptable to any tech stack and is scalable to grow with the business.

Key features

• Multi-touch Attribution:

The feature helps understand the marketing effort’s impact on revenue and customer acquisition. It can track user interactions across different channels and help assign credit to the channels that drive more conversion and revenue. It also focuses on identifying what is impacting the pipeline and predicts pipeline generation.

• Funnels:

This feature lets you identify why customers drop off during the journey. CaliberMind also helps you fill those gaps and enables you to get more out of your funnel. 

• Web Tracking:

The innovative web tracker provides better visibility into your website traffic. As a result, you can quickly identify who interacted with your brand and at which point in their buyer journey.

• Surge (ABM) Scoring:

Surge scoring based on account-based marketing (ABM) strategy lets you quickly identify potential customers with a high chance of buying your products or services. This feature leverages online behavior, customer information, and other relevant data to identify potential customers. 

Pricing

CaliberMind offers a free trial, but its pricing is not transparent. Contact their team for more details. 

6. Ruler Analytics

Ruler Analytics is a marketing attribution tool that provides closed-loop attribution across different channels. It can track online and offline touchpoints and automatically reveal channels that drive conversions. 

The tool can track customer journeys quickly and link revenue to appropriate campaigns. In addition, it allows marketers to see how quality leads behave and optimize their campaigns accordingly. Ruler Analytics is easy to implement and provides good customer support.

Key features

• Marketing Attribution:

Ruler Analytics empowers marketing teams to track each website visitor across multiple sessions. After conversion, the tool collects revenue data from CRM and attributes it to influential campaigns. It provides various attribution models and lets marketers select the right one for their business. 

• Opportunity Attribution:

This feature automatically attributes leads to the pipeline. Marketers can see how many leads are at each pipeline stage and track every lead to their source. 

• Offline Conversion Tracking:

Ruler Analytics lets you track and identify offline touchpoints that contribute to or lead up to conversions. 

• Data-Driven Attribution:

It generates actionable insights that help businesses;

• Help optimize their marketing efforts.
• Align marketing and sales team.
• Visualize a more accurate customer journey. 

Pricing

Ruler Analytics offers a free trial, and their pricing plans are as follows. 

• Small/Medium Business - £199 per month. 
• Large Business - £499 per month
• Enterprise - £999 per month. 

It also provides an Advanced plan with pricing available upon request (POA).

Takeaway

Those mentioned above are a few of the many Bizible alternatives you can use. Choosing an attribution tool ultimately depends on your business needs and requirements. 

For example, if you are a B2B marketer in search of an attribution tool, then Factors would be an ideal choice. The tool is built for B2B marketers, enabling them to identify all website visitors, attribute revenue, provide the right attribution models, run ABM, and more. Whereas, if you are a small business that wants to have constant customer feedback to improve the product, then choose HockeyStack. Its Survey add-on feature would be handy.

Following are some key factors to consider when choosing an attribution tool. 

• Make sure the tool is customizable to meet your business needs.
• Check the pricing of each tool and ensure it provides value for the investment.
• Make sure the tool can grow with your business.
• Go through the reviews to find out what other customers have said about the tool.
• Look into their customer service and find how helpful they are.

Keep these reviews and considerations in mind when you’re on the lookout for a Bizible alternative.