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:
- Amplitude Analytics
- Amplitude Experiment
- 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:
- Marketing and website analytics
- Marketing attribution
- Journeys analytics
- 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.
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
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