In today's data-driven world, B2B SaaS companies need a clear overview of their marketing team’s impact on the bottom line metrics. Marketing attribution tools are built for this particular purpose. They’re essential for measuring the effectiveness of different marketing channels and optimizing campaigns to drive ROI.
These tools use data analysis to determine the channels and touchpoints that are driving conversions and revenue. This enables marketers to make data-driven decisions and allocate their budgets more effectively.
tl;dr:
- Businesses in the SaaS B2B market need attribution tools to identify account journeys and how they ended up converting
- Attribution tools help you dissect touchpoint data and optimize marketing efforts for increased ROI
- Marketing attribution tools are to be used in tandem with your marketing tech stack
Why do SaaS companies need marketing attribution tools?
SaaS companies use attribution tools to find the most effective ways to acquire customers. These tools enable marketers to precisely identify the platforms that contribute to the revenue, and then work on strategies to get the most out of the top-performing touchpoints.
However, measuring the impact of various marketing channels on customer acquisition and revenue is easier said than done. B2B buyer journeys increasingly involve lengthy sales cycles, multiple touchpoints, and extensive buying committees
Attribution tools are designed to help B2B companies identify these touchpoints and analyze the effectiveness of their marketing efforts. In fact, a survey by AdRoll in 2016 found that companies using marketing attribution tools experienced a 70% increase in conversion rates, a 33% increase in customer retention rates, and a 20% decrease in customer acquisition costs.
Similarly, a study by Google found that companies using data-driven attribution models see a 10% increase in conversions on average.
The point is, with growing competition, using marketing attribution tools is no longer a matter of choice for SaaS enterprises. It gives your company a huge potential to grow its B2B SaaS market share by simply leveraging touchpoint insights.
All you need is the right marketing attribution tool… and we’ve got the best ones for you right here.
Top 7 marketing attribution tools for 2023
1. Adobe Marketo Measure (formerly Bizible)
Bizible is a multi-touch attribution tool that identifies the pipeline and revenue generated by each channel and campaign.
The tool attributes revenue streams with specific marketing channels, content, or cross-platform campaigns.
You can use Adobe Marketo to highlight the performance of each marketing campaign and accurately identify your most high-performing touchpoints.
It provides a holistic view of the marketing funnel which allows you to measure the impact of your marketing efforts, allocate budget to the right channels, and align marketing and sales teams using unified data.
Key features
Cross-channel engagement: You can target customers based on their current stage in the buying journey to keep them engaged through personalized social media messages, impactful emails, and more.
Connect sales and marketing: Centralize data such as prioritized leads and relevant customer insights to enable your sales and marketing teams to collaborate for better conversion.
Identify real-time behavior: Use data-rich profiles and AI to identify customer preferences and deliver personalized experiences
Integrations
You can integrate Adobe Marketo with:
- Salesforce
- Eloqua
- Pardot
- HubSpot
- Google Analytics
- Bing Ads
- Facebook Ads
- LinkedIn Ads
- Twitter Ads
- AdRoll
- DoubleClick by Google
- Kenshoo
- Marin Software
Adobe Marketo pros
- Choose from a wide range of attribution models based on the nature of your business
- Report and visualize data across marketing channels and campaigns
- Tap into real-time customer behavioral insights
Adobe Marketo cons
- Filtering data within the dashboard can be tricky
- Limited integration options
- Cannot see user activity on the account level
Pricing
Adobe Marketo offers 4 different subscription packages, each of which varies depending upon the size of your database. Each plan also comes with unique features starting from basic marketing attribution features (Growth package) to full-fledged automation and attribution insights (Ultimate package).
Reviews
- Bizible was great for creating our multi-touch attribution model and allowed our marketing team to gain real insight into our online and offline marketing efforts.
- For us, it wasn't the perfect tool only because we tended to look at the activity at the account level in Salesforce, but we could only view activity at the contact level within Bizible so there was a bit of a mismatch there.
2. Dreamdata
Dreamdata is a B2B revenue attribution tool that offers actionable revenue analysis by tapping into both online and offline touchpoints.
Dreamdata integrates with multiple data sources to provide a comprehensive view of the customer journey from initial engagement to final conversion. This enables you to optimize your business’s marketing strategies and drive growth.
This attribution software uses advanced algorithms and machine learning to credit different marketing channels and touchpoints along the customer journey. This helps identify the impact of each marketing touchpoint on revenue generation.
Key features
Web analytics: track engagement by drilling into each URL’s performance
No-code integrations: a user-friendly plug-and-play integration setup that doesn’t require a single line of code
Content analytics: Identify the top content pieces which influence leads and customers
Integrations
- CRM: Salesforce, HubSpot, Pipedrive, Close, Zendesk Sell, Zoho CRM, and Microsoft Dynamics.
- Marketing automation: Marketo, HubSpot, and Pardot
- Ad platforms: Google Ads, LinkedIn Ads, Facebook Ads, Bing Ads, Twitter Ads, Capterra, G2, Drift, and AdRoll
- Customer Success: Intercom
- Sales tools: Outreach
- Website tracking: Segment, analytics.js, Zapier, and Snowplow
- Data Warehouse: BigQuery, Amazon Redshift, and Snowflake
- BI tools: Google Data Studio, Tableau, Power BI, Metabase, Zendesk Sell, and Looker
- Reverse ETL: Hightouch, and Census
Dreamdata pros
- Easy to configure
- Provides accurate content marketing insights
- Stays competitive by swiftly rolling out new features
Dreamdata cons
- Limited flexibility
- The UI/UX is not user-friendly
- Onboarding is a hassle with minimal training material available
Pricing
The base plan of Dreamdata is free for individuals. Pricing starts at $999 for a team, while businesses with multiple teams can get a customized plan made to fit their requirements.
Reviews
- The way the team works with us to customize our specific needs to the numbers we get back around marketing attribution. It has taken time, but the insights we have access to are very powerful.
- The dashboard can be quite buggy & really isn't structured to help drill down on the top-level numbers to gather more granular insights on what is helping us succeed or which campaigns are performing well for us - which is difficult when it comes to reporting on the success or failure of campaigns.
3. Factors
Factors is a unified B2B visitor identification, marketing analytics and attribution tool that helps go-to-market teams monitor and optimize efforts across campaigns, website, offline events, and CRM.
Factors saves time and effort by empowering a consolidated view of the customer journey across the website, ad platforms, MAP and CRM. Such a unified view of your marketing metrics enables you to identify customer journeys with incredible detail.
Factors provides you with data about each and every touchpoint that users interacted with. This allows you to measure each touchpoint’s performance, optimize them accordingly, reduce customer acquisition costs in the process, and generate more revenue.
Key features
Data Integration: Choose from a list of attribution models that fits your business needs and connect your go to market data across CRM, website, and campaigns with no-code integrations
Visitor Identification: Identify anonymous traffic, track visitor behavior, and target high-intent accounts
ABM Analytics: Track your marketing campaigns, spends, and KPIs under one roof.
Journey Analytics: Visualize aggregated user paths and generate automated insights into what's helping and hurting conversions.
Revenue Attribution: Credit marketing touch-points to conversions and bottom line metrics with a range of multi-touch attribution models.
Account Timelines: Map out customer engagement at a user and account level. See how prospects interact with your brand and progress through the sales funnel.
Integrations
- HubSpot
- Segment
- Salesforce
- Salesforce
- LeadSquared CRM
- Google Ads
- Clearbit
- Facebook Ads
- Marketo Engage
- Drift
- Microsoft Advertising
- Google Search Console
Factors.AI pros
- A powerful, yet intuitive tool that offers a unified view of data from all touchpoints
- Advanced Event Analytics architecture with the flexibility to run User level or Account level reports
- It pulls the CRM data and makes it available for reporting in a chronological order
- Highly accurate in tracking user engagement metrics
- Auto-Click Capture enables you to conveniently measure CTA effectiveness across your website
- Extremely helpful customer support
Factors.AI cons
Limited integrations
Non-customizable graphical representations
Pricing
Factors provides multiple subscription plans across three different categories.
Factors Website Deanonymization
There are 4 subscription plans in the Factors Website Deanonymization category, starting at $99/month which identifies 500 companies, going up to an Enterprise level plan which can identify 5000+ companies for you.
Analytics and Attribution
The Attribution and Analytics category features 4 different subscription plans starting at $399/month allowing up to 10,000 users, and goes up to an Agency level plan for full-fledged marketing agencies.
Professional Services
Factors also offers Professional Services with three subscription plans. The price varies based on the number of hours you purchase. The higher your billable hours are, the lower your per-hour cost will be.
- Tier 1 is for early-stage teams and costs $50/hour for 10 hrs/month
- Tier 2 is for high-growth teams, and costs $45/hour for 20 hrs/month
- Tier 3 is for end-to-end consultation, and costs $40/hour for 30hrs/month
Reviews
- Best customer support I have seen for a SaaS product - The team helps build any reports we require.
- The UI can probably use a bit more polish, but I expect they'll get there considering how fast they're moving
- Loved the accuracy of marketing attribution to channels for lead generation of websites.
4. Ruler Analytics
Ruler Analytics is a marketing attribution and lead-tracking solution that maps your user journeys and credits the channels that bring in leads.
This tool allows you to identify leads and leverage reverse engineering to map out the entire journey of that lead. It also uses this data to predict how similar prospects would behave, allowing you to take proactive action by setting up campaigns to target such customers at different stages within the pipeline.
Ruler Analytics comes with various tracking features and multi-touch attribution that allows your business to measure the effectiveness of each campaign. However, unlike most other alternatives, Ruler Analytics gets to work only after a lead is converted, which means you won’t get any insights from abandoned visitors.
Key features
Form tracking: separate leads that converted from form submissions, and track their journey to identify why these converted and others didn’t.
Predictive analysis: identify potential risks by analyzing historical data to predict future business outcomes and take proactive measures accordingly.
Revenue analytics: identify which campaigns, channels, and keywords brought the lead in.
Integrations
- Google Ads
- Salesforce
- Google Analytics
- Bespoke
- Capsule
- HubSpot
- Insightly
- Microsoft Dynamics
- Pipedrive
- Proclaim
- Sugar CRM
- Unbounce
- Zoho
- Microsoft (Bing) Ads
… and more.
Ruler Analytics pros
- Allows you to track live chats, web forms, and calls from different marketing channels
- Comes with a large set of pre-built integrations
- Can be used to track offline events
Ruler Analytics cons
- The learning curve is bigger due to a cluttered dashboard
- Limited integration capabilities with some tools
- Dashboard often takes time to load
- Doesn’t offer account-level analytics which is a must-have for B2B companies
Pricing
Ruler Analytics offers 4 different subscription models starting at $199/month for SMEs with traffic of up to 50,000 visits. You can also opt for a fully customized plan to meet your particular attribution needs.
Reviews
- Great customer support. Easy implementation. Powerful online and offline tracking capabilities.
- The functionality to compare data from different time periods isn’t present within the dashboard - something beneficial to GA.
5. Full Circle Insights
Full Circle Insights is a multi-touch attribution tool best fit for marketing performance management.
Full Circle Insights helps businesses understand the entire customer journey by combining data from marketing automation, CRMs, and ad platforms. It tracks each touchpoint to gain relevant insights about activities that are driving the most revenue.
As a full-fledged marketing performance management tool, it offers numerous features and capabilities such as lead management, funnel metrics, and campaign attribution.
Key features
Salesforce Integration: tie your marketing campaigns directly to revenue and track the ROI of each campaign.
Digital Source Tracker: identify marketing offers across channels that drive conversions and pipeline.
Data Cleansing and Enrichment: ensure the accuracy of marketing data to amplify your marketing efforts, acquire more leads, and gain more revenue.
Integrations
Full Circle Insights doesn’t provide integrations of its own, but you can link it with other apps like Workato, which will enable Full Circle Insights to integrate with 1000+ SaaS apps.
Full Circle Insights Pros
- Easy to understand the data and attribution model
- Flexibility in curating how you want to track your business' funnel(s) and create a lead lifecycle.
- Accurate tracking and visibility into lead-initiated activity (response management).
Full Circle Insights Cons
- Implementation or rebuilding can be daunting without knowledge of how flows or processes will be affected. Like any other platform, constant iteration and changes need to be made.
- Since FCI is native to Salesforce, non-Salesforce users (for example HubSpot users) cannot use this platform.
- Any issue outside of the tool’s own configuration panel almost always requires an SFDC admin or developer to troubleshoot.
Pricing
Full Circle Insights offers 5 different pricing options:
- Matchmaker: lead to account matching and account-based marketing solution
- Digital Source Tracker: track the impact of your digital marketing
- Campaign Attribution: campaign performance measurement
- Funnel Metrics: full-funnel visibility
- Full Circle Enterprise: our flagship marketing performance management solution
To get accurate pricing details for each plan, talk to Full Circle Insight’s sales team through their website.
Reviews
- Since the model is built into SFDC, you can leverage custom reporting fairly easily. So, as your organization grows and changes, you can also easily update the model(s).
- The implementation is extremely time-consuming and you definitely need a dedicated SFDC Admin internally for implementation and upkeep.
6. Attribution App
Attribution App is a multi-touch attribution tool that shows your revenue, visits, conversions, and ROI through a single holistic dashboard.
Attribution App offers attribution at the user and account level, enabling users to truly understand the buyer journey and credit touchpoints that drive ROI. Attribution also offers affiliate tracking to help you compare affiliate channels within a single window.
You can use the tool’s cohort-based reporting feature to show ROAS per channel per day/month for actionable insights, and export all the data and insights for further analysis.
Key features
Multi-touch attribution: analyze interactions across channels and accounts and set up intuitive workflows for complete reporting flexibility.
Affiliate tracking: invest in affiliate marketing with confidence, track all your partner campaigns, and consolidate all that data within the attribution dashboard for analysis.
Data export tool: automatically or manually export Attribution App’s data for reporting and analysis and make the most out of the acquired insights into customer journeys.
Integrations
- AdRoll
- Bing Ads
- Facebook Ads
- Google Ads
- Heap
- HubSpot
- Magento
- Marketo
- Outbrain
- Pipedrive
- Quora
- Recurly
- Salesforce
- Segment
- Shopify
- Stripe
- Twitter Ads
- Woocommerce
- WordPress
- Zendesk
… and more.
Attribution Pros
- Easily build custom attribution models from click data
- Powerful multi-touch attribution platform.
- Centralized dashboard with great visualizations
Attribution Cons
- High page load times
- Keyword-level data from AdWords isn’t passed into the Attribution App.
- Limited customizations
Pricing
No pricing information is available on the website.
Reviews
- Incredible multi-touch attribution platform with outstanding support.
- We are not allowed to customize reporting views on the dashboard. (For example, I can't see signups next to purchases. these are two different pulls)
7. HockeyStack
HockeyStack is a no-code revenue attribution tool that unites data from different touchpoints to identify account-based intent at different stages of the buying journey.
HockeyStack allows you to highlight the channels that are driving high-quality leads so you can allocate marketing efforts in the right direction to increase ROI. It gives you a deeper understanding of your website’s visitors’ behavior, coupled with advanced tracking and analytics features to help you swiftly take data-driven business decisions.
HockeyStack also allows you to track clicks, form submissions, views, bounce rates, session timelines, and more, all of which can be filtered by geographic, demographic, and behavioral attributes for clearer analysis.
Key features
LinkedIn impression tracking: take a step beyond measuring CTRs. Track all your LinkedIn views, campaign impressions, and engagement at the account level and identify the social media platform’s influence on your pipeline.
Attribution analysis: Collect data from all touchpoints including pre- and post-conversion journeys and view them in a unified visual dashboard
Unified tracking: execute a single code for setup and attribute each CRM field with revenue within minutes
Integrations
- CRM: HubSpot CRM, Salesforce, Pipedrive, Close, Microsoft Dynamics
- Ads: Google Ads, LinkedIn Ads, Twitter Ads, Facebook Ads, Capterra Ads, TikTok Ads
- Account-based marketing: 6sense, Rollworks, Albacross
- Marketing Automation: Mailchimp, Pardot, Marketo, HubSpot Marketing Hub
HockeyStack pros
- Cookieless analytics
- Minimal code implementation in minutes
- Customizable dashboard
HockeyStack cons
- No content heatmaps
- Limited integration options and requests take several days to a week to build
- Limited alerts and notifications
Pricing
You can purchase HockeyStack’s subscription for $949/month. This base package is offered with a 30-day refund policy and can be used to identify 10 seats and up to 10k users.
Reviews
- We used HubSpot before and we couldn't see what happened before the lead filled out a form or before we went outbound. HockeyStack showed the hidden touchpoints before the person ever became a lead.
- We noticed data accuracy problems a few times. I believe their responsive team is working hard on the product and trying to improve the quality. We're also looking forward to seeing the AMP version of their script.
What should you look for in an attribution tool?
Not all marketing attribution software is made equal. That’s why you need to consider several factors before searching for the right attribution tool for your business, such as:
Integrations
It is essential to see if an attribution software can integrate with your existing marketing technology stack. This means that it should seamlessly connect with your email marketing software, your social media platforms, CRM, and any other tool you use for marketing. In addition, you should also be able to integrate your tool with ad platforms and websites for a holistic view of your pipeline.
Some attribution tools may have limited integrations, but are open to create customized ones for your marketing tech stack. In this case, you should see their turnaround time to build an integration for your business, and the quality of customer support it offers during the process.
Pricing
You need to find a fine line between the features offered by an attribution tool and the subscription models it offers. Compare different tools to find the most competitive pricing and don’t overpay for features you may not need.
Furthermore, pricing strategies vary from one attribution tool to another. While some tools charge on the number of seats, others charge on the number of conversions. Study each alternative’s pricing model to determine the one that works best for you.
Ease of use
Your attribution tool will be the heart of all your marketing, analysis, and reporting activities, which means you will be utilizing it for several hours every week. That’s why it needs to have a simple and user-friendly UI/UX so there are no hiccups in onboarding or operations.
In addition, consider features like real-time alerts and automation to get rid of administrative tasks. This will also enable you to focus on analysis and stay on top of your marketing efforts without digging into the data.
Additional considerations
Your attribution tool should be able to align content, lead gen, marketing, and sales teams by having answers to all of their potential questions about each channel.
Remember: an attribution tool is not a magic wand that can resolve all your pipeline concerns independently. You need to have a robust marketing technology stack that can align with your attribution software to direct your marketing team’s efforts.
Factors is one multi-touch marketing attribution tool that checks all the boxes to become the perfect fit for your business. Don’t take our word for it: take a free demo here.
Or sign up with Factors now to change the way you leverage account journeys forever.
FAQs
How do you measure marketing attribution?
You can measure marketing attribution through different models such as:
- First-touch attribution
- Last-touch attribution
- Multi-touch attribution
Each of these models uses different metrics to identify the efforts involved in marketing, cost incurred, and revenue generated. You can use an attribution tool with one or a mix of different models to effectively measure your marketing attribution.
What attribution model should I use?
Different attribution models use different parameters to measure marketing attribution. Each of these models offers a unique set of benefits, for example:
- First-touch attribution: gives conversion credit to the very first touchpoint in the journey allowing you to identify which channel or piece of content got your customer started on their journey
- Last-touch attribution: gives conversion credit to the last touchpoint in the journey that led a customer to make the purchase
- Multi-touch attribution: gives credit to each touchpoint in the journey that contributed to the user’s decision, and eventually led to conversion. Some touchpoints play a more important role in conversion than others.
The point is that each attribution model is different, and that you should opt for the one that works best for your business.
