Factors Blog

B2B teams invest heavily in paid campaigns, organic social, content assets, events, cold calls and more to drive relevant traffic to their websites. However, only about 4% of this traffic makes itself known through form submissions — leaving GTM folk in the dark about the remaining 96% of anonymous accounts.

Without the right tools, this translates to hundreds, if not thousands of potential deals down the drain every year — simply because teams are unable to identify the majority of in-market, brand-aware accounts already visiting their websites. 

Visitor identification software (aka website deanonymization) helps B2B teams discover these anonymous accounts and spot hidden opportunities based on firmographics, intent, and engagement. 

This blog highlights everything you need to know about visitor identification: what it is, how it works, where it helps, and what you should look for in a visitor identification tool.

TL;DR

• Visitor identification reveals anonymous B2B website visitors using IP lookup and firmographic data.
• Sales teams can prioritize in-market accounts for intent-based outreach.
• Marketing teams optimize ad spend by retargeting known accounts and improving content strategy.
• Key tool selection criteria: accuracy, integrations, scalability, support, and pricing.

What is visitor identification & why is it important? 

Visitor identification is the process of discovering anonymous companies visiting a website using IP-lookup technology. Visitor identification tools also enrich this information with firmographics and engagement data such as:

• Country & State-level geographics
• Technographics
• Industry
• Page views 
• Button clicks
• Scroll-depth 

This data is valuable as it can be leveraged to identify, qualify and convert sales-ready accounts with intent-based outreach and targeted marketing efforts (as opposed to expensive, inefficient spray & pray tactics). In short, more pipeline with already existing traffic! 

Note: Privacy-first intelligence solutions like Factors do not identify, monetize, or share personal information or user data such as mail IDs or phone numbers in either raw or derived forms. Visitor identification tools only match IP-to-company data at an account level. 

How does visitor identification work? 

Not to get too technical but visitor identification uses rDNS or reverse IP-lookup to discover anonymous accounts visiting a website. This is essentially a tiny line of code that sits on a website to track and match IP addresses. So, if an account lands on your website from a corporate network, visitor identification tools will connect the IP-address back to an IP-database and map it to a company name or domain. 

Once the company is identified, the database can also share up-to-date firmographic information (industry, company size, geography, etc) to help qualify accounts based on your ICP criteria.

Now, it’s important to note that IP-lookup is never 100% accurate. There may always be situations where a visitor is working out of a non-corporate network resulting in imperfect account matches. To counteract inaccurate account identification, Factors works with industry-leading data partners (6sense and Clearbit) to deliver best-in-market identification match rates of up to 64%. For context, this translates to about 27% more companies identified than the closest alternatives out there. 

The benefits of website visitor identification

So far, we’ve explored what website visitor identification is and how it works. But how can it actually help marketers and sales folk? Here are a few benefits our customers have been realizing:

1. Intent-based sales outreach

It’s all too common for B2B teams to purchase account lists and have SDRs reach out with “personalized” mails and cold calls — only for the outcome to be a disappointing response rate of less than 2%. 

And if you think about it, it’s really not surprising. While it’s easy enough to find a list of companies that would, in theory, make good customers, it’s nearly impossible to know when these accounts are actually in-market to purchase your product. It’s throwing sales resources at the wall and hoping something will stick. Not very effective. 

With visitor identification, sales teams can discover companies that are problem, solution and brand aware, and reach out to them with relevant messaging based on their previous engagement. For example, an ICP account may be visiting your product comparison blog and your pricing page. Based on this, we can assume that they’re in-market and are weighing out their options. In this case, reaching out with tailor-made messages around limited time offers or battle cards will certainly be more persuasive than a generic mail that says “Hey! Let’s chat”. 

2. Revive lost opportunities 

In addition to helping teams discover and target net new logos, visitor identification softwares can alert you to previously lost opportunities that are back in market Factors takes account intelligence a step further by capturing engagement across websites, G2 reviews, and LinkedIn ad impressions, at an account level. Custom alerts can be configured to notify teams in real-time via Slack or MS Teams when once cold accounts are showing signs of spark — so you can strike while the iron’s still hot. 

3. Maximize return on ad spend

Even early-stage B2B teams invest significantly in search ads, paid social, and other digital marketing channels. Unfortunately, even the most optimistic benchmarks place conversion rates at around 10%. This means that for every 100 paid visitors or accounts that view an ad, only 10 of them actually sign-up for a demo or trial. At scale, this becomes priceyyy!

With visitor identification, marketing teams can identify which accounts the remaining 90% of traffic is from, filter those accounts down to ICP companies, and re-target them efficiently to drive far more conversions. This helps wring out every last bit of RoAS from your paid efforts, resulting in more pipeline, with less spend. 

4. Create content that converts

B2B teams often pump out content assets with little visibility into which companies are reading what. With insights from visitor identification, marketers can track what assets and pages target accounts care about most and personalize efforts accordingly. Additionally, teams can see what assets work best at attracting ICP traffic and iterate upon their content strategy accordingly. 

Without a visitor identification tool, marketers would only be able to see the number of anonymous sessions and total time spent on blogs. But with a visitor identification tool, it could be revealed that enterprise accounts spend more time around privacy-compliance material while early-stage teams spend more time comparing pricing and cost-effectiveness. Accordingly, marketers can personalize campaigns and outreach based on what’s relevant to the target audience  

What should you take into account when purchasing a visitor identification software?

• Accuracy: There are several visitor identification solutions out there, but only a few offer robust, uncompromising data quality. Factors connects with a database of over 50B+ IP-addresses to provide industry-leading identification rates of up to 64%.
• Integrations: It’s one thing to identify anonymous accounts, but it’s just as important to have that data be accessible to relevant stakeholders. Factors integrates with CRMs, Ad campaigns, CDPs, G2 and more so you can identify accounts across websites, ad impressions, product reviews and push relevant data back anywhere you like with Webhooks. 
• Scalability: As your business continues to grow, so will the volume of website traffic. Ensure that your tool of choice is capable of scaling with your growth. Factors’ plans start at identifying as few as 100 accounts per month all the way up to 10,000. 
• Support: Visitor identification software can be tricky. Consider the quality and extent of customer support you’ll receive when making a purchase decision. Factors, for instance, offers dedicated customer success management to all its paid plans to ensure that customers get the most value out of the platform. 
• Cost: Consider the stage your business is in when making a purchase decision. Tools like 6sense and Clearbit are phenomenal enterprise-grade identification tools but can run you a pretty penny as they offer much more than is needed. Learn more about Factors pricing here. 

About Factors

Factors is an account intelligence and analytics platform that helps B2B teams discover, qualify, and convery hidden opportunities across their ecosystem. What makes Factors different from other visitor identification solutions out there? Here’s a breakdown: 

• Data quality: Factors achieves an identification match-rate of up to 64% — that’s 27% more accounts than the closest alternative.
• Granular analytics: Factors is built upon strong analytics and attribution foundations. It provides far more granularity in terms of website metrics, impression tracking, and other KPIs as compared to alternatives. 
• Scoring & timelines: Factors tracks account-level activity across websites, reviews, ads, offline events and more to provide a bird’s eye view of the customer journey and score accounts based on engagement and intent. 

Why Visitor Identification is Essential for B2B Growth

B2B teams invest heavily in driving website traffic through paid ads, content, events, and outbound efforts. However, only about 4% of visitors fill out forms, leaving 96% of potentially valuable accounts unidentified. Without knowing who these anonymous visitors are, teams risk losing high-intent leads and missing revenue opportunities.

Visitor identification tools solve this by using IP lookup technology to uncover company details like industry, size, and location. They enrich this data with engagement insights, such as page views and ad impressions, helping teams qualify accounts and prioritize outreach based on intent.

These tools empower sales teams to focus on in-market accounts, revive previously lost opportunities, and improve ad spend efficiency by retargeting known visitors. Marketing teams gain clarity on which content resonates with high-value accounts, enabling better campaign personalization.

When choosing a visitor identification tool, consider data accuracy, CRM and ad platform integrations, scalability, support, and cost. Solutions with high match rates and account-level engagement tracking drive the most value. Implementing visitor identification bridges the gap between anonymous traffic and sales-ready leads, turning overlooked website visits into pipeline growth.

FAQs

1. Can Factors identify individual users who visit my website? No. Factors is a privacy-first intelligence solution that does not collect user-level data unless users choose to share this information. Factors does not identify phone numbers, mail IDs, or any other personal information from anonymous website visitors. Our data enrichment is limited to company-level properties such as account names, industries, technographics, etc. Factors has no ownership rights over your user data. We do not share or monetize first-party data collected from clients (you) in any way, shape or form. If granted access to client data, we do so only as a data processor under our DPA. 
2. Is Factors privacy-compliant? Privacy and security are central values to our business. Factors recognizes the importance of protecting vital account and user-level data entrusted to us by our clients and data partners. Accordingly, Factors is aligned with GDPR (General Data Protection Regulation), CCPA (California Consumer Privacy Act), and PECR (Privacy and Electronic Communications Regulations) standards. We continually strengthen our already robust protection measures via regular revisions of our policies and practices.

From aligning the sales and marketing team to providing personalized campaigns to increasing the likelihood of converting a potential customer, ABM has become a key marketing strategy for B2B marketers. In fact, B2B companies now invest about a third of their marketing budget in ABM. 

There is no doubt that ABM has proven to be effective in increasing conversion rates and ROI.

But how do you measure the effectiveness of an ABM campaign? Which metric should be considered for the purpose? 

Don’t worry, we are here to help you. Let’s dive into the 9 ABM metrics you should measure to understand the campaign’s performance.

9 ABM Metrics to Measure Campaign Performance

1. Total Addressable Market

TAM (Total Addressable Market) refers to the total revenue opportunity available for a product or service within a specific market.  

A common approach for calculating TAM is as follows.

TAM = (Total no. of potential customers) * (Annual contract value )

If a company offers a product that costs $9600 annually and its target customers are all SMBs in the US, which is 10,000, then the TAM will be 96 million dollars per annum.

TAM= 10,000  9600

TAM= 96,000,000

While TAM isn’t directly an ABM metric to track, it provides key insights into the following:

• The size of their market opportunity
• The potential revenue estimate

2. Pipeline Generated

This refers to the total amount of potential revenue that is currently in the sales pipeline. 

By tracking the pipeline generated, teams can learn the following. 

• How many new opportunities have been created?
• How are these opportunities progressing through the pipeline?
• How much potential revenue can the business generate?

If you consistently generate more pipelines, it means the ABM campaigns are resonating with your target accounts and driving meaningful businesses.

Keep in mind that this metric may vary over time as opportunities progress through the pipeline. So, it’s important to track it regularly and adjust your ABM campaigns accordingly. 

3. Close Rate (Conversion Rate)

Close rate refers to the percentage of target accounts that have moved through the sales funnel and converted into paying customers. 

The general formula to calculate a close rate is given below.

Close Rate=[(Total no. of accounts converted)/ (Total no. of target accounts engaged)] *100

So, if a company engages with 100 target accounts in an ABM campaign and only converts 20 of them, then the close rate will be 20%.

Close Rate= 20 100  100

Close Rate= 20%

By tracking the close rate over time, one can identify which aspects of the ABM campaigns are working and which are not. Furthermore, businesses can calculate the close rate at each stage of the sales funnel and identify inefficiencies in the sales process. This can help businesses refine their ABM strategy and maximize results. 

Hence, use close rate as a critical ABM metric to measure and improve the ABM campaign’s success. The following are some best practices to optimize close rates and yield better results.   

• Select accounts that align with your ICP criteria.
• Personalize the marketing and sales strategies to provide the target account’s needs and address their pain points.
• Align your marketing and Sales team to ensure that the messaging and offers are consistent through the sales funnel.
• Develop a multi-channel engagement strategy to maximize the chance of conversions.
• Regularly track and analyze the metrics and optimize the ABM campaigns as needed. 

4. Pipeline Velocity

Pipeline Velocity refers to the speed with which a lead moves down the sales pipeline. 

A lower pipeline velocity would indicate that there is friction in the pipeline. This friction needs to be addressed to avoid the loss of potential customers. You can calculate the pipeline velocity of your business using the following formula.

PV= (S *W *D)/ L

PV - pipeline velocity,
S - number of SQLs in the pipeline

W - win rate (%)

D - average deal size

L - length of the sales cycle. 

So, if a company has 60 SQLs in their pipeline, with a win rate of 20% and an average deal size of $10,000, and the length of the sales cycle is 90 days. Then the Pipeline velocity will be $1333 per day. 

Pipeline Velocity = 60  20%  10,000 90

Pipeline Velocity = 120,000 90

Pipeline Velocity = $1333.33 per day

To increase the pipeline velocity, focus on the following.

• Increase your lead quality and ensure that the visitors fall in your ICP criteria by tracking qualified traffic.
• If you are losing customers from the pipeline, determine what prompted it. Accordingly, make necessary changes to ensure they stay put and increase the win rate.
• Align the marketing and sales team to make the messaging consistent and relevant for the prospects. Also, make the sales process more streamlined and remove any unnecessary steps. Both these can help improve sales efficiency and subsequently shorten the sales cycle.

5. Churn rate

From a B2B perspective, it is the rate at which a company loses its clients or customers.

It is a crucial ABM metric as it helps businesses understand the health of their customer base and their ability to retain them. A business can calculate the churn rate by dividing the number of customers a company lost during a specific period of time by the total number of customers the business had at the beginning of that period. 

So, if a company starts the quarter with 100 customers and loses 20 customers by the end of that quarter, then the churn rate will be 20%.

Churn Rate= 20  100  100

Churn Rate= 20%

A high churn rate is detrimental to a B2B company. It will result in revenue loss and increased expenditure to acquire new customers to replace lost ones. Following are a few ways to reduce the churn rate.

• Build strong relationships with the customers
• Provide excellent customer service
• Offer personalized solutions
• And deliver on the promise you advertise

6. Customer Lifetime Value

CLV refers to the total net profit a company can generate from a customer over the entirety of their relationship. 

It is an important metric to measure as it helps determine the value of a customer and helps businesses decide on how much they should spend on acquiring new customers or retaining existing ones. The larger the customer lifetime value, the less you need to spend on acquisition costs. 

When it comes to Customer Lifetime Value, there is no specific formula to calculate it. But if you consider the definition, “CLV is how much a customer is paying to a company over a period of time", then you can calculate CLV with the following equation. 

CLV= Avg. Monthly Recurring Revenue * Avg. time duration a customer stays with a business

So if a company’s average MRR (Monthly Recurring Revenue) is $1000 and the average time period a customer chooses to stay with the company is 8 months, then the CLV will be $8000.

CLV= $1000  8

CLV= $8000

Average Customer Lifetime Value per Industry

Source: firstpagesage

7. Customer Acquisition Cost

CAC, or Customer Acquisition Cost, refers to the total cost spent by a company to attract new customers.

The metric is calculated in a set period of time, and the formula for calculating it is as follows.

CAC= (Cost of sales and marketing/ New customers acquired)

So, if a company spends $400K on sales and $300K on marketing and generates about 700 customers by the end of the fiscal year, then CAC will $1K per customer.

CAC= $400K +$300K  700

CAC=$700K   700

CAC= $1K

Compare the Acquisition cost with the Customer Lifetime Value (CLV) to understand the business’s profitability. If the cost of acquiring a customer is higher than the revenue generated from that customer over their lifetime, then the business is likely to lose money. In this case, it’s time to reevaluate the marketing strategies or consider investing in alternative approaches to lower the acquisition cost.

Average Customer Acquisition Cost per Industry

Source: firstpagesage

8. Average Deal Size (ADS)

This is a metric used to measure the average value of each sale made by a company.

By tracking the average deal size, a business can understand how much the customers are willing to pay/invest in their products/services. 

ADS is often calculated monthly or on a quarterly basis and can be calculated by dividing the total value of all deals closed by the total number of deals closed during a given period.

ADS= (Total value of the deals won  /Total no. of deals won)

So, if a company closes 10 deals in a given month, and the total value of the deals is $200,000, then Average Deal Size is $20,000.

ADS= $200,000   10

ADS= $20,000

9. Length of Sales Cycle

Sales cycle length is the total time a company takes to complete a sale, from the customer’s initial contact with the company to the final closing of the deal.

The sales cycle length differs from industry to industry. For example, according to Klipfolio, the average B2B SaaS sales cycle length is 83 days, whereas, for a B2C company, it will be a week or less. 

It is an important metric for businesses as it can impact the revenue, profitability, and overall success of the company. For example, if the length of a sales cycle is higher for a company than its competitors, it indicates that there are inefficiencies in the sales process that need to be addressed. 

If you want to calculate the sales cycle length, simply divide the total number of days taken to close each deal by the total deals won. 

Sales Cycle Length= (Total no.of days taken to close each deal  / Total no. of deals won)

So, if a company closed three deals, each taking 35, 55, and 90 days, then the average sales cycle length will be 60 days.

Sales Cycle Length= 35 +55 +90 3

Sales Cycle Length= 180 3

Sales Cycle Length= 60 days

Measure the Success of Your ABM Campaigns with Factors

Factors, with its ABM analytics feature, enables users to access a range of different tools and techniques for analyzing and presenting the data in a way that is easy to understand and use. 

• Factors’ deanonymization feature can provide a complete view of your visitors at an account-level and track entire customer journeys. 
• Its robust CRM integration can empower your marketing team to segment accounts and contacts based on criteria like firmographic, behavior, and engagement. This allows marketing teams to identify high-value accounts and target them with personalized campaigns. 
• Its customizable dashboard provides visualization of all critical data, data-driven insights, and more - all within a single dashboard. The feature provides a comprehensive view of all accounts, helping marketers to get all the information to make an informed decision on marketing strategies. 

Ready to take your ABM campaigns to the next level? Look no further than Factors, and ensure your efforts pays off. Book a demo to understand how factors can take your ABM campaigns to the next level. Or sign up here to try Factors for free!

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.

‍

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

The key to attracting new customers and retaining existing ones is by providing a personalized experience. That is true in the case of B2C, as proven by many studies and surveys.

But what about B2B? Does offering personalized emails, sales calls, or website content make a positive impact?

Well, it seems it does! As Abe Aswathi, Principal – Customer & Marketing at Deloitte, points out in an article.

"Business customers are heavily influenced by their experiences as consumers. These consumers, many of whom are younger professionals, now seek the same experiences in their business interactions."

Now that we've established that personalization drives results for B2B buyers, let's explore how we can go about personalizing B2B marketing efforts with account identification.

In this article, we will be looking at

• What are visitor identification tools?
• Are visitor identification tools the same as visitor tracking software?
• 11 visitor identification tools that can help you understand your users better.

What Are Visitor Identification Tools?

Visitor identification tools help businesses identify anonymous companies visiting a website — without the need for form submissions. These tools use advanced IP-tracking technology to associate IPs with their respective companies. Additionally, the tools can track website behavior and journey through the sales cycle and provide insight into how they engage with web content.

Sales and marketing teams can leverage this information to create personalized emails, web content, and more to engage with key decision-makers in the identified companies. Doing so results in higher engagement rates, conversions, and customer satisfaction.

11 Visitor Identification Tools to Understand Your Visitors Better

Our list is based on extensive market research. We shed some light on what the tools do, their key features and the integrations they offer. In addition, we also show some critical user reviews and pricing of these tools.

1. Factors

Factors is an AI-powered account identification and analytics software that helps teams discover, qualify, and convert anonymous companies visiting their website.

The tool’s marketing analytics and attribution platform enables sales and marketing teams, irrespective of size, to analyze, attribute and optimize their efforts and drive revenue to new heights.

Factors also tracks account-level website behavior and progress through the buyer’s journey. Right from the initial visit, helping inbound marketing teams get a clear picture of the campaigns that are driving engagement and bringing in qualified leads. 

Content teams also benefit from this tool as they can easily measure prospects' engagement with website content and discover what is bringing in MQLs.

Product marketing teams are able to narrow down and plan their marketing strategy based on the vast information Factors provided.

Features

1. ACCOUNT IDENTIFICATION: Factors account identification capability powered by 6Sense enables businesses to identify anonymous website traffic, analyze website engagement, and target high-intent accounts with ease. Factors delivers the highest match rates in the industry, revealing up to 64% of companies visiting your website.

2. MULTI-TOUCH ATTRIBUTION: Factors’ account identification technology, combined with integrations with CRM and MAP, allows marketers to map the complete customer journey at an account level. It allows users to draw data-driven conclusions by comparing various attribution models, win rates, and deal sizes side by side. 

3. UNIFIED ACCOUNT ANALYTICS: Factors offers a wide range of complementary features such as end-to-end marketing analytics, user and account journey mapping, path analysis, and more. All these features help sales and marketing teams measure and analyze their efforts while gaining insights into website traffic. Based on this information, they can optimize their effort to improve conversion rates.

4. AI-POWERED FEATURE “EXPLAIN”: 'Explain' empowers marketers with automated insights and root cause analysis on any conversion goal so they can understand what's working and not working. 

Integrations

Factors seamlessly integrates with the following list of tools and softwares.

• Hubspot
• Facebook Ads
• LinkedIn
• Google Ads
• Salesforce
• Segment
• Bing Ads
• Rudderstack
• Marketo
• 6Sense
• Clearbit
• Leadsquared

Reviews

Pricing

Factors offers three services, each with its own pricing:

Deanonymization: Where you can identify anonymous companies that are visiting your website, analyze user behavior, and generate high-intent leads. Pricing starts at

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

Analytics & Attribution: This offers website analytics, events and form tracking, multi-touch attribution, and more. The pricing for this is as follows:

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

Professional Services: Get expert analytics, consulting, and technical support that is tailor-made for your B2B marketing team. 

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

2. Clearbit

Clearbit is a B2B data activation platform that provides data enrichment and market intelligence. It helps B2B teams enrich their existing CRM data and helps them understand their customers better, identify prospects, & personalize interactions with real-time intelligence.

Features

1. ENRICHMENT: Clearbit has a database with over 250 data sources having millions of data points. Users can use the data to update their existing CRM records and also identify new leads.

2. REVEAL: Reveal is the de-anonymization platform of Clearbit. It helps businesses identify companies visiting their website. Sales and marketing teams can then target high-intent accounts with personalized emails, ad campaigns, and sales calls to increase conversion rates.

3. CAPTURE: Clearbit automatically adds the contact information of key decision-makers from best-fit accounts directly into the integrated CRM. 

Integrations

Some of Clearbit’s popular integrations are:

• Salesforce
• Segment
• Marketo
• Slack

Reviews

Pricing

Clearbit does not provide any information about their pricing.

3. Leadfeeder

Leadfeeder is a well-known website visitor tracking software that helps B2B businesses find companies visiting their website. Additionally, Leadfeeder also helps sales teams qualify and connect with key decision-makers in the companies.  

Features

1. QUALIFY HIGH POTENTIAL LEADS: Based on web activity, Leadfeeder allots a score for each visitor account. Sales and marketing teams can use this to identify best-fit companies to align their efforts.

2. LEADFEEDER CONTACTS: With this feature, sales teams are able to determine the best person to connect with in a qualified company. After identifying leads, teams can focus their efforts on converting them into paying customers.

3. AUTOMATIC CRM SYNC: Leadfeeder integrates with many popular CRM and MAP tools available in the market. The tool syncs visitor data with your CRM to keep your MarTech stack up-to-date.

Integrations

Some of Leadfeeder’s popular integrations are:

• Salesforce
• Pipedrive
• Zapier
• Slack

Reviews

Pricing

Leadfeeder has two plans.

• Lite – Free.
• Premium – Starting at €139/Month.

4. Lead Forensics

Lead Forensics is another well-known website visitor identification software. The tool can help B2B businesses uncover information about anonymous website visitors. Additionally, Lead Forensics also helps sales and marketing teams discover high-intent leads and get detailed insights into the prospects’ web behavior.

Features

1. VISITOR IDENTIFICATION: Lead Forensics claims to have the world’s largest, wholly-owned B2B-matched IP address database with over 1.4 bn records. The tool uses this information to process and discover website visitor accounts in real-time.

2. DEEP VISITOR INSIGHT: The tool tracks web activity at an account level as well as user-level, showing how many times they visited the website, which pages they viewed, how much time they spent, and more. Sales and marketing teams can use this information to further personalize and optimize their efforts.

3. MOBILE APP: Lead Forensics has a mobile app that keeps users updated on the website activity of high-intent visitors on the go.

Integrations

Some of the popular integrations are:

• Salesforce
• Mailchimp
• Square
• Zoho

Reviews

Pricing

Lead Forensics offers two plans, get in touch with them to get a price quote.

5. VisitorQueue

Visitor Queue is another popular tool that helps identify website visitors in real-time. Additionally, the tool also helps businesses customize their website to personalize the experience for their website visitors.

Features

1. USER-FIRST DESIGN: The platform is designed with the user in mind, it features a simple and intuitive design making it easy for sales and marketing teams to use Visitor Queue.

2. WEBSITE PERSONALIZATION: This is currently an invite-only feature, but Visitor Queue allows businesses to tailor their website to provide a personalized experience for their visitors.

3. LEAD INTELLIGENCE: The tool provides a wide range of data and insights on leads, such as web activity and contact information. With this information, marketing and sales teams can streamline their efforts.

Integrations

Some of the available integrations are:

• Salesforce
• Slack
• Zapier
• HubSpot

Reviews

Pricing

VisitorQueue has five paid plans based on the number of unique monthly companies visiting your website.

• For 100 Unique companies/Month – $49/Month.
• For 300 Unique companies/Month – $99/Month.
• For 500 Unique companies/Month – $199/Month.
• For 1000 Unique companies/Month – $209/Month.
• For 2000 Unique companies/Month – $309/Month.

6. Albacross

Albacross is a visitor identification tool that deanonymizes B2B website visitors. The tool uses first-party intent data to provide insights on high-quality leads. Sales and marketing teams can tailor and optimize their efforts based on the information to get better results.

Features

1. ANALYTICS ENRICHMENT: Albacross’s analytics platform helps marketing teams track and measure KPI metrics. The platform also enables teams to prove their efforts with accurate revenue attribution.

2. PERSONALIZATION ENRICHMENT: Albacross helps businesses tailor web content, email, ad campaigns, and more to provide a personalized experience to visitor accounts. 

3. DEEP INSIGHTS: By tracking account and user engagement, Albacross can provide insights such as the pages they frequent, the amount of time they spend on each page and website, the channels and campaigns driving engagement, etc. With these insights, marketing teams can optimize their strategy to increase conversion rates and drive the acquisition of qualified leads.

Integrations

Some of the available integrations are:

• Slack
• Pipedrive
• Google Analytics
• HubSpot

Reviews

Pricing

Contact Albacross to know more about the pricing of their product.

7. Leadinfo

Leadinfo helps businesses by transforming anonymous website visitors into leads. The tool helps business teams to observe and respond to leads in real-time, this means businesses are able to capitalize as soon as an opportunity presents itself.

Features

1. LEAD CAPTURE FORMS: Sales and marketing teams can use visitor information to create personalized lead gen forms in Leadinfo. By creating data-backed personalization, website visitors are more likely to respond positively and turn into leads.  

2. TRACK BROWSING ACTIVITY: Leadinfo also tracks visitors' journeys through the website. Sales and marketing teams can use this information and determine visitors' intent and qualify them.

3. INTUITIVE LAYOUT: Leadinfo’s inbox-type layout provides an intuitive view of every website visitor in the same way you view your email. It makes it easier for teams to get accustomed to the tool.

Integrations

Some of Leadinfo’s available integrations are:

• Asana
• HubSpot
• Zoho
• Slack

Reviews

Pricing

Leadinfo’s pricing model is based on the number of monthly unique visitors to your website. You can input this data into their pricing page and see what it would cost you.

8. Happierleads

Happierleads helps identify B2B website visitors and helps businesses generate leads. This tool empowers sales and marketing teams to identify anonymous visitors, segment leads, and retarget high-intent visitors with effective marketing campaigns.

Features

1. PROSPECTOR: This feature helps businesses identify prospects in the company that matches their ICP criteria. Its database holds details such as direct-dial phone numbers, up-to-date business emails, job titles, and more for over 60M businesses.

2. SEGMENT & QUALIFY: Sales and marketing teams can segment accounts and leads according to their ICP with the various behavioral and demographic filters. Once segmented, Happierleads allots a score to each account based on website activity, making it easier for teams to identify the best fit, high-intent accounts.

3. EMAIL OUTREACH: Happierleads has an internal email campaigning and outreach tool. Sales and marketing teams can work on prospecting and outreach without having to export their data elsewhere.

Integrations

Happierleads integrates with

• Zapier
• HubSpot
• Fullstory

Reviews

Pricing

Happierleads have a unique pricing page. Input your requirements to get a custom quote.

9. Leadlander

LeadLander is a website visitor identification software that enables sales and marketing teams to generate leads and monitor web analytics. This tool has a  vast database of contacts of key decision-makers from over 60 million companies worldwide that businesses can use to prospect and outreach to their visitors.

Features

1. INTUITIVE DASHBOARD: LeadLander provides an overview of all the accounts and users visiting the website in a single dashboard. With information readily available, sales and marketing teams can make better decisions.
2. VISITOR IDENTIFICATION: LeadLander is able to deanonymize website visitors in real-time. The tool uncovers visitors' journey through the website and reveals the visitors' company details like the website, physical address, and phone number.
3. EMAIL NOTIFICATIONS: LeadLander notifies its users via email when high-intent companies visit their websites. LeadLander also sends daily and weekly summaries of website visitors and their activity.

Integrations

LeadLander uses Zapier to integrate with other software.

Reviews

Pricing

You have to get in touch with the company to know more about its pricing.

10. KickFire (a Foundry company)

KickFire is a B2B sales and marketing intelligence platform acquired by Foundry in 2021. The platform also identifies and tracks user and account behavior. Sales and marketing teams can use this information to understand their audience better and improve their efforts.

Features

1. INTENT DATA: Foundry Intent combines the intent of website visitors and accounts from multiple sources to showcase meaningful buyer behavior. Business teams can use this data to create prospecting and outreach campaigns with confidence.  

2. LEAD NURTURING: Selling Simplified is Foundry’s product suite designed to identify, nurture and qualify sales reading leads. Sales teams are able to identify the purchase intent of target users and accounts at an early stage, allowing them to focus their efforts.

3. ACCOUNT-BASED MARKETING: Triblio is Foundry’s ABM platform designed to help businesses scale their ABM capabilities. This proprietary platform identifies accounts showing high-intent accounts based on their monthly interactions.

Integrations

Some of the available integrations are: 

• HubSpot
• Salesforce
• ConnectWise
• MS Dynamics

Reviews

Pricing

Kickfire, now a part of Foundry, does not have an open pricing policy. So you'll have to get in touch with them over a demo to receive a quote.

11. LeadMagic

LeadMagic is a lead generation and visitor identification platform that helps businesses deanonymize visitors to their websites. It uses AI algorithms to analyze visitor behavior and provide insights on how to best engage with your visitors.

Features

1. VISITOR IDENTIFICATION: LeadMagic can identify high-value accounts visiting a website. The tool sends messages on slack to keep sales and marketing teams updated.

2. LEAD SCORING AND PRIORITIZATION: Based on the engagement level, LeadMagic can score and prioritize leads. This ensures that your sales and marketing focus their efforts on the most valuable leads.

3. LEAD NURTURING AND AUTOMATED WORKFLOWS: With LeadMagic, you can create and automate lead nurturing campaigns to build meaningful and engaging relationships with your prospects and easily move them through the sales funnel.

Integrations

Leadmagic integrates with:

• Slack
• Zapier
• Segment
• Google Analytics

Reviews

Pricing

LeadMagic has three premium plans for its visitor identification tool.

• LeadMagic Solopreneur – $79/Month.
• LeadMagic Basic Plan – $249/Month.
• LeadMagic Pro Plan – $499/Month.

Which Visitor Tracking Software Should You Choose?

The right tool for you depends on your use case and the scenario. Each tool in this list has its own unique features, capabilities, and limitations.

But if you are looking to uncover account-level information about your website visitors, then a tool with deanonymization capabilities is a must. That said, you should also look for easy setup, user-friendliness, and integration with the existing MarTech stack.

In addition to the above, customizability is a huge necessity. Being able to customize your reports and dashboards ensures that you get to track metrics that matter. It goes without saying, but a great tool with a poor support team is just money down the drain.

Know Your Visitors Better With Factors

Now that you know what to look out for in a visitor identification tool. Let us show you how Factors.ai can help elevate your marketing efforts with AI-powered analytics & attribution. 

Factors ensure that you can easily decode visitor journeys at the user and account levels. This, coupled with the powerful attribution and marketing analytics features, helps you make decisions faster.

Throw intuition out the window and optimize marketing efforts with data-driven insights, and drive revenue to new heights. With the complete flexibility of customizing your reports and dashboards, you can track and monitor KPI metrics that are important to your business.

Factors acts as an extension of your marketing team, so you get unmatched support. A dedicated team of customer success managers is ready to support your team at any time.

With Factors, the entire onboarding lasts no longer than 30-mins. Lastly, our transparent pricing policy ensures that you pay for what you need and you get what you pay for.

Top Website Visitor Identification Tools

Visitor identification tools help businesses uncover anonymous website visitors by analyzing IP addresses and matching them to company data, enabling targeted engagement.

- Leading Tools: Factors, Leadfeeder, and Albacross.

- Key Features: Real-time analytics, CRM integration, lead scoring, data enrichment, and automated alerts.

- Strategic Benefits: Gain visitor insights, personalize outreach, and enhance lead generation efforts.

Implementing visitor identification tools improves conversion rates, strengthens marketing strategies, and boosts overall business growth.

FAQs

1. How can I track anonymous website visitors?

To track anonymous website visitors, you can use visitor identification software. Tools such as Factors.ai, Albacross, and Visitor Queue work by collecting data on your website visitors in compliance with Data Protection Laws. You can get information about their location, browsing behavior, the company they are from, and much more.

2. Can a website owner see my IP address?

Yes, the owner of a website or server administrator can see the IP address of every visitor. However, it is worth noting that IP addresses are not always directly linked to you. Your ISP may use a dynamic IP address, an address that keeps changing periodically.

3. Which two technologies do websites use to track visitors?

Websites commonly use Cookies and Web Beacons or Tracking Pixels.

Cookies are text files that are stored locally on a website visitor's device. The server receives cookies when visitors revisit the website. This allows the website to recognize them and track their behavior.

A web beacon is a small, transparent image (one square pixel in size) that is embedded in a website's code. When a user visits a website, the beacon tracks the user’s IP address, time spent on the site, pages they visit, browser information, and more.

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

‍

[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

Several analytical solutions are available for B2B marketers to track and analyze data for their businesses. Two of the most popular choices are Heap and Mixpanel. Though both tools share significant similarities, they also distinguish themselves with unique features and capabilities. 

In this article, we introduce both tools, explain how they are set up, and share key features and limitations to help you make an informed purchase decision. 

Without any delay, let’s delve into it. 

What is Heap?

Heap is a unique digital analytics platform that automatically captures customers’ interactions, analyzes them, and generates actionable insights to improve customer experience, retention, and conversions. 

Heap can track user interactions on websites and mobile apps, allowing businesses to analyze their customer's behaviors and generate data-driven insights.

The tool has a wide range of features, including automatic event tracking, retroactive data capture, and real-time reporting. Heap also allows businesses to segment their data by users, sessions, and events, making it easier to identify trends and patterns. 

Heap’s key features include

1. Customer 360 analytics captures all user interactions and actions on your website and/or mobile app and sends data to your data warehouse to get a comprehensive understanding of the customers' journeys.
2. Funnel optimization helps remove friction and optimize the customer journey to increase conversion rates.
3. Intuitive dashboards help track your critical business metrics and coordinate insights-driven action across the organization.
4. Integrates with 50+ sources/websites ranging from CRM and attribution platforms to marketing automation and user onboarding & adoption platforms. 
5. Usage Tracking/Analytics, allows detailed tracking and analysis of users' interactions within your website and/or mobile app.

What is Mixpanel?

Mixpanel is a product analytics platform that helps businesses improve user experience by tracking and analyzing user interactions with their website or mobile app

Mixpanel equips businesses with insightful reports surrounding user interactions, monitoring the growth of key user cohorts and even comparing current trends with earlier ones. 

The tool also illustrates the user flow within your website/mobile app, discovering the paths taken by users before they make a purchase. Moreover, the flow helps businesses locate friction in the user journey. 

Some of the key features of Mixpanels are

• KPI monitoring, keeping track of the status of previously identified performance measurements. 
• Data integration, integrating or connecting with different sources/apps for analysis and dashboard preparation
• Customer journey mapping, visualizing every interaction made by the user with the business 
• Funnel analysis, mapping the user flow to a set of funnel steps that results in conversion [achieve desired results in general]
• Customer segmentation, segmenting users based on attributes, cohorts or actions to uncover engagement drivers.

Getting started with Heap

Heap is easy to implement as it does not require extensive coding, removing the dependency on software developers. 

To set Heap up, you need to sign up for an account, add a tracking code to your website, and adjust your settings. The time taken to complete the set-up process may vary depending on the complexity of your website and the type of data you want to track. 

Also, after the installation, Heap will automatically track data retroactively.

Setting up Mixpanel

As for the time needed for implementation, the Mixpanel team assures that the entire process will take less than 15 minutes, but it depends on the complexity of the website and the tech stack used. They are also providing codeless implementation by partnering with Freshpaint, in which case, they say the time taken will stretch to 30 minutes.

The tool's main downside is its lack of codeless automation for retroactive tracking, but recently, they have partnered with Freshpaint to allow users to choose between codeless or coded tracking. 

Heap vs Mixpanel: Deep Dive

Heap and Mixpanel are both popular digital analytics tools with unique features and capabilities. So it's essential to understand their key differences before deciding which is the best fit for your business needs.

1. How Event Tracking Works in Heap vs. Mixpanel

The capability to monitor events, such as individual user actions like button clicks, form submissions, page views, etc., and is an essential feature for all marketing analytics tool. Luckily both Heap and Mixpanel  provides this functionality. The only difference is that Heap automatically tracks them, while Mixpanel requires you to instrument custom code on the website to start tracking events. 

Even though Heap tracks events automatically throughout the website, they also deliver a custom option for users to manually track and enrich their dataset with flexible APIs that capture clients and server-side events.

As for Mixpanel, like Heap, a tracking code must be installed on the website or mobile app. Once that's done, businesses can set up events to track. This can be done using the Mixpanel JavaScript library, which provides a simple way to track events and send data to Mixpanel.

Mixpanel's wide-range of APIs offers businesses an alternate approach to tracking events across servers, mobile apps, and other sources. 

But the real problem with event tracking is when it comes to tracking non-website events.

Marketing is not just about the things that happen on the website. In a typical B2B customer journey, touchpoints such as webinars, gated content, meetings, sales calls, field events, and so on play a crucial role in moving the customer down the funnel. This function is absent in both of the tools, which limits their applicability in a B2B context.

This is where marketing analytics tools like Factors come into play. The tool can help businesses track both website and non-website events and overcome the said limitation. 

2. Custom Dashboards and Reporting 

A good dashboard requires the ability to customize dashboards with the data you want to track. This helps to provide an overall insight without jumping tabs.

Dashboards in Mixpanel and Heap are customizable, and users can create multiple ones for the KPIs you want to track. They provide options for filtering charts, categorizing dashboards, and so on. 

Following are examples of how each of their dashboards looks like. 

Heap:

Mixpanel: 

But even though both tools make these arguments, the most common issues related to them are their slow customer support, the requirement for basic technical knowledge for usage, their limited documentation, etc. 

According to reviews on platforms like G2, TrustRadius, and Capterra, when it comes to dashboarding and reporting, the users have found 

• The dashboard’s functionality to be limiting as they can’t add certain types of reports,
• The intuitive UI is found to be confusing and not so easy to use.
• Creation of dashboards to be time-consuming. 
• There is a lack of more explicit filters in the dashboard

The above-mentioned are a few of the many suggestions and cons in their users’ reviews. 

While both Heap and Mixpanel are working to address their limitations, there are other options available in the market that may also meet the needs of users. Factors is one such example.

Factors provide visualization of every bit of information, data-driven insights, and emphasizes any fluctuations or changes from the ordinary, and all are available within a single dashboard. 

3. User Segmentation

Both Heap and Mixpanel offer user segmentation features that allow businesses to group users based on their characteristics and behavior. However, this feature's functionality and ease of use differs between the tools.

Based on Functionality

Heap's Segments feature allows businesses to create custom segments based on events, properties, and time. On top of that, it also allows businesses to track user behavior retroactively.

On the other hand, Mixpanel's segmentation feature allows businesses to segment data by user, session, and event; and create custom reports and dashboards. And based on the segments, the tool allows businesses to conduct A/B testing and in-app messaging as well.

Based on Ease of Use

Heap's Segments feature is comparatively simple, with a dedicated "Segments" option that makes creating and managing segments easy. 

Whereas in Mixpanel, its user segmentation feature is also easy to use though it may take some time to learn how to navigate through the different options to undertake cohort analysis and custom segmentation.

The crucial aspect to keep in mind is that the ability to segment users relies on the data that the analytics tool has about them. Unfortunately, Heap and Mixpanel lack robust integrations with CRM systems to bring in CRM data for segmentation. 

Though both platforms have integration with HubSpot (or, equivalently, Salesforce) for the purpose, Heap only pulls in two data sets from Hubspot, Email Interactions and Contact Properties. And, Mixpanel's integration with Hubspot is even more limiting and only syncs user properties with none of the CRM event objects. 

But both platforms do not provide options for other valuable data sets such as Company Properties, Deal Properties, and Deal Progression, as well as Events recorded in CRM such as Form Submissions, List Additions, Sales Calls, and Meetings, which are critical for B2B companies. 

However, Factors excels in this regard as it supports CRM integration with HubSpot and Salesforce and can help B2B businesses in tracking contact, account, and opportunity properties as well as all events, campaigns, and activities recorded in the CRM.

4. Insights

This is a unique feature Mixpanel has over Heap. The main focus of this feature is to visualize trends and compositions in the acquired data. It allows users to analyze events and user profiles, compare current data with previous data, create custom events, and more. 

Using the insight feature, a business can track and analyze the performance of different UTM sources and identify which source generates more conversions or any desired results. This would further help businesses optimize their marketing strategy and drive more conversions.

In insights, the metrics calculated across the entire time period will be visualized in simple bar graphs, stacked bar graphs, or pie charts. Following is an example of the pie chart. 

And for the metrics calculated for segmented time, the feature uses a line chart or stacked line chart for visualization. The following is a stacked line graph for reference. 

On the other hand, Heap has the Illuminate feature. It utilizes a data science layer to analyze a dataset and automatically identifies insights that lead to significant business results, even for events that weren't tracked previously. Also, the tool can uncover insights that would be missed by other tools, leading to better business results. 

Though this feature is limited compared to Mixpanel's Insights, it helps businesses to find hidden opportunities and frictions and understand whether the user behavior is hurting or helping with conversions. 

5. Integrations

Heap and Mixpanel offer integration capabilities with over 50 tools, allowing businesses to combine data from different sources.

The Heap Connect in Heap allows businesses to bring user data into data warehouses such as Snowflake and Redshift. 

Mixpanel allows integration with tools like AWS, Google Cloud, and Microsoft Azure. 

Though they both provide integration with common sources like Zendesk, HubSpot, Salesforce, and Segment, the tools also provide some unique integrations as well.

Some unique integrations with Heap are

1. Shopify
2. FullStory
3. Clearbit
4. RedShift
5. Eloqua

Some unique integrations with Mixpanel are

1. Slack
2. Adapty
3. Apptimize
4. Elevar
5. Microsoft Azure

6. User Timeline

A user timeline refers to the visual representation of a specific user’s actions and behavior over time within and outside a website. It shows each user’s visits to a website, downloads, engagement with emails, and other activities in touchpoints. It is essential to gain insights into the user’s interests, preferences, and behavior, which further helps marketers customize their campaigns.  

The Group Analytics feature is the closest thing Mixpanel has to a user timeline. Though it doesn’t necessarily provide a timeline, the feature enables marketers to track each target account’s engagement within the website. It also allows marketers to identify upsell opportunities and churn risks. 

Heap, however, has a User & Session View feature that enables marketers to see granular, user-level data on how each user interacts with the website/app. It also presents a list of users in reverse chronological order based on their most recent activities. 

The timeline of this activity can be adjusted from the last 7 days to the date the user first interacted with the website/app. 

Both Heap’s and Mixpanel’s features do not account for offline touchpoints of the users/accounts or provide an extensive view of the user timeline.

So if you are looking for a tool that can empower businesses with a detailed account of each user’s timeline and engagement with the website, then Factors would be a good choice. 

With Factors.ai, a business can get an account-level timeline as well as user-level timelines through deanonymization. Also, the tool brings in all key touchpoints, including meetings, calls, web data, app data, etc., whereas the others [Heap and Mixpanel] focus only on the web and app data.

Following is a view of the account-level timeline in Factors.

Following is a view of the user-level timeline in Factors.

Heap vs Mixpanel: Pricing 

The pricing plans of these tools differ based on the features that come with each plan. 

Given below is the pricing plan of Heap. And from it, you can see that there is a lack of transparency in the plans, and you have to contact them to get an idea of the overall expenditure. 

On top of the free plan, they also allow a “7-day free trial”.

Mixpanel provides a free option with limited features and a pricing of $25 per month for the basic plan. But like Heap, Mixpanel also requires prospects to contact the team to upgrade the plan and get estimated pricing for their enterprise plan. 

Recap

Heap and Mixpanel are both great analytics platforms with their own pros and cons. To give you an overview of both tools’ strengths and weaknesses, please take a look at the following tables.

Heap: Pros and Cons

Pros

• Automatic retroactive tracking
• Customizable dashboard
• Rapid implementation [codeless]
• Provide necessary integrations
• Can create custom segments based on different metrics

Cons

• Does not provide deeper insights into trends compared to Mixpanel’s Insight feature.
• Though the dashboard is customizable, it is more product analytics oriented. 

Mixpanel: Pros and Cons

Pros

• Can track both event-level, and user-level data
• The insights feature helps visualize trends and compositions in data
• Provide necessary integrations 
• Allows customization of dashboards
• Can compute retroactive tracking

Cons

• Requires dedicated developers to implement.
• Even though they allow codeless implementation with Freshpaint, the implementation can consume more time. 
• Has intuitive dashboards but is complex from a marketing point of view.
• Doesn’t have automatic retroactive tracking.
• Since it requires codes, continuous tag maintenance is required.

Limitations of Heap and Mixpanel

Both these tools provide options for both product and marketing analytics. But at the present day, these tools are best used and known for product analytics. And so, the features they both provide tends to focus more on the product. It means a marketing professional trying to use these tools will need help getting around the tool. 

Also, non-website event tracking is absent in both tools, which limits the data acquired surrounding a business’s users. Considering that every insight made by these tools is based on these data, it’s safe to say that they are not the perfect fit for marketing analytics. 

Still on the Fence? Complete Your Analytics Stack with Factors

In conclusion, Heap and Mixpanel are both popular analytics tools that provide businesses with powerful features for tracking and measuring user interactions and behavior. They both offer a wide range of features, helping businesses with event tracking, event reports, identifying UTM sources, and more. 

Heap and Mixpanel are known for focusing on products rather than marketing analytics. So, it's worth considering other options that may better align with your business needs and goals, particularly when it comes to marketing analytics.

Factors is a marketing analytics tool built for B2B and SaaS marketers with a focus on account-based analytics and robust  CRM integrations. The tool is purpose-built for marketers and has an advanced multi-touch attribution feature at an account level covering website and offline touchpoints. 

Its UI is simple and easy to use, and it takes about 15-20 minutes to set it up. You can sign up for FREE and learn how Factors can transform your marketing operations.

FAQs 

1. What data does Heap collect?

Heap collects user interactions and user behavior data on a website or mobile app. It includes data on events such as button clicks, form submissions, page views, and user properties such as device type and location.

2. Where does Heap io store data?

The collected data is stored on secure cloud-based servers. Heap also uses Heap connect to connect with data warehouses like Redshift and snowflake for the purpose too. 

3. What is the use of Mixpanel?

The primary use of Mixpanel is to track and measure user interactions and user behaviors on a website or mobile app. It allows businesses to understand how customers engage with their products/services and generate actionable insights to improve their UX. 

4. Does Mixpanel require coding?

Yes, it does require coding, which is, in fact, a downside of using Mixpanel. You will need tech support to create/write codes that can help track events. However, recently, Mixpanel has partnered with Freshpaint to make the codeless implementation available for their users. 

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.

Factors vs. Dreamdata: Pricing, features & reviews

Marketing analytics. Revenue attribution. Customer Journey mapping. Three invaluable use-cases, two all-encompassing alternatives, and one right choice for B2B marketers. 

The following blog comments on two powerful off-the-shelf B2B attribution and analytics platforms, Factors and Dreamdata, to determine why the former may be a better fit. We elaborate on key benefits and exclusives that Factors provide, which ultimately lends itself to being the preferred B2B marketing attribution and analytics solution.

‍Dreamdata Vs. Factors.ai: Common features and use-cases‍

When it comes down to it, both Factors and Dreamdata are proficient B2B attribution and marketing analytics tools. Before we pick apart some differences, let’s highlight some similarities between the two solutions:

Multi-touch Attribution

For a marketer, multi-touch attribution forms the bridge between prospects’ marketing touchpoints and deal won revenue. The purpose of marketing attribution is to help teams optimize their resource allocation and eliminate poor marketing spend. But for an attribution solution to be truly effective, it ought to be functional, adaptable and intuitive. Both Factors and Dreamdata are equipped with powerful multi-touch attribution modeling that’s capable of assigning value to touchpoint data across the funnel based on revenue impact.

Marketing analytics 

Factors and Dreamdata are versatile solutions built upon strong analytical foundations. Both B2B marketing solutions make use of performance analytics and real time event reporting to fulfill your business's tracking and analytical requirements . This would include tracking and reporting essential site metrics, paid campaigns, organic metrics and more.

Customer success

Customer success management is a crucial component of onboarding, troubleshooting, and deriving the most value from a tool. Both Factors and Dreamdata have both received high praise for their customer service in the onboarding processes and dedicated support for a pleasant experience. What must be noted is that unlike Dreamdata, Factors.ai provides dedicated support across all its plans — not only high tier ones.

Dreamdata vs Factors.ai: Pricing & Plans

Let's get down to brass tacks. First, we discuss the difference in pricing between Factors and Dreamdata. Your martech investment decision should revolve around one thing: ROI. Ideally, you’re looking for a cost-effective solution that doesn’t compromise on its service value.

Here are 4 reasons why Factors is the most cost-effective Dreamdata alternative:

1. Economical plans with Factors: As of today, Dreamdata’s paid plans start at $999/month. This is more expensive than even Factors’s higher tier growth plans ($799/month). Accordingly, Factors is generally better-suited to SME start-ups looking for a wider range of features.  
2. User seat limitation: Dreamdata has restricted user seats per tier. Starting with 5 seats, all the way up to 10 for their highest tier business plan. Factors have no user seat limitation for all tiers.
3. Limited stage models: Dreamdata offers limited user stage models, which is a filter that allows users to segment their customers or leads. Alternatively, Factors can create endless custom user stage models.
4. Dedicated support: Dreamdata’s dedicated support and onboarding is only available in their highest business tier plan. Factors.ai has no such restrictions. It offers the following benefits across all pricing plans and tiers:

1. End-to-end onboarding support
2. Dedicated customer success manager
3. Connected slack channel

In conclusion, we believe that Factors’ pricing plans are more cost-effective and accessible to that of Dreamdata’s. Despite this, Dreamdata does offer basic website analytics for free. While we don’t do this, we do offer a free 14-day trial of our entire platform.

Why B2B Marketers Love Factors.ai

This section highlights a catalog of features that cannot be found using Dreamdata and are exclusive to Factors’ users:

#1. AI-powered “Explain”

Explain is a one of it's kind AI tool that empowers marketers with automated insights into what's helping and hurting conversions. And the best part? The conversion goal is 100% flexible: demos, MQLs, newsletter downloads, web sessions, or any other touchpoint you're interested in optimizing.

Factors will then run thousands of funnel queries and rank the insights using artificial intelligence before neatly presenting them to you. These insights will be separated into columns that show positive (above average conversion rate) and negative (below average conversion rate) ratings. Each column lists different combinations of conversion paths that can be further broken down into sub insights that show even more conversion paths. 

#2. Account Intelligence

Factors partners with industry-leading data partners to provide IP-based account deanonymization. In short, this means that users can discover high-intent companies engaging with the website, product reviews, or ads — but are yet to convert. This in turn empowers efficient marketing and intent-based sales outreach.

#3. Slack and Email alerts

This nifty feature allows users to configure automated alerts that keep users up to date with their KPIs’ progress or regression over a predefined interval. Users can pick from several default KPI or use their custom built ones and apply filters for specific insights. Once this is done, users can configure a criteria for triggering the alert which can be for example, an increase or decrease by 10%. Factors will then send alerts to your slack and/or email once every interval that you select, with the last interval period serving as the comparison for your new insights.

#4. Path analysis

The path analysis feature in Factors presents a complete overview of the entire event journey and the number of prospects in the form of something akin to a tree data structure. This feature breaks down specified events into a number of steps, both of which are configurable, and will display the number of prospects within each unique event path.

#5. Auto button click tracking

Another feature exclusive to Factors in this comparison is the automatic button click tracking. As the name implies, this feature and as complicated as it is code-wise, requires no developer dependency to set up. And can ironically start tracking button clicks with the click of a button. It also displays the total number of clicks right next to each button click.

And this concludes our comparison. If you want to substantiate these claims and are interested in learning more about Factors.ai. Feel free to schedule a personalized demo.

Marketing today looks nothing like it did just a few years ago. You need to keep an eye on numerous campaigns on various channels, understand where your users are coming from, what drives them, possibilities of churn, and endless optimizations. For tasks like these, companies can’t help but rely on B2B marketing tools like Factors.ai and Bizible. 

Well-known in the marketing space, both of these tools come with a variety of capabilities and functionalities for analytics, attribution, personalization, and optimization to help B2B firms make better-informed marketing decisions. 

But how do you know which one’s right for you?

The following blog delves into the features offered by them and a comparative analysis of their respective strengths and weaknesses in the marketing analytics field. Curious how one of these tools can become part of your marketing arsenal? In this article, we’re covering everything from the features to pricing, integrations and even reviews for both Bizible and Factors! 

About Bizible

Bizible (now Marketo Measure) is a widely-used attribution tool aimed at providing B2B and B2C marketers with insights on their customer journey and revenue impact. It does so with strong touchpoint tracking and attribution modeling.

Bizible Integrations

The Adobe Marketo Measure (previously Bizible) extends its functionality to seamlessly integrate other tools to collect information on web source, medium, keyword, cookies, visitor behavior. Using this you can optimise your marketing strategies accordingly. Here are some of the tools that are supported by Bizible: 

• Microsoft Dynamics CRM (for custom objects, pre-built CRM reports, templates and dashboards)
• Marketo Engage 
• WordPress
• Salesforce Sales Cloud
• HubSpot Marketing Hub

Bizible Features

• Dedicated A/B testing integration, lets you track the revenue impact of your Optimizely and VWO site experiment. These experiments can provide insight to your marketing team to help optimize their campaigns and improve ROI.There are a few types of Marketo Measure A/B reports available to customers, which enable reporting on A/B Test results regarding leads, contacts, and opportunities.
• Dedicated Boomerang stage feature was designed to enhance visibility into the customer's journey, particularly for customers with extended sales cycles. Marketers are empowered by this feature to establish touchpoints at every stage transition throughout the Opportunity journey. For example, it captures scenarios where a contact progresses from MQL to SAL and subsequently returns to the MQL stage. This is known as the boomerang stage, or when contacts "re-enter the MQL stage" or "re-MQL." The Boomerang Stage feature seamlessly integrates with the Marketo Measure Custom Stages, working together to enhance the functionality.
  

• Multi-currency Compatibility which allows users to switch between different currencies for their reported spend and sales revenue. Currently, this feature covers  these two metrics.
  

About Factors. ai 

A compelling alternative to Bizible, Factors. ai comes into the picture as an AI-fueled marketing analytics and attribution platform that works with SME and mid-market B2B companies like Razorpay, Chargebee and Clickhouse. Not only does Factors.ai offer robust attribution capabilities, but it also provides a user-friendly interface and intuitive reporting tools. The platform is divided into 4 broad categories: 

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

Factors. ai Integrations

Factors has the ability to connect with advertising platforms, customer relationship management (CRM) systems, and customer data platforms (CDPs). Consequently, it can be used to track user actions across various touch points on a website, analyze campaign information, and even gather data from events recorded in the CRM. This comprehensive integration enables holistic analysis and reporting of data.

Factors. ai Features

Factors.ai comes bundled with unique features that aid attribution. 

1. User/account timeline: showcases all touchpoints for all users across their conversion journey over a span of time presented neatly on a timeline graph. This feature helps businesses identify valuable touchpoint data for all its users that can pinpoint every single step of every user’s conversion journey.
2. Customizable Stage Transitions: With this feature, users can track and optimize the customer journey by defining and customizing stage transitions that align with your unique sales cycles, allowing for granular analysis of each stage.
3. User-Friendly Interface: Users can enjoy a seamless and intuitive platform that makes it easy to navigate, visualize data, and access actionable insights, ensuring effortless usage for marketers of all skill levels.
4. Cross-Channel Analysis: It is also possible to analyze the performance of your marketing efforts across multiple channels, such as digital advertising, social media, email marketing, and more, to understand the synergistic effects and optimize cross-channel strategies.

How do the two compare?

Here is a table comparing the features that Bizible and Factors. ai come with:

In the next few paragraphs we will look at their strengths and weaknesses when pitted against each other with respect to integrations, attribution, onboarding and implementation, reporting quality, pricing, and privacy and compliance.

1. Integration

There are some points to consider when comparing the integration features of their tools. First off, the tools that these apps integrate with, do not completely overlap. For instance, Factors. ai does not integrate with Microsoft Dynamics Integration- Bizible does, and Bizible does not integrate with CDPs, which Factors. ai does. Second, Factors. Ai offers out-of-the-box integrations while Bizible comes with high developer dependency for tasks such as tracking HubSpot landing pages or integrating with LinkedIn.

Bizible can integrate with a wide range of applications and platforms. These popular apps span across CRM, CMS, marketing automation, email marketing, advertising platforms, web and sales analytic tools. Some of these commonly used platforms are Marketo, Google Ads, WordPress, MailChimp, Outreach and SalesLoft. 

Factors. Ai can also integrate with similar ad platforms, CRMs, and CDPs. CDP helps improve data quality, identify new audiences, and connect behavioral data. At the moment, Factors can integrate with third-party CDPs like Segment. 

2. Attribution

B2B marketing attribution is like detective work for marketers, uncovering the hidden fingerprints of success. It's an process that delves deep into the influence of various marketing touchpoints on coveted conversion goals, such as demos, pipeline growth, and revenue generation. The process involves employing a variety of multi-touch attribution models to evaluate and quantify the contribution of each marketing touchpoint towards achieving these objectives.

Factors. ai and Bizible both offer marketing attribution capabilities. They share a few similarities and differences.

Channels and Subchannels

Marketing Channels serve the purpose of categorizing and organizing your marketing activities for convenient reporting in both the Marketo Measure ROI Dashboard and your CRM system. Bizible offers 40 custom channels, which can be customized and renamed according to your organization's preferences. The Marketing Channel represents the broadest level of classification, encompassing various Subchannels. These Subchannels can be viewed as the specific "type" of source through which your leads are generated. Examples of Marketing Channels include Paid Search, Organic Search, Display, and Paid Social. Subchannels play a significant role in indicating the specific version or variation of the Marketing Channel used to attract leads.

Currently, Bizible offers 40 custom channels and 200 subchannels.  Channels and subchannels in Bizible attribution categorize and organize marketing touchpoints, providing insights into the performance of different marketing sources. This helps marketers understand the effectiveness of various channels and subchannels in driving conversions and revenue, informing decision-making and optimization strategies.

A business growing at a fast pace might opt for more channels to avoid chances of narrowing attribution and analytics. Factors.ai attribution does not specifically use the terminology of ‘channels’ and ‘subchannels’ in the same way as Bizible. Instead, Factors.ai focuses on integrating various data sources, such as ad platforms, CRMs, and CDPs, to provide a holistic view of marketing performance and customer journeys. It analyzes the impact of different touchpoints and events across the customer journey, offering comprehensive insights into marketing effectiveness and revenue attribution.

Attribution models: Factors.ai has the capability to create attribution reports at both company and user levels, can track both website and non-website events, and has a customized dashboard that collects and visualizes all crucial data in one place. Factors.ai also delivers 9 attribution models that include influence, time-decay, U-shaped and W-shaped.

Bizible offers 6 different attribution models that can help marketers decide what touchpoints are impactful in the customer journey. These are Lead creation, First-touch, U- shaped, W- shaped, Full- Path, and the Custom model. 

Attribution model funnels and metrics:

Bizible and Factors. ai both provide a range of metrics and filters to analyze attribution models and measure marketing performance. Here are some of the key metrics and filters offered: 

1. Revenue Attribution: Measures the revenue generated by each touchpoint or marketing source, providing insights into their contribution to the bottom line.
2. Conversion Attribution: Determines the contribution of each touchpoint to conversion events, allowing you to understand which marketing efforts are driving conversions.
3. Touchpoint Influence: Measures the influence of a specific touchpoint on conversions or revenue, providing a granular view of individual touchpoint performance.

These platforms also allow filters like: 

1. Time-based Filters: Can be used to analyze attribution data within specific time frames, such as daily, weekly, monthly, or custom date ranges.
2. Revenue Range Filters: You can set filters to analyze attribution data within specific revenue ranges, allowing you to focus on different tiers of revenue generation.

The difference between the two lies in Factors’ AI- driven approach to provide attribution models. With this information, you can dynamically allocate credit to marketing touchpoints based on their actual impact on revenue and conversions, and also forecast future performance by availing predictive analytics. Factors. ai also emphasizes seamless integration with CRM systems and marketing platforms.

3. Onboarding and Implementation

Setting up Bizible requires some level of dependency on developers. You might also require technical support from your development team for processes like creating a custom model. As per reviews on g2, the onboarding process can take a few months to fully complete. On the whole, Bizible works as a solid attribution tool, but reviewers often report problems with the onboarding and implementation.

Factors offers a quicker onboarding process of under 30 minutes, without requiring heavy-duty technical assistance. Factors’ tracking script can be set up directly or through Google Tag Manager in only a few minutes. Find out more about the process here. In case you're facing any difficulties, you can also get in touch with Factors' customer support team available round the clock.

4. Analytics/Reporting

Bizible has a wide selection of drill-through data. You can access marketing reports on the revenue by channel, closed revenue, contacts created, opportunities created, closed deals etc. It provides snapshots of CRM at any point in time and the distribution of records across opportunity stages.

Factors.ai can also extract and analyze relevant data points to give you a comprehensive overview of your customer relationships and interactions.The snapshot provided by Factors.ai may include key CRM metrics and visualizations, such as pipeline value, conversion rates, sales velocity, lead distribution, and performance trends. This enables you to have a holistic view of your CRM data and track the progress of your sales and marketing activities.

Bizible and Factors.ai both give you the option to visualize marketing data the way you want. If you connect to a business intelligence (BI) platform, you can present data with more flexible visual options. Standard metrics like bounce rates and monthly visitors are available on both Factors and Bizible, when integrated with data analytics platforms. 

5. Pricing

Bizible's pricing information is not available on their website. That said, according to reviews online, Bizible is 5% and 6% more expensive than the average attribution production, for small and mid sized businesses respectively. 

This is not very convenient for SMEs and startups. However, according to GetApp, Bizible scores high with 4.8 out of 5 stars on the value of money rating. They allow a maximum of 25 users per plan. It is important to note that this number can vary with lower plans. 

Factors. ai pricing is geared to cater to startups and SMEs. Their high tier growth plan is more affordable for these businesses and comes with customer support and functionality. They also offer specific plans that are purpose-built for your business’s unique analytical and attribution requirements. They also allow unlimited users per plan. 

What is the right option for you?

Ultimately, the choice between Bizible and Factors.ai depends on your specific requirements and priorities. Bizible may be a good fit if you prioritize strong touchpoint tracking and existing integrations with tools like Microsoft Dynamics CRM and Marketo Engage. Furthermore, Bizible pricing is considered appropriately priced by users. On the other hand, Factors.ai offers AI-driven attribution models, customization options, and a user-friendly interface, making it a compelling option for those seeking a more agile and appropriate solution for startups and SMEs.

Consider your business's needs, budget, and desired features to determine which platform aligns best with your goals and will empower your marketing team to make better-informed decisions. The choice between the two depends on the specific requirements, the importance placed on factors such as AI-driven attribution, customization, predictive analytics, and user interface. Evaluating these differences can help determine which platform better aligns with your organization's marketing measurement requirements in terms of attribution modeling and the depth of integration needed. If you’re interested in seeing how Factors.ai could align with your business, schedule a personalized demo here. 

Wondering how Factors fares against other top analytics tools? Here are some quick reads: 

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

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.

According to Hubspot, marketers spend nearly 210 minutes a week analyzing data from different sources. What’s interesting, though, is that marketing professionals often struggle to determine the channels that facilitate customer journeys to fuel pipeline and revenue.

Coincidence? No.  

With a gamut of channels, touchpoints, platforms, and campaigns running simultaneously, it becomes difficult to determine which marketing strategy brings value to the table. 

Especially in the case of B2B marketing, multiple online & offline channels are involved. For instance, online channels involve social media, content, email marketing, etc., whereas offline channels include ebooks, webinars, workshops, meetings, etc.  

Thankfully, marketing attribution reporting can effectively solve this problem and assist businesses in shifting from intuition-driven strategies to customer-centric and data-driven strategies. 

Attribution reporting allows marketers to do an in-depth analysis at a granular level and give a clear picture of the direct impact of marketing strategies and tactics. 

Read our blog to understand exactly what attribution reporting is and what you can learn from marketing attribution reports to put your revenue growth on the fast lane . 

Let’s get started! 

Table Of Contents

• What Is Attribution Reporting? 
• Why Use Attribution Reporting And When To Use It? 
• What You Can Learn From Marketing Attribution Reports?
• How Can Organizations Leverage Attribution Reports To Skyrocket Their Conversions?
• Bonus Information: What Is The Attribution Window 
• Wrapping Up
• FAQs

What Is Attribution Reporting? 

Attribution reporting gives you a bird's eye view of the path your customer took before converting. Moreover, it also gives an in-depth insight into how different marketing efforts have cohesively worked to fuel conversions. 

Attribution reporting will help you to determine the following. 

• From which channels are the customers first becoming aware of your brand?
• Which campaign is driving the maximum demo form submissions or signups?
• Which piece of content/ad are they interacting with between opportunity creation and closed-won?
• Provide an actionable view of the buyer’s journey across multiple stakeholders who interact with multiple touchpoints over many months. 
• A transparent overview of the channels to generate leads, nurture them and finally convert.
  

You can leverage many attribution models to create a comprehensive report, such as first interaction, last interaction, linear attribution, etc. Attribution reporting gives crystal clear insights into the specific parts of your strategy and helps you highlight the areas that need improvement. 

All in all, marketing attribution reports summarize your customer journey data by building a timeline of touchpoints at a user and account level, combine that with vital channel metrics such as impressions, clicks, and spending and visualize the insights into a cohesive and effective report

Why Use Attribution Reporting, And When To Use It? 

One of the most rewarding aspects for a marketer is to see the successful result of their efforts. Once you start noticing the number of conversions from a strategy you have implemented or a piece of content you have posted, you know you have done your job right. 

But getting conversions is just one part of the job! The most gratifying part is to be able to measure and correlate the amount spent with the business ROI. 

This is where attribution reporting comes into play. 

An attribution report is nothing but a presentable outcome of your customer journey and campaign data. Therefore, an attribution report is only as valuable as the underlying data itself. Within your Marketing Strategy, attribution fulfills the need to optimize your marketing spending, allocate resources better, scale the right initiatives, and track channel performance.

That being said, you wouldn’t want to rely on a false source of optimization or, worse, vanity metrics to determine your marketing strategy. Attribution reporting provides you a credible foundation to build a data driven marketing execution engine.

Unlike a marketing team’s requirements for tracking KPIs, which tend to be an everyday ordeal, the frequency of usage of attribution reports is determined by the following factors

• How frequently are the campaigns optimized?
• What is the conversion cycle length from first touch to revenue
• What is the cadence of executive reporting for the CMO
• How frequently are budget re-allocation decisions made at your company
  

What You Can Learn From Marketing Attribution Reports?

Here are the learnings you can expect from marketing attribution reports. 

1. Better Comparison With  Model-Based Information

Companies increasingly use a multi-channel approach to educate and inform their target audience based on their preferences.  However, when too many channels are in action, it becomes challenging to determine which channel contributed the most to pipeline and revenue. 

Attribution reporting allows marketers to determine the contribution of each channel based on the chosen model and compare the results of different types of attribution models to make your investment decisions. For example, an Influence attribution model shows the amount of pipeline and revenue influenced by each campaign or content, whereas a First Touch Attribution report only credits the campaign or content for the revenue where it was the very first touchpoint.

Further, the conversion goals in attribution can be set as Top of the Funnel KPIs such as Leads, Demos or Mid Funnel Metrics such as MQLs, SQLs or Bottom of the Funnel metrics such as Pipeline and Revenue, helping Marketers understand the influence of each channel at various stages of the funnel. 

If you are a Saas company with both a PLG flow (SignUp and then Product Milestones) as well as a sales-led flow (Demo and then Opportunity Creation), you can use attribution analysis to understand which channels are most effective for each of these go to market models.

2.  Get An Overview Of Baseline Metrics

Baseline Metrics within Attribution provide a channel-level overview of investment metrics such as Impressions, Clicks, and Spending, along with platform-specific metrics such as Keyword Match Type, Search Impression Share for Google Ads. 

Attribution reporting tools aggregate these investment metrics across channels, enabling a Marketer to understand how much are they spending by a campaign, Ad group, creative, and keyword. Using these insights, Marketers can get a complete view of the performance metrics for each Campaign.

3. Analyze Conversion Metrics

A good attribution report combines the baseline investment metrics along with conversion metrics across the funnel such as leads, demos, SQLS, pipeline, and revenue. This helps Marketing teams move beyond measuring marketing efforts on metrics such as leads and get an accurate understanding of the impact on pipeline and revenue.  

Based on this information, you can assess the following:

• How many leads does each channel or campaign generate?
• How many of these leads are then converted to demos and sales-qualified leads by the campaign?
• How much pipeline and revenue were influenced by each of these channels or campaigns?

4. To Get Clarity On ROAS 

ROAS (return on ad spend) is a crucial metric that is used to measure the total revenue generated on every dollar spent on marketing. By bringing together the investment and conversion metrics, Attribution Reports highlights the profit margin and ROAS at a campaign, ad group, creative, or keyword level.

Companies may define different ROAS thresholds based on the type of campaigns - such as Product Feature Promotion, Competitive Takeout, and Brand Building. Also, depending on whether the campaign is more experimental (entry into a new product category or new geographic territory) or a well-established one, the ROAS thresholds may be different. Granular ROAS data allows marketers to make data-informed bidding decisions resulting in cost savings and improvement in return metrics.

5. Non-Paid Channels vs Paid Channels

It has always been a struggle for Marketers to determine whether paid or non-paid channels help accelerate your sales. However, attribution reporting gives you an extensive overview of different channels (such as Paid Search, Social, Referrals, Review Sites, and Organic Content) and their contribution to pipeline and revenue.

For instance, Let’s assume your business is active on LinkedIn and drives traffic from the platform through posts and ad campaigns. But when a lead is converted through LinkedIn, you will need to know which tactic contributed to the result - Was it the organic posts or ad campaigns? 

With attribution reporting, you can determine whether the lead got converted organically from the posts you shared or the ads campaign you are running or whether both tactics played a part in the conversion. 

A distinction between direct and non-direct sources of traffic helps identify your PPC leads and your organic ones. This, in turn, helps both the paid marketing teams and the content marketing teams optimize their execution strategies.

6. Attributing Sales Funnel

Attribution reports also enable Marketers to go beyond a single conversion goal and visualize the entire marketing and sales funnel (Leads, Demos, SQLs, Pipeline, and Revenue) at a channel, campaign, or ad group level. 

Armed with this data, Marketers can get a sense of the conversion rates by channel for each stage and focus their efforts accordingly.

7. Get A Clear Picture With Data Visualization

Lastly, because the Attribution Reports and underlying data are exhaustive and cover the entire customer journey and channel mix, it may feel a bit daunting to analyze this data solely in tabular form. 

The report can include dimensions such as keywords (and associated metadata such as keyword match type), ad groups, campaigns, campaign themes, and channels, as well as metrics such as spend, impressions, clicks, CTR, and conversion metrics as well. 

Phew.. - quite a handful to analyze this table of 15+ columns and 100+ rows to unearth actionable insights. This is where intuitive visualizations play a role in facilitating a better understanding of the data through formats such as scatter plots, bar charts, and line vs bar visualizations.

Further, an AI-powered attribution tool like factors.ai  is capable of offering augmented features in a report, such as recommendations on campaign bidding, trends in cost per MQL and SQL, and much more) 

How Can Organizations Leverage Attribution Reports To Skyrocket Their Conversions?

Now that you know what you can learn from attribution reports, we will take you to the next step. After doing an in-depth attribution analysis, now is the time to take some steps to accelerate the momentum of the conversions. 

Following are some ways organizations can leverage attribution reports:  

1. To Create A Result-Driven Content Strategy 

A crucial part of online marketing is creating a content strategy to ensure that the content created will be focused on the customer journey stage they are in. 

With attribution data, marketers can get an overview of the entire customer journey and leverage it to build a result-driven content strategy. 

2. Where Should You Expend Your Marketing Efforts? 

We all know attribution reporting gives deep insights into which channels drive conversions and users. Therefore, we can focus on those specific channels and generate maximum leads.  

3. To Fully Understand The Customer’s Journey 

You may know which channel drove the conversions, but you should also know about the touchpoints your customer interacted with before converting. 

Attribution reporting has the capability to do so, and therefore, it allows you to fully understand the customer’s journey right from the start till the end. 

Understanding this will allow you to create more effective strategies and journey paths that are aligned with buyer preferences.

Bonus Information: What Is The Attribution Window? 

An attribution window, also known as a conversion window, is the timeframe within which conversion will be attributed to a touchpoint. In layperson’s words, it can be defined as a time frame between which a potential lead viewed/clicked on your ad/piece of content and later performed your desired conversion action

 For example, suppose your attribution window is 20 days. In that case, any touchpoints (like users interacting with your landing page) incurred by prospects will only be linked to a conversion (actions like a demo request) if it occurred within 20 days of the touchpoint. Attribution windows also help distinguish your fresh leads from your re-engaged ones and hence remove the impact of interactions that happened a while ago.

The total number of conversions can be skewed if you don’t set the right attribution window. If you look it up, they’re different recommendations on setting an attribution window. Some recommend as little as 7 days, while others suggest 90 or 180 days. 

Setting the attribution window is largely dependent on the expected conversion cycle from first visit to revenue as well as the internal understanding among Go to Market teams (Sales and Marketing) on what would be the appropriate conversion window. Our recommendation would be to compute your average conversion cycle based on historical data and set double that value, post aligning with the sales team.

Wrapping Up

Without a doubt, we can say that attribution reporting is the most effective way to understand and measure the impact of Marketing Efforts on business outcomes. Insights generated from marketing attribution can become your most valuable asset to drive maximum ROI. 

When picking a solution to power your Attribution reporting, you want the best of the best. So keep your eyes peeled for solutions that offer capabilities such as:

• Bring in touchpoints from across data sources - such as website events (digital marketing)and offline touchpoints (webinars, events, e-books, sales calls, and meetings)
  

• Attributing your entire marketing and sales funnel stages and rather than focusing on a single conversion point such as Leads.
• Present both baseline investment metrics and conversion metrics, with the computation of ROI at a channel, campaign, ad group, keyword, page URL, or Theme level.
• Has advanced features to distinguish between new business vs expansions or new leads vs reactivated ones.
  

Opting for a solution that has these capabilities and more can take your attribution reporting to the next level.

Get started with attribution reporting with Factors.ai 

Factors.ai is an AI-empowered attribution reporting tool that helps you to fuel your marketing efforts by effectively comparing and customizing attribution models to generate a clearer picture based on metrics. 

Factors.ai has the capability to create attribution reports at both company and user levels, can track both website and non-website events, and has a customized dashboard that collects and visualizes all crucial data in one place.

If you’re interested in taking your business to next level by analyzing your marketing efforts with robust multi-touch attribution modeling and deep data-driven insights to make an informed decision then, schedule a demo and start for FREE at factors.ai.

FAQs ‍

1. What does attribution mean in marketing?

In marketing, attribution refers to the process of identifying and assigning credit to the various marketing channels and touchpoints that contribute to a conversion [or any desired action]. 

By understanding the effectiveness of these different marketing channels, businesses can optimize their marketing budget and resources to maximize their ROI.

2. Why is attribution reporting important for marketers in 2023? 

Attribution reporting provides a holistic view of how different marketing channels work together to drive conversions and revenue. It enables marketers to see which channels drive the most conversions and revenue and which are driving the most users to their website or mobile app. 

With this information, marketers can make more informed decisions about where to allocate their marketing budget and resources.

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.