Factors Blog

Ever poured budget into campaigns, only to wonder which one drove results? For B2B marketers, this isn’t just a frustration but a roadblock to smarter decisions. With long sales cycles, multiple stakeholders, and countless touchpoints, it’s tough to know what’s really working. That’s where marketing attribution earns its place.

According to a study by Gartner, B2B buyers spent only 17% of their time meeting with potential suppliers and merely 5-6% of the entire time with the sales representative of each vendor. This means that the sellers have little opportunity to influence the buyer's decisions.

Buying decisions in B2B typically involve six or more individuals. And they prefer to do their own research instead of relying on the vendor's sales team. Their research includes industry publications, blogs, case studies, pricing, and customer reviews put out by the vendors. They often engage back and forth, moving from your website to your competitors. They take their time, compare, and decide on the best choice.

Hence, the interaction with the sales rep usually happens late in the buyer's journey. Marketing hence plays a much larger role in influencing the buying group's decision.

The back-and-forth engagement also results in multiple touchpoints across many channels. And by using marketing attribution models, a marketer can determine which touchpoints contribute to the conversion.

Many B2B marketing attribution software has emerged in recent years. But the big question is, how can these help? Why is it important for marketers? And which models should your marketing team be using?

This guide will explore the details of B2B marketing attribution. It will give you the knowledge and tools to handle this complex area. Whether you're new to this or want to improve your current strategies, learning about marketing attribution is key for any B2B marketer who wants to grow and succeed. Let’s get started!

TL;DR

What is Marketing Attribution?

Marketing attribution determines what marketing actions help a business reach its goals, like getting leads or growing revenue.

Suppose you're a marketing manager for a software firm. Your goal is to get more leads and earn more revenue.

To do this, you use various marketing channels such as Google search, organic search, LinkedIn ads, and so on. Meanwhile, the sales team contacts potential customers through emails and calls.

However, it can be challenging to know which channels work best and which need improvement. This is where marketing attribution comes in.

Attribution software acts like a GPS for your marketing efforts, helping you track the performance of every channel and campaign.

For instance, say your LinkedIn ads get the most leads, but your webinars don't perform as well. You can see this with the help of attribution software and change your strategy. Instead of putting more investment into an ineffective channel, you can focus on the channels that bring in leads and revenue.

Attribution shows which channels, messages, and interactions influenced a lead, moved them down the funnel, or closed the deal. The main goal of attribution is not to prove the marketing team's value but to help the team improve their efforts and get better results.

What's the difference between marketing attribution, revenue attribution, and digital marketing attribution?

‍When it comes to attribution, chances are you've come across a whole range of terms—namely, the following three.

1. Marketing attribution
2. Revenue attribution
3. Digital attribution
   

Well, be relieved to know that all these terms virtually mean the same things. They simply differ in terms of context. 

Marketing attribution refers to the process where you can quantify the influence of your channels on business metrics such as meetings, pipeline, and revenue. 

Revenue attribution is identical in essence but has a slightly different perspective. Here, the focus is more on assigning value to channels to estimate their revenue impact. 

And finally, digital marketing attribution is centered around attributing digital touchpoints. It exclusively focuses on the digital customer journey. 

Why is marketing attribution important (and useful)?

Have you ever heard the saying, "you can't manage what you can't measure"? Well, that's exactly what marketing attribution is all about.

Imagine a company, ABC, that sells enterprise software solutions to other businesses. The company has a sales team, a digital marketing team, and a trade show presence to generate leads and close deals. The sales team receives leads from a variety of sources, including:

1. The company's website through a contact form
2. A trade show where the company had a booth
3. An email campaign sent to target prospects
4. A referral from a satisfied customer

In this scenario, it's important for ABC to understand which campaigns are driving the most conversions. This way, they can allocate their budget and resources more effectively.

For example, let's say the company's sales team closed a deal with a lead that came from the trade show. It's difficult to determine whether the trade show was solely responsible for the conversion or if other marketing efforts also played a role. This is where B2B marketing attribution comes into play.

With marketing attribution, ABC can identify the marketing touchpoints that drove most conversions. This further allows the company to see which marketing channels are the most effective in driving sales. 

The tool helps the company to measure and attribute the success of your campaign and optimize and improve your strategies.

What are the functional benefits of marketing attribution?

1. Marketing ROI Optimization

With marketing attribution, B2B teams achieve a better and broader picture of each channel's cost-to-revenue ratio or ROI.

By understanding every channel's influence on lead conversion, pipeline, and revenue in relation to their cost, you can effectively quantify marketing performance. Ultimately, this leads to our next point — prudent marketing investment and spending.‍

2. Improved Marketing Spends

Using marketing attribution can make a significant impact on your marketing investment. This is because it provides crucial information about the performance of different marketing channels and tactics. Armed with this information, you can optimize your spending to achieve the end business objectives. Instead of distributing your investments evenly, you can double down on the channels that are actually performing better.

Consider this example. Imagine you have $10,000 to spend on a marketing campaign. Without attribution, you might split the money evenly between different channels. But with attribution, you might find that Linkedin conversational ads work best and are responsible for 80% of your conversions. So, in this case, you could put 80% of your budget towards Linkedin conversational ads and the rest towards other channels.

In short, marketing attribution helps you make decisions based on data instead of guessing. By knowing what's working, you can spend your money in the best way possible and get the biggest return on your investment.

3. Attribution and Content Marketing

Content marketing remains the best way to communicate effectively with customers and educate them about your offerings. And with the help of marketing attribution, you can take content marketing to the next level.

How?

Your content should engage with the target audience and drive demand for your products/services at every stage of the buying journey. For that, you need to create content that's tailored to your Ideal Customer Profile (ICP).

Marketing attribution plays a crucial role in this process. It provides insight into which content resonates with your audience and leads to more conversions. Traditional CRM and MAP systems credit conversions to content only by a First Touch model (if the content was the first interaction the prospect had), which can be very misleading. 

You can also track how different pieces of content contribute to your pipeline and revenue. This allows you to optimize your content strategy.

For example, you may find that a particular blog post is driving a lot of traffic to your website but is not resulting in any conversions. In this case, you can analyze why this is happening and make changes to the content to increase its effectiveness.

Keep reading to learn more about the ROI of B2B content.

4. Mapping Out The Customer Journey

The use of attribution isn't limited to understanding channel influence on conversion. It's also a powerful tool to make sense of marketing's impact across each step of the funnel.

You can use it to identify the relationship between channel interactions, which touchpoints work together, and their relative probability of occurrence down the funnel. All of which help you map out your buyer's typical journey.

Marketing attribution models

Attribution models allow you to understand the different touchpoints in the customer journey and how each of them influenced your prospect to convert. The main goal of attribution models is to help marketers determine their campaigns' performance

For example, consider the following. 

A customer reached your website through a LinkedIn ad. Then, the customer further engages with your website content, like blogs and case studies, before becoming a lead. And finally, they are converted (booked a demo) after clicking on a retargeting ad.  

Now, depending on your business goals, the attribution model you choose assigns credit to different touchpoints. 

If your objective were to create awareness of your brand or product, the credit would be assigned to the first touchpoint. In this case, the LinkedIn ad. But if you were looking at conversion alone, the credit will be given to the last touchpoint, which is the retargeting ads. 

There are other scenarios too, where you assign credit to multiple touchpoints. But as we said, it depends on your business objective.

With that said, there are mainly two types of attribution models.

1. Single touch models
2. Multi-touch model

Types of attribution models

Single-touch 

As the name indicates, allocate the credit to a single touchpoint. Some types of single-touch attribution models are;

1. First touch 
2. Last touch
3. Last non-direct touch 

These types of attribution models are used mainly by businesses with a clear and straightforward marketing funnel and want to track the impact of specific touchpoints on conversion

Multi-touch

Again, as the name implies, multi-touch models allocate credit to multiple touchpoints in the customer journey. The main focus of this model is to give a more accurate picture of your marketing channels' impact on conversion.

Some of the types of multi-touch attribution models are:

1. Linear attribution model
2. Time-decay attribution model
3. U-shaped attribution model
4. W-shaped attribution model

Here, take a look at our take on the seven types of attribution models with examples that can help you understand the attribution models better. 

So, how to choose the suitable model for your business?

Choosing the right model for your business can be a challenge. As the saying goes, ‘all models are wrong, but some models are useful. But it's essential to select the one that helps you answer the specific questions you have in mind.

With that said, let's look into the factors that affect choosing the model and how to select the right one for your business.

Some factors that affect the choice of attribution model are as follows.

• The nature of the buyer journey cycle - This includes the length of the sales cycle and the number of decision-makers.
• The nature of the product. Does the product belong to an established category or a new one?
  

Here are seven steps to help you choose the right attribution model: 

1. The first and foremost thing to do is to understand your business goal. Ask yourself, "What do I want to achieve with attribution modeling?". The answer can help you select a model that aligns with your business goals.
2. Speak with your customer to understand their customer journey and the touchpoints involved. Anecdotal assessments of how each touchpoint contributed to conversion can help you select an appropriate model.
3. Evaluate different attribution models. Compare the strengths and weaknesses of each model and see how they align with your business goals.
4. Do A/B testing. Test each model and compare the results. This will give you a better understanding of the model that will work best for you.
5. Some attribution models require more data than others. So, consider the data you have and select the model that aligns with the data you have.
6. Constantly review and adjust the models. It's crucial to ensure that your model is relevant and accurate. So, as your business grows and evolves, you should review the current one and make the necessary changes.
7. Evangelize the results of the selected attribution model and get buy-in from relevant teams - field marketing, digital marketing, and sales so that all equally accept the results from the model you select.
   

Common challenges with marketing attribution

Whilst the benefits of attribution analysis are clear and unquestionable, there are certain challenges and limitations which need to be highlighted. We will briefly discuss a few B2B attribution challenges here. You can follow up on the link to learn more about the B2B attribution challenges and how to overcome them. 

Complex customer journey: 

B2B customers often go through a lengthy and intricate buying process. There is usually a group of 4-6 people researching and deciding between vendors before moving to purchase. Not to mention the multiple touchpoints across many channels that influence decision-making.

Marketers can't determine which touchpoints are affecting the sales pipeline and revenue without proper attribution. This makes it hard to track the success of their campaigns and make improvements.

However, attribution makes it easier to see all the touchpoints, even if the customer journey is complex. Also, when choosing an attribution software, ensure that it includes the deanonymization feature. This can help track the entire journey of all the buying committee members, even if they browse anonymously. 

Longer sales cycle:

B2B purchases require a significant investment. Hence the decision-making process is more rigorous and complex than B2C sales. On top of that, there are contractual agreements, regulations, and budget approvals that further add up the time. 

According to Klipfolio, around 75% of B2B companies take an average of 4 months to onboard a new customer. And depending on your sales process, the time can be longer or shorter. 

Because the B2B sales cycle is complex and lengthy, it can be difficult to find out which touchpoints influenced the prospect to convert. Moreover, it can take months or years to see the results of your marketing activities. Thus, making it harder to attribute the conversion to a specific campaign. 

By using multi-touch attribution models, marketers can understand the impact of their campaigns. This would help them prioritize marketing investments and create a more engaging customer experience. 

Multiple touchpoints:

Customers often interact with your company through multiple channels before purchasing. These can be both online and offline interactions. Also, a customer can engage with your company at different stages of the buying journey. 

 For example, a customer may receive an email about a product. They then visit the company's website for more information, only to later attend a trade show and have a follow-up conversation with a sales representative. Each touchpoint could have a different impact on their decision-making process.

But, determining which touchpoints had the most significant impact can be difficult. One solution is to use an attribution tool that can track all these diverse channels and bring all the interactions together in one place.

Tracking and defining offline touchpoints:

In a B2B sales process, the customer engages with the vendors through both online and offline touchpoints. This makes it difficult to track and attribute conversions accurately, as you now need to stitch data across systems.. 

For example: consider a set of B2B customers. They attended a trade show and got on a call with your sales team. Afterward, they sign up on your website and complete the purchase. Here, it will be hard to determine credit for a touchpoint if you don't have the right attribution solution. 

Marketing analytics software, like Factors, enables tracking of both online and offline touchpoints. Factors has a click-and-select UI through which the offline touchpoints can be set up from your CRM / MAP platform. This ensures that you have a detailed view of the customer journey.

Sales-Marketing alignment:

Alignment between Marketing and Sales teams is essential to maximize returns. However, this is easier said than done. In many B2B companies, there's a lack of communication between the two teams, making it hard to reach potential customers. Fighting for credit can be a reason for this disconnect, as each team believes their efforts to be the reason for closing a deal.

 Bridging this alignment divide can be achieved in two ways.

1. Emphasize that both teams are not independent but part of a larger go-to-market function. 
2. Unify the customer journey data across marketing and sales touchpoints.
   

Sophisticated Marketing Attribution solutions such as Factors can help here by providing a clear and consistent view of the customer journey. On top of the unified data foundation, teams can get answers to questions such as 

• How many touchpoints did it take to convert a deal? How many of these were sales vs. marketing touchpoints?
• Were marketing efforts able to drive engagement with the right stakeholders in these accounts?
• When is the right time for sales teams to intervene so as to convert an account?
  

Furthermore, each team can review and analyze the attribution data to understand which of their strategies are working and which are not. From a sales perspective, such analysis can help in defining the frequency and content of email sequences, calls, and meetings that lead to maximum impact. 

Why should CMOs consider marketing attribution?

As a CMO, you are often asked to achieve better results with limited resources. Meanwhile, the buyer's journey has become complex, with more channels, stakeholders, and a longer buying cycle. Attribution Software can be a valuable guide, helping you in the following ways.

Better decision-making

By understanding the customer journey, you can determine the channels to focus on and how to allocate your limited budget. 

Improved ROI

Attribution lets you know which channels effectively drive conversions. Therefore, it allows you to allocate expenditures accordingly and generate better results.

Increased accountability

You can unambiguously measure and track your marketing effort's impact. Good or bad, you can hold yourself and your team accountable for the results while continuously finding ways to improve.

Enhanced customer understanding

You can gain a deep understanding of customer behavior and interactions with marketing and sales initiatives. You can know what types of content your customers are seeking, the landing pages they interact with, and more. This enables you to optimize future campaigns to align with the customer's interests.

You can read more about the importance of marketing attribution for CMOs here. 

How to Build a B2B Marketing Attribution Model?

Here’s how to build a strong attribution model that delivers actionable insights:

Step 1: Audit Your Existing Marketing Ecosystem

Start by identifying all current marketing channels and touchpoints. From ad impressions and content downloads to email interactions and sales calls, every engagement should be tracked. This initial audit helps uncover gaps in tracking and ensures you’re capturing the complete customer journey.

Step 2: Define Clear Business Objectives

Your attribution model should align with specific goals, whether that’s improving lead quality, shortening the sales cycle, or boosting customer lifetime value. Defining these goals upfront helps you choose the right model and metrics to measure success.

Step 3: Map the Complete Customer Journey

Carefully map each stage of the journey: awareness, consideration, evaluation, and decision. Assign touchpoints to each stage and evaluate their potential influence. Consider using lead scoring systems to highlight which touchpoints contribute most to sales-ready leads.

Step 4: Select the Right Attribution Model

Based on your sales cycle complexity and goals, choose an attribution model that fits. For example:

• First-Touch Attribution can help identify effective top-of-funnel channels.
  
• W-Shaped or Full-Path Attribution is better suited for tracking engagement across long B2B buying cycles.
  
• Custom or Data-Driven Models offer flexibility and accuracy for organizations with mature data operations.

Step 5: Leverage the Right Attribution Tools

Use analytics and attribution tools that integrate easily with your CRM, marketing automation, and ad platforms. Tools like HubSpot, Marketo, and Google Analytics (alongside more advanced tools like Factors.ai or Wicked Reports) help track user interactions across multiple platforms.

Step 6: Integrate with Your CRM and Sales Stack

Connect your attribution system with your CRM (like Salesforce or HubSpot) to unify marketing and sales data. This centralization ensures teams are working from the same insights, which improves alignment and leads to handoff efficiency. 

Step 7: Customize Reporting and Optimize Over Time

Build dashboards that focus on the KPIs that matter to your business, such as cost per lead, deal velocity, campaign ROI, etc. Attribution is not static: regularly analyze performance, identify patterns, and adjust strategies to stay aligned with changing market dynamics and buyer behavior.

Pro Tip: Start with a simpler model and gradually evolve toward more advanced approaches as your data maturity grows.

By following these steps, you can create an attribution model that improves marketing results.

Key Touchpoints in the B2B Customer Journey

In B2B marketing, understanding and optimizing the key touchpoints throughout the customer journey is essential for driving qualified leads and closing deals. Each touchpoint represents a critical moment of interaction that influences a buyer's path toward becoming a customer. Here's a closer look at the four most important touchpoints in the B2B journey:

1. First Engagement

This is where the journey begins. The first engagement typically happens when a potential buyer interacts with your brand through a blog post, social media ad, webinar invite, or a piece of gated content. This stage is crucial for creating awareness and positioning your brand as a valuable solution to the buyer’s problems. The goal here is to capture interest and drive the user to learn more.

2. Last Marketing Interaction Before Lead Capture

This touchpoint occurs just before a prospect converts into a known lead, often when they fill out a form, request a demo, or download a whitepaper. Identifying this moment helps marketers understand which final nudge (campaign, CTA, content piece) was most effective in prompting conversion. It’s an indicator of what messaging and channels are best at turning interest into action.

3. Opportunity Creation

At this stage, the lead transitions from a Marketing Qualified Lead (MQL) to a Sales Qualified Lead (SQL). It’s the point where marketing hands the lead off to the sales team, often based on engagement metrics, firmographic fit, or behavioral triggers. This handoff is critical: aligning attribution around this milestone helps validate which marketing efforts truly generate sales-ready opportunities.

4. Closed (Won or Lost)

The journey's final and most definitive touchpoint is when a deal is closed. Whether the opportunity results in a win or a loss, this stage reveals which interactions had the most impact on influencing the purchase decision. Attribution here allows you to analyze which marketing strategies contributed to revenue and what might need improvement for future deals.

By tracking and analyzing these key touchpoints, B2B marketers can optimize each stage of the funnel, better allocate budgets, and align more closely with sales teams. This leads to smarter campaigns, higher-quality leads, and ultimately, improved ROI.

Best Practices for Implementing Marketing Attribution

To implement marketing attribution well, follow a clear plan. 

1. Centralize Your Data Sources

Start by unifying marketing and sales data into a single system. This ensures consistent tracking across all channels and touchpoints. A centralized data hub often built around a CRM like HubSpot or Salesforce reduces fragmentation, eliminates data silos, and enables deeper insights into the customer journey. Integration with marketing automation tools, ad platforms, and website analytics is also essential.

2. Choose the Right Attribution Model

Select an attribution model that reflects your sales cycle, buyer behavior, and strategic goals. In B2B, where decisions involve multiple stakeholders and longer timeframes, multi-touch attribution models (e.g., Linear, W-Shaped, or Full Path) usually provide the most balanced view. However, start simple if you're new to attribution and evolve your model as your capabilities grow.

3. Continuously Test and Refine

Attribution isn’t a “set it and forget it” system. Buyer journeys shift with new market trends, technologies, and buyer expectations. Regularly review and refine your attribution models to ensure they reflect real user behavior. Use A/B testing, conversion tracking audits, and periodic performance analysis to fine-tune your approach.

4. Foster Cross-Department Collaboration

Effective attribution depends on input from multiple teams. Align marketing, sales, revenue operations, and customer success around shared metrics and definitions of success (e.g., what qualifies as a lead, opportunity, or conversion). This collaboration leads to more accurate attribution reporting and more cohesive strategies across the funnel.

5. Ensure Privacy Compliance

With evolving data privacy regulations (like GDPR, CCPA, and others), it’s crucial to use attribution tools that respect user privacy. Prioritize platforms that offer privacy-friendly tracking (like server-side tagging, consent-based data collection, and anonymized tracking) to stay compliant while still gathering actionable data. This builds trust and protects your brand reputation.

How to choose the right marketing attribution tool?

‍Choosing a marketing attribution tool requires careful consideration of several factors. Some of the key considerations are

1. Data Integration: Ensure the tool integrates easily with your existing data sources. This includes your CRM, marketing automation platform, web analytics, CDPsand advertising platforms.
2. User-friendly interface: Make sure the tool is easy to set up, track campaigns, and analyze results. 
3. Model flexibility: Choose the tool that offers a range of attribution models. This way, you can choose the most appropriate one aligning with your business goals. 
4. Reporting and analysis: Check whether the tool provides robust reporting and analysis capabilities. This is important for you to understand the impact of your campaigns on lead generation and conversion.
5.  Customer support: Check the quality of the customer support offered by the vendor. It's best to choose the one who provides good technical support and training.
6. Security: Ensure the tool has robust security measures to protect your data. 
7. Cost: Consider the cost of the tool in relation to the value it can deliver to your business.
   

Ultimately, the right attribution tool for your business will depend on your specific needs and goals. Consider your budget, the data you want to track, and the level of analysis you need.

Factors is one of the leading marketing analytics and attribution tools purpose-built for the B2B segment. It can help businesses make data-driven decisions by accurately attributing conversions to the most influential touchpoints. Some of the highlights of Factors include

1. Enables attribution of offline touchpoints such as webinars, field events, and so on.
2. You can visualize the customer journey at an Account and User Level. 
3. Easily integrates with tools like HubSpot, Salesforce, Marketo, 6sense, Segment, and Rudderstack
4. Supports Account Level Analytics and Attribution natively
5. You can compare attribution models and select the one most aligned with your business objectives
6. Provides an extensive set of filters and breakdowns to create rapid, relevant ad hoc reports in seconds.
7. AI-fueled insights into performance, anomalies, and fluctuations. 
   

If you’re looking for a marketing analytics tool that facilitates all your attribution needs, look no further than Factors.ai. Sign up for free to learn more about Factors, or book a personalized demo today!

This article on advanced marketing analytics covers…

• What is advanced marketing analytics?
• Limitations with marketing analytics
• Normalization of data prior to marketing analytics
• An overview of advanced marketing analytics techniques
• How to implement the advanced marketing analytics techniques?
• How Factors can help your business?
• Frequently Asked Questions

The impact of advanced marketing analytics has consistently expanded in B2B marketing. Making sense of relevant marketing data using analytics has always been of interest to marketers, but the ability to connect large data-set across various channels and programs has taken data-driven decision making to the next level. 

But how exactly can marketers go about making the most of their data? And once techniques and strategies for advanced marketing analytics have been identified, how can one ensure a smooth, frictionless implementation.

Most discussions of cutting-edge marketing and sales analytics tend to get bogged down in jargon. In this article, we will discuss the most effective methods of marketing analytics in simple terms. In order to provide a sense of how these methods operate in practice, we’ll also share a few concrete examples. Then, we'll highlight how advanced marketing analytics may be best used by data-driven marketers.

What is advanced marketing analytics?

Advanced marketing analytics is an all-encompassing term. It refers to a variety of advanced techniques and tools that teams employ to extract additional value from their data. By utilizing advanced marketing analytics, you’ll be able to predict patterns and generate accurate behavioral forecasts of your target audience and customers.

In short, advanced marketing analytics increases the value of campaigns for marketers, optimize ROI, and scale growth and pipeline.

Various types of analytics constitute advanced marketing analytics:

Regression Analytics: Regression Analytics examines the links between a dependent variable and an independent variable. This is an excellent technique for identifying trends in data, as the associations discovered in your sample will also exist in the larger population.

Predictive Analytics: Predictive analytics is a crucial component of advanced analytics, as it enables the discovery of solutions to unanswered questions. This sort of analysis employs numerous techniques from other data processes (such as data mining, AI, machine learning, and modeling) to do a comprehensive study of available data in order to make a future forecast. 

Prescriptive Analytics: Business analytics culminates in prescriptive analytics. This is the method of finding the greatest potential outcome by employing technology to examine raw data and make judgments based on existing descriptive and predictive analytics.

A few limitations with basic B2B marketing analytics

In some instances, analytics may misinterpret data, leading to ill-informed decisions. This section discusses the limitations that marketing analytics can present to an organization. A few limitations are listed below:

Misidentification of marketing needs: Basic marketing analytics methods can sometimes overestimate or underestimate the market’s needs and behaviors: what do customers want, how well are competitors performing, what messaging resonates most with the audience. This, in turn, may mislead your team into making suboptimal decisions around marketing strategy.

Evaluating marketing growth in the absence of a market share: Analyzing the market should provide an idea of your potential opportunities. However, this analysis may not always be comprehensive, leading to missed opportunities that may have otherwise seemed obvious. So, in order to be sure of your data, a comprehensive market share analysis is suggested to provide sufficient context.

Improper Data Interpretation: Collecting data from multiple sources aids in data analysis, but data interpretation is an entirely separate process. If anything, interpreting data requires significantly more effort — and failing to allocate adequate resources towards this step will likely result in inaccurate conclusions.

This is where advanced marketing analytics comes into play. By utilizing advanced methods, B2B teams can help themselves achieve improved operational efficiency, increased customer satisfaction, scalable revenue, and optimized ROI.

Normalizing data prior to analysis

Before engaging in advanced analytics, the wisest investment is to thoroughly prepare the foundations of your data. Ensure that fundamental reporting requirements are met through a robust automated data and reporting pipeline, which will liberate resources, eliminate human error, and enhance data quality.

The quantity & variety of data also have an important influence. The majority of advanced analytics approaches perform substantially better with bigger volumes of granular data acquired from several sources. Remember that the results of your deployments of advanced analytics will only be as good as the data you supply.

An overview of advanced marketing analytics techniques

#1 Customer Lifetime Value

It can be an expensive error to direct marketing efforts towards the incorrect audience. Using the aforementioned conversion prediction methods, marketers can generate a list of people that are likely to convert into customers, but how do you identify the most valuable leads out of this set?

Despite their initial satisfaction, a huge number of customers never come back to a business again. A possible churn awaits those who do so. Only a small percentage of customers will remain loyal over the long term, and even fewer will go on to become true brand advocates. This underrepresented group is the most important. Especially in B2B SaaS, the Pareto principle (80/20 rule) almost always holds true: 20% of consumers generate 80% of value.

Customer lifetime value (CLV) estimates a client's future earnings using a sample of their past purchases. With this information in hand, marketers may cut costs on clients who aren't lucrative, strengthen their focus on channels that bring in similar, paying consumers, and work to reawaken the interest of previously inactive customers.

How can Factors help with CLV?

Using Timelines, Factors can generate user and account level timelines of the entire customer journey from first touch to deal won. This is especially useful to B2B SaaS organizations wherein sales cycles involve several stakeholders from the same account. The ability to visualize every touch-point based on account, roles, etc offers granular insight into what’s working for whom and in which account.

#2 Marketing Attribution

How efficient are your methods for analyzing the efficacy of marketing campaigns? How much should you be investing in each advertisement? What channels should you cut to drive ROI? These are fundamental inquiries that any successful marketing strategy must address. Due to the increasingly complex, nonlinear nature of customer journeys, marketing attribution is increasingly gaining relevance.

There are a number of ways to implement a marketing attribution strategy, and some of them entail very basic business standards, like giving all of the credit for a conversion to the very first or very last click. There are other others, though, that demand more intricate mathematical and probabilistic methods. Multi-channel attribution makes sense for firms that operate in a digital environment and analyze engagement metrics like clicks, conversions, and click pathways. Marketing Mix Modeling is a supplementary method utilized by businesses that employ conventional marketing channels (MMM). It utilizes what-if scenarios and is based on regression analysis, a well-studied statistical method. What would happen, for instance, to income if spending on television were to rise by x percent? If you already know the answers to these questions, you can use them to better allocate resources for future initiatives.

Marketing Attribution on Factors

As previously mentioned, marketing attribution is the analytical science of determining which marketing tactics are contributing to sales or conversions. Attribution models give marketers insights into how marketing dollars are best spent by showing touch points that earn the most engagements. Factors delivers a robust marketing attribution suite with a wide range of multi-touch attribution models. Want to learn more? Find a good time here.

#3 Clustering

Clustering is a valuable tool for B2B marketers. The goal is help marketers divide their target audiences into manageable subsets. This allows for  better targeted content, campaigns, and offers. It is possible to generate several types or clusters of customers using heuristic rules: "Show content of type A if the customer is a millennial; show content of type B if they are gen Z."

With today’s abundence of and accessibility to large volumes of data, clustering has evolved into an effective technique to categorize a large number of clients based on any number of features or properties. These clusters emerge as a result of a statistical analysis of data using a measure of the mathematical distancing between various attributes. Customers with comparable ratings will be placed together.

Age, income, spend, duration of time since last purchase, etc. are all examples of features that can be used to segment customers. Similar success can be achieved when clustering keywords according to metrics such as organic ranking, competition level, and opportunity score. Product ads, marketing campaigns, advertisement groups, and so on can also be grouped together.

#4 Conversion prediction

Conversion prediction is not a straightforward operation because conversion rates are often in the single digits. It’s comparable to looking for a needle in a haystack. To increase your chances of success, you'll need a wealth of user behavior data from the past. Early behaviors connected to future conversion milestones can be determined based on this historical data.

Once you have identified people whose actions indicate a high possibility of conversion, you may prioritize and target them appropriately. In addition, this method is effective in identifying factors with the greatest impact on conversion. Depending on the site and its users, it may include a combination of industry, role, location, device kind, or any other combination of relevant dimensions.

How does Factors help with conversion prediction and optimization?

As the name suggests, Factors.ai is built upon an AI-powered analytics engine. Our proprietary ML algorithms empower markets to generate actionable insights from their data in a matter of seconds using AI-fueled Explain and Weekly insights. Curious to see our work in action? Find a good time here!

#5 Anomaly detection

The B2B SaaS marketing industry is rapidly evolving into a data-driven operation that involves near-real time iterations to campaigns and strategies. Naturally, this relies on a large, up-to-date volumes of data. Ad groups and keywords in display and search campaigns, for example, can be rather large and take part in hundreds of daily programmatic auctions; they also have their own unique conversion rates, budgets, returns on investment, and so on. That is,a  vast variety of figures and metrics that constantly fluctuate.

Generally, the fluctuations stay within the range of naturally occurring variances, but exceptions may be found. As a marketer, one must stay vigilant so as to quickly respond with appropriate actions and reactions.

Anomaly detection makes use of statistical analysis and automated decision making to notify marketers when critical KPIs such as conversion rate, revenue, and traffic depart too greatly from the norm. This method treats data as a statistical time series, allowing it to automatically detect seasonal and weekly patterns while simultaneously avoiding false positives. This allows for quick identification of data outliers and under or over performing efforts.

How does Factors help with Anomaly detection?

Factors provides robust, customizable KPI reporting functionality. Set your parameters and sit back as Factors automatically alerts you through Slack and Email notifications when your KPIs extend past your preconfigured range. Furthermore, unlock insights into which marketing efforts are performing, and which ones aren't. Attribution and Explain on Factors may also be used to detect the anomalies across keywords, firmographics, channels, campaigns and more

#6 Forecasting

Forecasting is everywhere: financial markets, economic indices, corporate sales, etc. So, it's no surprise that this technique can also forecast online traffic, conversion, revenue, and other metrics marketers care about. Similar to anomaly detection, forecasting uses historical data to predict trends. This, however, is not always possible and, as a result, forecasts will likely be inaccurate — at least to a certain degree.

In order to make interpretation of predicted results more flexible, forecasting techniques provide bands within which forecasted data can range with given probabilities. If uncertainty is properly accounted for, forecasting can be used as a technique to help you better adjust your future campaigns and targets.

How to implement advanced marketing analytics techniques?

Marketing teams can benefit from advanced marketing analytics throughout the entire marketing process. Advanced marketing analytics helps firms automate and optimize their marketing efforts one step past conventional marketing analytics. 

Gathering data from a larger variety of sources, not simply social media outlets, is an important part of deploying this type of analytics. More diverse data sets require more precise analysis if you want to get the most out of your data and make better decisions. There isn't a single business that has access to every piece of information it would need to make well-informed choices. Instead, firms should broaden their data collection to gain a deeper understanding of their field as a whole. 

Try to supplement your data with that of larger external data providers. As a result, you can more precisely grow your business and build more insightful models. You should also see data with a more prospective eye. It's conceivable that marketing and analytics models used in the past won't be useful for planning future efforts. Finding new connections between online and offline market aspects and impacts is more important than using past data. An analytics model that aids in taking more consequential choices requires a more in-depth examination of client behavior. 

Top-down data analysis is also crucial. By looking at the market as a whole, we may more easily identify a broader range of decision points from which to draw more predictive data. To get the most out of advanced analytics, granularity is essential.

The usefulness of data models can be increased by including the knowledge and experience of more people. The teams responsible for creating data models should include a wide variety of specialists. Data models that are both accurate and useful in practice benefit from the input of experts from a variety of disciplines. 

Large amounts of different data are ideal for advanced marketing analytics strategies. This is why before implementing a new analytics model, a company should thoroughly cleanse its historical data and set up its infrastructure.

How Factors can help your business?

Automation of ordinary data processing and integration of contemporary software solutions into your workflow are always prerequisites for advanced marketing analytics. Manual data manipulation requires far too much time on mechanical activities rather than focusing on the analysis itself. Furthermore, manual processing exposes the granularity of your findings to human error.

Factors assists businesses in automating marketing data processing and gathering advanced marketing analytics insights without the need for repetitive activities. The tool unifies data from a huge number of  marketing data sources, standardizes insights, and loads them into a single warehouse. Marketers can then quickly transfer data to Factors’ dedicated dashboards to create sophisticated charts and graphs. With numerous pre-designed and customizable dashboard templates at your disposal, you will gain a fresh perspective on your marketing activities and efficiently optimize your marketing ROI.

Advanced Marketing Analytics Techniques

Advanced marketing analytics enables marketers to extract deeper insights, optimize campaigns, and drive business growth.

- Key Methodologies: Regression analysis, predictive analytics, and prescriptive analytics.

- Core Functions: Identify trends, forecast customer behavior, and provide data-driven recommendations.

- Implementation Factors: Requires data normalization for accuracy and consistency.

Leveraging advanced analytics empowers marketers to enhance ROI, make informed decisions, and scale business growth effectively.

FAQs

What is advanced marketing analytics?

Advanced marketing analytics refers to a detailed examination of various marketing data utilized to show new customer behavior patterns, market trends, campaign performance concerns, and other significant insights.

Why is advanced marketing analytics important?

A company can find new markets for their products, expand their customer base, and increase revenue with the help of advanced sales and marketing analytics. Monitoring the success of marketing campaigns is essential for their continued success. Using advanced marketing analytics methods will help you fine-tune your campaigns and spend where it counts.

How does data analytics help in marketing?

With the help of data analytics, marketers can glean actionable insights into their data's performance. This data is useful for determining the channels used by customers and prospects, as well as the most profitable campaigns.

How Does Advanced Marketing Analytics Help CMOs?

The use of advanced marketing analytics allows businesses to make more informed predictions about the future and to spot emerging trends earlier. More reliable insights can be obtained from a larger pool of high-quality data with the help of this type of analytics. A CMO will have access to more actionable data, which should lead to more effective campaigns.

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

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

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

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

Enter: Supermetrics. 

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

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Supermetrics Features

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

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

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

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

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

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

Pull data from hundreds of sites and platforms

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

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

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

• MS Excel 
• Snowflake 
• Google Sheets 
• Google Data Studio 
• API 
• BigQuery 

3. Marketing Data Visualization 

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

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

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

Limitations with Supermetrics 

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

1. No clean-ups for marketing data errors

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

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

2. Unintuitive marketing analytics software 

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

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

3. Lack of scalability

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

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

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

4. Supermetrics pricing

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

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

1. Data-Grabbing and Insights across the customer journey 

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

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

2. Customizable Attribution Modeling

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

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

3. Cost Effectiveness 

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

4. User-friendly interface

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

Wrapping Up 

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

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Looking to learn more about HockeyStack’s pricing, features, and comparisons? You’re in the right place. This article is the product of raiding the internet to highlight everything you need to know about HockeyStack. Let’s jump in. 

What is HockeyStack?

HockeyStack is a B2B analytics & attribution platform that integrates with your ads, website, CRM, and more to identify how campaigns and content are influencing conversions across the customer journey. Here’s a quick breakdown of what HockeyStack offers:

• Multi-touch attribution
• Website analytics
• Predictive analytics
• IP-identification
• Unified tracking across campaigns, website, CRM, etc
• Goals, funnels, and segment tracking
• Account-based customer journeys
• Custom dashboards and reports
• Surveys
• LinkedIn Impression tracking

HockeyStack Pricing

[December 2023 Update] HockeyStack has recently revised its pricing to $1399/mo for up to 10,000 unique visitors. Here's a breakdown of what HockeyStack's growth plan includes on time of writing:

[Aug 2023 Update] HockeyStack’s pricing plans start at $949/mo for up to 10,000 unique website visitors and 10 seats. This starting price is somewhere between Dreamdata ($599/mo) and Infinigrow’s ($1,500/mo) starting plans. Not the cheapest or the most expensive attribution solution out there.

As with most products in this category, HockeyStack pricing is based on the volume of traffic or users you’re tracking. You’ll have to request a demo to find the exact commercials for your business. 

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HockeyStack Reviews

Generally, HockeyStack is well rated for its wide range of customization but a few reviews find HockeyStack marginally unintuitive and relatively unrefined.  

HockeyStack Alternatives

Here’s a quick list of leading HockeyStack alternatives for your consideration. Looking for an in-depth analysis of the strengths and limitations of these options? Read on here: Top 7 HockeyStack alternatives 

• Factors.ai
• Dreamdata
• Adobe Marketo Measure (Bizible)
• Attribution App
• Ruler Analytics
• Calibermind
• FullCircle Insights

HockeyStack Comparison: Why Factors Over HockeyStack

HockeyStack is great at what it does. It provides robust attribution functionality, a wide range of customizations and integrations, and well-reviewed customer support. That being said, when compared to a similarly priced attribution product like Factors, HockeyStack seems to fall short in terms of features, usability, and cost-effectiveness. 

Accordingly, here are three reasons why Factors may make more sense for you:

1. Product features

In addition to the standard attribution and analytics features shared by both solutions, Factors delivers a wide range of features to help GTM teams refine customer journeys and drive conversions. Mainly:

1. LinkedIn and G2 Intent signals: While both tools offer IP-based account identification, Factors captures intent signals across website, LinkedIn impressions, AND G2 engagement. This means that you can identify anonymous accounts and track their cross-channel engagement more holistically. 

In addition, Factors integrates with MAPs, LinkedIn, and more via Webhooks to activate trigger-based actions. This includes automated LinkedIn matched audience list building, automated mail sequence activation based on engagement and intent signals & more.

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2. Path analysis for aggregated customer journey mapping 

3. Account scoring Factors empower tailor-made account scoring configurations based on engagement across website, LinkedIn impressions, and G2 so teams can qualify and prioritize high-intent accounts accurately.

4. Anomaly detection and real-time alerts via mail, Slack or MS Teams

2. Usability

Factors and HockeyStack are both among the most customizable B2B attribution solutions out there. The ability to customize KPIs, properties, dashboards, and events is extremely valuable for teams looking to tailor their reporting for their business-specific requirements.

That being said, users find Factors to be user-friendly and conducive to self-service. Fortunately, both solutions provide comprehensive onboarding support and customer success management, so you should still be able to derive great value from either one. Still, user experience and product usability is something to keep in mind when making a purchase decision. 

3. Cost-effectiveness

Finally, we arrive at cost. While HockeyStack plans start at $950 [As of Dec 2023, HockeyStack pricing has been revised to $1399/mo] for up to 10,000 monthly visitors, Factors offers a much lower barrier to entry with paid plans starting as low as $99/mo. Moreover, Factors provides a free plan to get you started with our basic offerings. 

Learn more about Factors pricing here: www.factors.ai/pricing

Overall, Factors is the more cost-effective option for early-stage teams looking to start out their marketing analytics and attribution journey. Given the additional features discussed above, it's more bang for your buck than other alternatives, including HockeyStack. 

Looking to see if Factors would make the right fit for your attribution needs? Book a demo with us today!

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

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

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

#1 A Lack of Focus on Branding

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

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

#2 Being unaware of your true target audience

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

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

#3 Using unnecessary jargon 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

#5 A Poor Definition of your Brand’s USP  

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

#6 Ignoring UI and Design

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

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

What is a product-led growth strategy?

Product-led growth (PLG) is a business strategy and technique that sets the product as the major engine of customer acquisition, activation, satisfaction, retention, and scalable expansion. Customers remain loyal to a brand that offers an innovative and personalized product experience. It most likely happens when all of a company's digital-facing teams—marketing, product, customer success, and more—unite around product-led growth.

Due to Product Led Growth’s pivotal position in some of the most successful SaaS start-ups in recent times (Notion, Dropbox, Canva, Figma, Slack and Dropbox), PLG is being increasingly considered by high-growth teams as a winning growth strategy.

A closer examination of PLG, reveals a fundamentally new approach to product development. One that makes the product the star of the show throughout the whole user experience. Salespeople, marketers, and engineers all play supporting roles in a successful assisted sale, but the product is the star of the show. User-driven virality, activation and engagement journeys, and the first steps toward an assisted sale are all examples of this.

Why is product-led growth the future of SaaS?

In contrast to sales-led organizations whose sole objective is to move a buyer from A to B in a sales cycle, product-led companies invert the typical sales paradigm. Product-driven businesses make this possible by providing the consumer with the "keys" to the product and assisting them in experiencing a meaningful consequence while using the product. At this point, upgrading to a premium subscription is an obvious choice.

On the surface, product-led development may appear to be a straightforward model for your buyer to test before purchasing. However, upon closer inspection, product-led growth is an entirely novel strategy for expanding a SaaS business.

Product-led growth entails that every team in your organization influences the product. Your marketing team will inquire, "How can we develop a demand flywheel for our product?" Your sales staff will inquire, "How can we use this product to qualify leads?" Your customer success team asks, "How can we design a product that facilitates customer success beyond our wildest dreams?" By focusing every team on the product, you establish a culture based on enduring customer value."

By focusing on the product throughout the organization, product-led businesses frequently gain:

• By letting your prospects onboard themselves, you can drastically minimize the time-to-value and sales cycle of your prospects.
• Reduce Customer Acquisition Costs (CAC) by allowing users to upgrade independently.
• Higher Revenue Per Employee (RPE): Less hand-holding results in increased profit margins per customer.

Product-led growth isn't just about disrupting "how" SaaS businesses sell; it's your only means of survival.

Key product-led growth metrics

It's critical that everyone in your team understands and adheres to the same set of performance goals. While there are new measures to rally behind in a product-led growth model, many on this list may sound familiar — many SaaS organizations already do prefer to track product-led growth metrics.

1. Activation Rate: The percentage of users that have found meaningful value in a product.

2. Customer Lifetime Value (CLV): An estimate of how much income a single customer will bring in for your company over the course of your engagement.

3. Acquisition: The number of users who have signed up for your free trial/tier.

4. Product Qualified Lead (PQL): A product qualified lead (PQL) is a lead who has derived significant value from your product via a free trial or freemium model. These customers are primed for an upsell.

5. Net Revenue Churn: This metric, which is commonly represented as a percentage, reflects the amount of money lost after accounting for new and expansion revenue.

6. Average Revenue Per User (ARPU): This metric is excellent for gauging the general health of your company. To determine this, divide the monthly recurring revenue by the total number of clients.

7. TTV: The amount of time it takes new users to reach their Activation moment is known as the Time-to-Value (TTV). The more quickly you can activate users, the more likely it is that they will remain active. The key objective of a successful onboarding process is to minimize TTV.

8. Expansion Revenue: One of the most crucial levers for SaaS growth, expansion revenue serves as an anti-churn strategy. Revenue from existing customers that is created through upsells, add-ons, cross-sells, and other strategies is measured by expansion revenue.

9. Free-to-Paid Conversion Rate: The percentage of trial users that have upgraded to a paid membership.

Is your product fit for product led growth?

If your organization possesses the following traits, you might want to employ a product-led growth approach to increase product adoption: In fact, a PLG approach can influence your marketing, product optimization, pricing, and sales strategies.

• The product market conditions are favorable for the proposed strategy to be implemented successfully.
• The user views the product as a "highest-value-product" that they wish to use on a frequent basis, which increases its perceived value.
• The user is able to quickly and easily achieve large ongoing benefit with little to no assistance from corporate staff.
• Rather than setting the price, "paywalls" in a product, track how much value the user is receiving and adjust their pricing accordingly.
• Market, sell, and onboard new consumers are all made possible by the product.
• The goal of marketing is to get people to interact with the product rather than the sales team.
• A network effect is already incorporated into the product.
• Companies that use the product have a vocal proponent who works tirelessly to spread the word about how fantastic it is.

Modelling growth around a product-driven approach

You can escape the onslaught of increasing client acquisition expenses and declining customer willingness to pay for your product by focusing on product-led growth. You must do the following actions in order to create a successful product-led business:

• Learn to articulate the benefits that working with you can offer to your clients.
• Make sure you express this value to your customer in a way that is pertinent to them and the situation they are in.
• Ensure that you deliver on that value.

How does the Product-led growth model fare in comparison to other models?

Growth models commonly used by companies include one or a combination of the following:

• Sales-led
• Marketing-led
• Product-led

Each of the three models has a different internal alignment. Companies that are mostly sales-driven are designed to help the sales team succeed as the company's principal revenue generator. We ask, "Will this help the sales team win more deals?" while making decisions about anything from employee training to software purchases to marketing strategies. 

The primary goal of marketing-driven businesses is to persuade customers of the worth of a product and to meet their demands. A marketing team is supported by the firm in its attempts to attract customers and generate leads. After conducting customer research and advertising campaigns, the marketing staff has a key role in bringing new customers into the fold. Marketing initiatives can make all the difference in pipeline and growth in a highly competitive market where items are tough to distinguish.

Prospects must be told the value of a product explicitly under each of these approaches. Product-led businesses, on the other hand, place an emphasis on showcasing the true worth of their offerings. For example, product-driven organizations may encourage prospects to engage with the product immediately—in the form of a free trial or "freemium" subscription—instead of investing extensively in outbound sales. Allowing potential customers to test out a high-quality product before they buy it enables them to experience its advantages first-hand. It is unnecessary to persuade a buyer about the genuine value of a product created with this mindset.

Product-led businesses prioritize minimizing customer acquisition costs (CAC) to the greatest extent possible. Recruiting and training a large sales force is costly. Both traditional and digital marketing tactics that are of high-quality demand substantial and consistent financial commitments. However, becoming product-driven does not entail abandoning all traditional sales and marketing tactics. It is more important to be strategic with your investments and vision.

You still require a sales team to assist with selling and a marketing team to generate demand. But product-driven expansion increases the effectiveness of both sales-driven and marketing-driven activities. Ultimately, it is much simpler to sell and promote a product that customers adore than to sell and market an average product.

How does your business benefit from a Product-led growth model?

Are you unsure if product-led growth is the right path for your company? There are some definite advantages to product-led growth, even if it isn't ideal in every situation.

Accelerated growth - Rapid acceptance and expansion are the primary motivations for using product-led growth in business. To put it another way, you're getting to the point and decreasing the barriers to entry by allowing users to access the product for no charge.

Scalability - Slack and Shopify are two of the most successful startups in the world, but scaling up may be a challenge. If you're looking for rapid expansion, product-driven growth is often the best option. This is because product-driven companies can focus their resources on onboarding and serving customers while their competitors are focusing on developing their sales organizations.

Reduced Cost of Acquisition - Using a product-led growth approach significantly decreases a company's marketing expense because customer acquisition channels are already embedded into the product. Overall acquisition expenses are reduced as a result.

Better Rates of Retention - Product-led growth ensures that user expectations are aligned with the capabilities of your product, ensuring that your product is a success. A better fit for the user is created, which leads to increased user retention over time.

Customer Satisfaction - Growing a business with a product is mostly dependent on word-of-mouth advertising. It's not your company's job to persuade customers to buy your goods. It's your customers, not you, who drive adoption.

Customers are likely to have great things to say about this product because of its emphasis on providing real value. Other customers read these ratings and thoughts, which starts a virtuous circle of purchases. Product-led growth enterprises benefit from the fact that many consumers prefer to investigate things they've heard about online rather than in person.

Transition to product-led: What does it mean to be product led

Not only is the price model changing, but so are many other aspects of the firm as a whole.

Customers can test a product before purchasing it thanks to free trials offered by many companies.

As a result, product onboarding experiences are being improved so that clients may begin experiencing the product's value much sooner.

Product firms devote a lot of time and attention to actually distinguishing themselves from their competitors by uncovering fresh client problems and value to offer.

To deliver even greater value to a more narrowly focused group of clients, businesses are increasingly focusing on a smaller set of distinct demographics and the difficulties they face.

The distinctive value proposition is the focus of the messaging developed by the marketing and sales teams.

Optimizing pricing models around customer experience and providing more options, such as subscription models, is becoming more commonplace.

The term "value" appears in all of them. Customers churn and move on to the next product if they don't feel their demands are addressed and the product doesn't deliver value.

In order to become product-led, the first step is to discover what customers value the most about their products. What are the most common issues customers have with the product? What features and functionalities are absolutely essential to your clients in order to keep them engaged over the long term?

Companies can use this information to improve their product offering, onboarding experience, marketing and sales message, pricing structures, and trial choices so that customers can experience the product's unique value proposition at every stage of their customer journey.

Looking forward…

When brands correctly use product-led growth frameworks, they acquire an unfair competitive edge and experience substantially lower Customer Acquisition Costs (CAC). A good framework will also help reduce friction in the user onboarding process, which might impede the growth of your product. 

But beyond the framework, product-led growth is really about knowing your customers' demands and identifying market gaps.

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

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

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

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

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

Well, your search ends here. 

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

What Are Content Marketing Metrics and Why Are They Important?

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

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

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

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

6 Content Marketing Metrics You Must Track 

Impressions 

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

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

Page Traffic 

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

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

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

CTR 

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

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

Conversion 

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

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

Enter conversion. 

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

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

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

SEO metrics 

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

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

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

Content Shares 

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

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

The takeaways? 

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

User Engagement 

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

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

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

FAQs 

How can I measure content marketing metrics? 

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

Why are content marketing metrics important? 

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

Top 10 Content Marketing Metrics for SaaS Growth

Tracking key metrics ensures effective content marketing strategies and sustainable business growth.

1. Core Metrics: Organic traffic, conversion rate, and customer acquisition cost (CAC).

2. Engagement Indicators: Time on page, bounce rate, and click-through rate (CTR).

3. Strategic Impact: Backlinks, social shares, lead quality, and customer lifetime value (CLV).

Monitoring these KPIs helps SaaS companies refine content strategies, boost engagement, and drive long-term success.

Wrapping Up 

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

Not all SaaS marketing metrics are made equal

Between traffic, conversion rates, MQLs, CAC, churn, and more, there’s no shortage of key marketing metrics for SaaS companies to track.

Each of these metrics allows teams to capture the pulse of marketing health, which in turn helps make iterative improvements to marketing performance and ROI.

No doubt, SaaS marketing metrics are important.

But it can also be overwhelming for teams to know which metrics matter more than others. Given that monitoring marketing metrics can be an investment in and of itself, it’s vital to prioritize a few key ones to begin with.

This blog explores 9 of the most important SaaS metrics that every marketing team should regularly keep tabs on. But first, let’s briefly discuss what marketing metrics are and why they’re important. 

Related reading: 9 ABM metrics to track campaign success

What are SaaS marketing metrics?

SaaS marketing metrics are standards of measurement used to monitor the efficacy of SaaS marketing campaigns and assets. 

These metrics provide a frame of reference to compare past and present performance in order to continue to make iterative improvements to desired objectives.

For instance, observing that the signups have dramatically increased by 40% after a landing page design overhaul is clear evidence of improvement in performance. At a deeper level, SaaS marketing metrics like return on investment helps marketers prove the impact of their campaigns on pipeline.

In summary, marketing metrics help SaaS companies track performance, improve ROI, and quantify bottom line impact.

9 key marketing metrics for SaaS companies

1. Website traffic  

Definition: Website traffic refers to the total number of web sessions or website visitors over a certain period of time.

Especially in SaaS, the website is at the heart of business. It acts as a hub for prospects to learn more about your work and reach out for a demo call or free trial. Needless to say, not all traffic is from high-intent prospects. In fact, only a fraction of traffic is likely to be relevant to your business. That being said, when used in tandem with other metrics, website traffic can help SaaS companies asses how the number of visitors interested in your brand and product.

Several tools including Google Analytics and Factors.ai measure website traffic. It’s a helpful metric to understand high-level website health as well as the immediate impact of marketing campaigns and content. While traffic in and of itself may not provide granular insights, growing traffic is generally a positive sign as it means more visitors are likely to eventually convert to paying customers. 

2. Conversion rate

Definition: Conversion rate measures the proportion of users who complete a certain event or action.

Conversion rate % = total conversions ÷ total visitors x 100 

Conversion rate is a broad SaaS marketing metric that can apply to a wide range of scenarios such as webinar registrations, demo form submissions, or trial sign-ups. 

One of the most common uses of conversion rate is in landing pages. 

For example, say 50 people click on a search ad and arrive at a landing page with a demo form. 2 people actually submit the demo form and schedule time to speak with a sales rep. In this case, the conversion rate is 2/50 x 100 = 4%. Maybe improving headline relevancy and page design could increase conversions even further.

The average benchmark landing page conversion rate is 9.7%

3. Bounce rate

Bounce rate is defined as the percentage of website visitors who click away from a website without viewing or interacting with any other page apart from the one they initially landed on. 

As much fun as it sounds, bounce rate is a serious marketing metric that reflects the quality of your web pages. A high bounce rate indicates that your web page design/content does not resonate with the visitor, causing them to leave without exploring any further. 

Bounce rate = total one-page visits  ÷ total visitors x 100

Note that a landing page with a high-bounce rate isn’t necessarily a cause for concern given that the purpose of the landing page is almost always to bring in a visitor, have them submit a form, and leave. 

Instead, bounce rate is more relevant for the homepage, feature page, pricing page, or blogs. High bounce rates in such pages indicate that the content or design isn’t relevant or captivating enough for the visitor to continue exploring the website.

Bounce rate benchmarks:

• 0-40% bounce rate: excellent performance
• 40-55% bounce rate: decent performance 
• 55% - 70%: mediocre performance 
• 70%+ bounce rate: poor performance 

Average bounce rates by channel:

• Display ads: 56%
• Social: 54%
• Direct: 49%
• Paid search: 44%
• Organic: 43% 

In addition to tracking traditional bounce rates, Factors.ai shows granular insight into exit and engagement rates as well. This provides complete insight into where visitors are dropping off and what content resonates most with the audience.

4. Marketing Qualified Leads (MQLs)

It’s all well and good to improve website traffic but real marketing impact involves driving qualified visitors who show explicit potential to eventually become paying customers. Marketing qualified leads is a metric that captures the number of leads early along the customer journey — but nonetheless on the path to becoming customers. 

Marketing qualified lead (MQL) measures the number of top-of-the-funnel leads that exhibit explicit interest in what a company has to offer based on their interactions across paid campaigns, social media, website, and other touchpoints. 

For example, a visitor downloading an eBook on “customer journey mapping”  is likely interested in addressing this use-case and is at the very least open to learning more about Factors. Generally speaking, this lead can be considered an MQL.

Factors.ai connects the dots between campaigns, website, and CRM to showcase which marketing efforts and assets are contributing to MQLs, SQLs, deals, and other lifecycle stages. 

5. Sales velocity 

Sales velocity is defined as the rate at which leads and prospects move through the sales funnel and generate pipeline. 

Sales velocity = (opportunities x deal value x % win rate) ÷ length of sales cycles

Sales velocity indicates the health and performance of sales and marketing teams to herd buyers towards becoming paying customers. 

Go-to-market teams can improve sales velocity by:

• Increasing number of opportunities by scaling marketing initiatives and sales outreach
• Increasing deal values by targeting larger customers
• Increasing % win rate by improving sales pitches and enablement material
• Decreasing the length of the sales cycle with incentives like free trials or limited time deals 

Funnel analytics on Factors.ai allows users to calibrate custom sales cycles to identify the velocity between one stage to the next. With this, users can understand how long it takes for visitors to progress from ad campaigns to web sessions to button submissions to deal won. In turn, this helps identify points of weaknesses or friction to eliminate across the journey. 

6. Customer Acquisition Cost 

Most marketing teams invest significant resources in paid campaigns, social, SEO, and offline events with the hopes that these initiatives attract further customers to cover their costs several times over. 

Customer acquisition cost (CAC) or cost per acquisition (CPA) is a metric that measures the amount of money spent to acquire a single new customer.

‍In theory, this includes employee compensation, overheads, and, of course, marketing expenses. In practice, most teams only consider the latter. 

For example, if a marketing team spends $70 on ads and $30 a website redesign to acquire 20 new customers, the CAC works out to be: ($70 + $30) ÷ 20 = $5 per customer. 

7. Customer lifetime value

Customer lifetime value (CLV) is the total expected revenue from a customer during the entire relationship with a business. 

For instance, long-term, enterprise customers with large contract values are bound to have greater CLV than mid-market customers with short-term contracts.

While it certainly helps to know the cost of acquiring a single customer, it’s crucial to measure the lifetime value of each of these customers to truly understand if acquisition initiatives are worth it. 

For example, if it costs $300 to acquire a single customer with a customer lifetime value of $250, it’s actually a loss of $50 to the business. Alternatively, if CAC is $500 but CLV is $5000, the customer pays back the CAC several times over. Hence, it’s important to look at CAC and CLV in conjunction. 

8. Return on marketing investment (RoMI)

Now more than ever, SaaS marketing teams are urged to prove their impact on bottom line metrics like pipeline and revenue. This is where RoMI comes in. 

Return on marketing investment (RoMI) measures the revenue won from marketing campaigns against the cost of that campaign. 

RoMI = revenue earned from campaign ÷ cost of campaign x 100

In theory, the RoMI is a straightforward concept. But in practice, calculating RoMI without the right multi-touch attribution tools can be an unintuitive, time-consuming chore. Given that SaaS sales cycles involve several touch-points across several campaigns and stakeholders, it’s hard to pin-point exactly which campaign contributed to revenue.

Factors.ai solves for this challenge with a wide range of powerful revenue attribution models to quantify marketing ROI. In turn, this helps allocate budgets towards campaigns that drive results and prove marketing’s impact on revenue. 

9. Retention & Churn

We’ve combined retention & churn together as they’re two sides of the same coin. 

Customer retention measures the number of customers that a business retains over time through repeated purchases or contract renewals. 

Customer retention is an important SaaS metric as retaining existing customers works out to 5-10 times cheaper than acquiring new ones. Hence, businesses should always look to improve retention rates. 

On the flip side, Churn refers to the number of customers who discontinue their relationships as buyers with a business. 

A high rate of churn indicates that customers are not receiving the value or service they expect from the business. It’s a strong signal of dissatisfaction. Hence, businesses should always look to limit churn rates.

And there you have it. While there are several other important SaaS marketing metrics out there, the 9 metrics we’ve covered in this blog should give any SaaS marketing team an idea of their top and bottom line performance. 

Want to learn more about how Factors.ai can help ll the metrics that matter to you under one roof? Request a personalized demo today! 

Search marketing with Google Ads is kinda cool. It helps users who are looking for specific information, products, or services connect with businesses looking to sell specific information, products or services — all through a wonderfully powerful, complex search engine. But how does search marketing work? More specifically, how does keyword matching work in the latest iteration of Google Ads? Let’s find out…

How does keyword matching work on Google Ads?

There are 7 steps involved in Google Search Ads to connect the right audience with the right message using keyword matching. Here’s how it works:

1. First, a user types a search query into Google. Google then processes this text against spell-checks, synonyms, and related terms to form what’s called the “retrieval query”. This retrieval query wrangles all relevant search ad keywords that could be served into a set. 

2. From this set of keywords from the retrieval query, Google verifies eligibility based on keyword match type, campaign, ad group, etc. This is performed using advanced machine learning and natural language tech to understand and optimize matching for intent and relevance. Other factors considered by Google are budget, geo, negative keywords, creatives, landing page, time of day, etc. 

3. When choosing from multiple eligible keywords from the same account (For example, if company X bids on both “B2B marketing analytics tools” and “B2B marketing analytics software”), Google will prioritize those keywords that are closer to being an exact match to the search term. So if a user searches “marketing analytics software”, they will receive the former search ad. Once filtered down, Google has its set of ad groups with eligible, relevant keywords.

4. With this set of ad groups containing eligible keywords, Google’s responsive search ads creative system will automatically rally the “best performing creative — including headline and description” for the user based relevance.

5. Next, we arrive at the stage wherein bids are calculated using Ad Rank. Ad Rank is a scoring system that assigns value to ads to determine if or not your ad will be presented to the audience. Of course, your bid amount is an important factor in determining Ad Rank as well. 

6. Here, Google Ads chooses the optimal combination of ad relevance and ad rank. Once again, Google’s algorithm is looking for landing page quality and keywords in an ad group. The latter implies it’s highly important  to group keywords by theme, to ensure favorability. 

7. The final step is straightforward. Once Google Ads processes all the aforementioned information, each advertiser enters into auction and those advertisements with the highest Ad Rank (including and especially bid amounts) are displayed for your audience to see. 

Keyword match types on Google Ads

As the name suggests, keyword matching matches words and phrases from the search ads you bid on to terms that people actually use when searching. Hence, it’s crucial to bid on the relevant keywords to ensure your ads align with what your audience is looking for. Google Ads offers three match types. The accuracy with which the keyword needs to match a user’s search query will be determined based on match type you choose:

1. [Exact match]

‍As you may have guessed, [Exact match] types require an exact match between the keyword and the search query. For example, if the keyword is “B2B marketing analytics”, only search queries that mean the same, like: “B2B marketing analytics software” or “B2B marketing analytics tools” will trigger the search ad. 

2. “Phrase match”

Phrase matching is marginally less rigid than [Exact match] types. It essentially considers all searches wherein the primary keyword is part of a larger string of search text (i.e. a phrase). For example: “Best software for B2B marketing analytics”

3. Broad match

Broad match provides the most loose matching out of the three match types. It considers the exact keyword, phrases around the keyword and all related terms around the keyword. For example, Google may trigger an ad for the search term “B2B marketing attribution” because it's somewhat related to “marketing analytics” as well. 

Note: In short, Exact match keywords are a subset of Phrase match keywords. And Phrase match keywords are a subset of Broad match keywords. 

Broad Keyword Matching on Google Ads

Google Ads have increasingly been pushing Broad match types as their AI-algorithms continue to improve their understanding of language, intent, relevance, etc. In recent year, keyword matching on Google Ads has evolved from a pure syntax-matching system (wherein a user’s search query text simply matches an advertisers search ad keyword) to a semantics based system (wherein broadly related themes and topics are recognized as relevant enough inquiries to warrant the display of an indirectly relevant search ad). Here are some signals that broad match takes into consideration (in addition to exact keyword and phrases):

1. Other keywords in the ad group: Arguably the most important signal is relevance of other keywords within a specific ad group. For example, if the search term is “salmon sweaters” and your ad group consists of the keywords “orange sweaters”, “red sweaters” and “blue sweaters”, Google Ads will understand that in this case, salmon refers to the colour and not the fish. 

2. Previous searches: Google Ads also takes into account a user's previous search when deciding what ad to present. For example, let’s say a user previously searches for “manchester city vs liverpool football score”. Google uses this historical data in the future so that simply searching “man city vs liverpool” will retrieve the football score without mention of either word.

3. User location: This one is straightforward. Google analyses user location to personalize search results. Eg: B2B SaaS marketing agencies based in New York vs B2B SaaS marketing agencies near me. This may or may not be as relevant to your marketing efforts depending on the type of product you’re selling. Still quite handy to be aware of.

4. Landing page: Last but most definitely not least is an ads landing page. Does the landing page contain relevant keywords? Does it contain quality content — including images and creatives, to ensure a valuable experience for the visitor? These are questions to keep in mind when constructing and improving upon your landing pages. 

And there you have it! An overview into how keyword matching works on Google Ads. 

Curious to learn how Google Analytics compares to Factors.ai? Read on here

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

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

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

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

What is Heap Analytics? 

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

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

What does Heap do well?

1. Real-time tracking 

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

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

2. Retroactive analysis 

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

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

3. ‍Multiple devices 

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

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

4. Events + Filters 

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

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

Why Heap May Not Be The Best Choice

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

Costs of Data Storage 

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

Tricky UI 

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

Limited to website analytics

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

Why Factors.ai over Heap?

Helps build overall GTM motion 

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

Comprehensive tracking and reporting

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

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

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

Cost Effectiveness

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

💰Check out our pricing here

Invest in the right analytics tool 

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

Heap Analytics Overview

Founded in 2013, Heap Analytics is a product analytics platform that captures user interactions across websites and apps.

1. Core Capabilities: Real-time tracking, retroactive analysis, and cross-device performance monitoring.

2. Key Features: Automatic event tracking, a user-friendly interface, and quick implementation for B2B companies.

3. Recent Development: Acquired by ContentSquare in September 2023 to enhance digital market analytics capabilities.

Heap helps businesses understand user behavior, optimize the customer journey, and drive data-driven decision-making.

‍Contemporary B2B marketing is closing the gap

In the marketing realm, it’s a common precedent to pit B2B and B2C marketing against each other. And rightly so, given their inherently dissimilar attributes with who they’re selling to, how long it takes to make a purchase, etc. With that said, research and technology have proven there are a lot alike between the two. They might be subtle but understanding those subtleties are impactful for the long haul.

Technology has shown us the prevalence of digital customers in B2B buyer personas is similar to that of B2C. With B2B marketing showing a progressive interest in becoming more brand-oriented, research has shown us the importance of emotional connection at higher levels of a B2B element value. Like in B2C, building a social media presence or making more personalized content to promote branding has shifted the agenda of B2B marketing. To emphasize further, here are 4 things B2B marketing could adopt from B2C marketing.

4 things b2b could adopt from b2c marketing

1. Marketing to People:

This translates to the personalisation of your marketing strategy that will tend to customers’ emotional and logical needs. B2C marketing for the longest time has honed the art of delivering personalized messages to individual prospects. While historically B2B marketing has been informational/educational akin to the needs of the several decision-makers involved. B2B prospects are nurtured with their need to research.

You’ll be surprised to know that adding a personal element to your interaction in your marketing promotes perceived brand value. In fact, B2B customers are 50% more likely to convert when they see personal value, and are 8x likely to pay a premium for a comparable service. The use of dynamic content that corresponds with a user’s needs on a website, and B2B email marketing to establish a personal tone, are some examples of personalisation. This isn’t to diminish the informational/professional element of B2B marketing but to add a personal touch to the same.

2. Building a Community Around the Brand:

From a business relationship to fans of the brand. Presumably, this is much harder for a B2B organization to achieve, while it’s second nature for most B2C brands. OnePlus for example built a community forum that gives users access to news, discussion and social features. This not only promotes the brand and its products but also allows for more customer engagement.

There are different channels through which B2B companies can build their communities. This can include creating a subreddit and uploading infographics on YouTube. Using these mediums could prove to be more useful than building your own forum thanks to the already well established B2B marketing communities within them. If you are keen on building one with a more tight-knit approach, consider forming a public discord server or a public slack channel.

When it comes to building a social media presence in B2B, having a social media presence alone won’t cut the mustard. Instead, a continual effort to build through customer engagement is key. B2C brands often create community posts and polls on Twitter, create short quizzes, answer queries, etc. This dynamic however is hard to build over the professional overtone, but adopting its practice should facilitate some creative and original content. It is also important to utilize a wide array of social media platforms, and not ones that might generate the most prospects.

Influencer marketing is something B2C marketing is all too familiar with. And for good reasons, people are more likely to purchase something with more credibility. But before you do so, you would have to sell the product to your influencer first, which involves a great deal of good faith and trust. The influencer marketing space in B2C is cataclysmically large, to scale the same for B2B would be pretty impractical. Instead, an affiliate program that incentivises existing customers to recommend the product or service to others. Even leaving reviews on authentic platforms like G2 increases the credibility of your brand by having other brands and marketing leaders vouch for it.

3. Buyer Personas and B2B Mobile Traffic:

Building a strong buyer persona is something B2B marketing could use to improve its content strategy and create more engaging content that addresses its challenges. This means understanding your target audience. In B2B this represents all the decision-makers involved, their pain points, goals and most importantly intent data. Research shows that B2B companies that utilize buyer personas in their content strategy perform better.

Speaking of buyer personas, it’s not unusual to expect a large portion of B2C buyers to use their mobile devices for research and queries. But what if I told you the use of mobile phones is gradually becoming the source of a lot of B2B search queries, over 50% of it to be precise. More buyers are using their phones for B2B research during work and leading organizations are generating 40% of revenue through it. Considering that mobile-first B2B generates higher engagement, site traffic, search queries and leads. Maybe it’s worth adopting from our B2C cousins.

4. Privacy and Privacy first marketing:

Becoming a privacy-first business is a big deal in this current digital climate. Given that the customer pool for the average B2C marketer is larger and its not so admirable track record with data security and privacy. More B2C marketers are becoming more proactive with their data and how they interact with it. This concerns B2B marketers as well, from a business perspective, data security is paramount. Educating yourself in B2C data security practices can be useful as most of the regulations governing these practices and the use of cookies stems from B2C practices in the past. To learn more about becoming a privacy-first business refer to this blog.

It's not hard to believe that the line between B2B and B2C marketing is getting blurry. At the very least they share the same goals. To generate as many leads and convert them. While contemporary B2B marketing adopts features of B2C marketing, the same could be said the other way around. Their culmination of experience in lead generation and conversion brings a lot to the table for the future of marketing methodology.

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

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

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

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

What is Performance Marketing?

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

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

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

Why is performance marketing preferred over other methods? 

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

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

Relatively Risk-Free 

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

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

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

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

Better, Clearer Insights 

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

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

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

How does performance marketing work? 

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

PPC - Pay-Per-Click 

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

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

PPM - Pay-Per-Impression 

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

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

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

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

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

Where Can You Use Performance Marketing? 

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

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

Affiliate Marketing 

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

Social Media 

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

Targeting Search Engine Results 

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

• Organic efforts (SEO) and 
• Paid ads and features 

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

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

Things to keep in mind 

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

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

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

In conclusion...

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

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