Marketing analytics software plays a critical role for any successful digital marketing team. With hundreds of marketing analytics tools out there, it’s easier than ever to collect marketing data. But collecting it is just the first step.

Turning big data into actionable insights that inform your marketing initiatives, drive marketing strategy, and increase marketing ROI is the real mark of a successful marketing analytics setup.

But it takes a variety of tools to collect the right data and do the right kinds of data analytics.

What are the best web analytics tools? Digital marketing analytics tools? Customer behavior and customer analytics tools?

In this article, we’ll help you separate the signal from the noise by digging into some of the best marketing analytics tools across a variety of different categories to ensure your marketing effort isn’t being wasted.

Marketing Analytics Tools

Woopra

Woopra is a multifaceted marketing analytics solution. If you’re looking for a single tool that covers all of the bases — or at least many of them — Woopra may be your best bet.

Woopra’s claim to fame is customer journey analytics. The platform offers end-to-end customer journey tracking and visualization to help you understand your customers’ experience from their first ad click to their first purchase and beyond.

With event-based tracking, Woopra allows you to drill down to the level of individual users to better understand their behavior. But it also aggregates journey data and collates it into easy-to-follow visual reports that demonstrate how customers move through their journeys.

To track users across their entire customer journey, Woopra can integrate data from a wide variety of other popular marketing analytics tools and data analysis tools.

It can link up to a variety of databases and cloud platforms, including Azure, MySQL, PostgreSQL, and more. It integrates with payment platforms such as Stripe, email and marketing automation tools like Mailchimp and Marketo, digital marketing analytics tools such as Google Ads and Facebook, and more.

It also can do product analytics. In addition to tracking all of the usual web metrics and metrics from all of your tool integrations, Woopra can also track custom metrics and events so that you can use it to better understand how customers use your product.

Woopra’s integrations also allow for some very powerful and time-saving marketing automation features. For example, you can set triggers to notify your sales team in Slack when a customer takes a certain action.

Or, you can automatically enroll a site visitor in a nurture email campaign after they’ve visited a particular page.

Long story short: Woopra can do a lot, and that’s what makes it so powerful. The fact that it can intake and integrate data from a wide variety of databases and marketing tools makes it a one-stop shop for marketing analytics work — all the data you need is right there in Woopra.

Especially when you factor in the integrations, it covers almost the entire spectrum of marketing activity, and being able to link that back to individual users and unify customer data are valuable things.

Woopra Pricing

Woopra is available with a free tier and also has several different tiers of paid services.

Google Analytics

Google Analytics is perhaps the most famous of all marketing analytics platforms. It has been around for a long time, so it’s familiar, and it’s free!

Google Analytics was designed to track web analytics metrics, and so its offerings in other areas of marketing analytics are pretty slim.

It also uses session-based tracking (so you can’t drill down to follow individual users over time) and only samples some of the real data for some reports.

That said, GA is great for answering quick, web-analytics-based questions such as “which marketing channel is driving the most traffic to this page?” or “which social media platform is actually getting people to click through to our site?”.

It may not offer fancy machine learning or predictive analytics features, but Google Analytics can help you track many of the most important marketing metrics (page views, conversions, conversion rate, etc.) and it does include some useful marketing dashboards.

Google Analytics Pricing

Since it’s free (technically there_ is_ a paid version, but it’s very expensive), it’s also relatively painless to use Google Analytics in tandem with other tools. It may not be a one-stop shop, but it makes it quick and easy to spot trends in your traffic.

On-Page Analytics/ Heat Mapping Tools

Hotjar

Hotjar is on-page marketing analytics software that’s designed to give you a ton of visibility into how your customers use your site via functions like heatmaps, session recordings, and user surveys.

To create heatmaps, the tool tracks users’ mouse movements and interactions on each page of your site.

Then, once the data reaches a certain threshold, it presents them to you with areas of high interest shaded red, orange, and white-hot, while ignored parts of the page are a cool blue.

Since it’s already tracking user sessions anyway, Hotjar can also be used to view session recordings, so you can watch exactly how a user has experienced your site.

This can be a really valuable tool for getting actionable insights into, for example, why a page on your site isn’t converting. If the heatmap doesn’t have the answer, dive into the session recordings, and often after watching a few users interact with the page, it will become clear.

Of course, you can also just ask the users themselves what happened. Hotjar facilitates with a user feedback widget that allows you to collect more qualitative data about how users are interacting with your site.

HotJar Pricing

Hotjar has a forever-free plan and tiers of paid plans that start at $39 per month.

Crazy Egg

Crazy Egg is an on-page data analytics tool that’s quite similar to Hotjar in some respects.

Like Hotjar, it offers heatmaps and session recordings to help you understand how users are interacting with your website. Unlike Hotjar, though, it also comes with A/B testing features to help you test and optimize possible solutions to any problem you discover.

Crazy Egg’s heat-mapping features include click and scroll depth maps (just like Hotjar), but it also includes some specialized dashboards, like an “Overlay Report”.

That lets you view a page on your site with overlaid marketing data (such as the conversion rates of various CTAs on the page).

Its session recording features are similar to Hotjar’s, giving you the ability to watch full user sessions and see how they move through and interact with your site.

Crazy Egg doesn’t facilitate user surveys, but it does allow you to quickly A/B test various page elements including headlines, copy, etc., without requiring any coding.

It promises quick reports on test winners so you can see what’s working fast and continue optimizing for even better results.

Crazy Egg Pricing

Crazy Egg offers a free trial, but it does not have a forever-free tier. Users must select one of several tiers of paid plans starting at $24 per month.

A/B Testing Tools

VWO

VWO offers a suite of A/B and software testing tools, including VWO Testing, its product aimed at marketers interested in A/B testing elements for their website.

VWO Testing is designed to make creating and running tests easy with a point-and-click editor. This visual editor loads your webpage, and then you click on the element you’d like to test to add your changes and set up the test parameters.

This makes setting up A/B tests straightforward enough that marketers with no technical background can still set up and run tests, although the tool also includes a code editor with support for HTML, CSS, JavaScript, and jQuery, in case users want something more precise.

VWO Testing allows you to run tests on almost any element of a webpage (titles, images, colors, copy, etc.), and it also comes with built-in widgets like banners and pop-ups so you can quickly test whether adding a pop-up (for example) can increase conversions.

Like most A/B testing tools, VWO Testing also comes with reporting features, including charts with margin-of-error ranges, to help you understand the results of your test once they start to come in, and turn them into actionable insights.

VWO Pricing

VWO does offer a free trial of its Testing product, but pricing is only available on request.

Optimizely

Like VWO, Optimizely offers tools that cover a number of different use cases, but one of its flagship offerings is its experimentation platform (part of its Intelligence Cloud product), which is designed to facilitate A/B testing on your website.

Like VWO, Optimizely’s platform comes with a visual editor that’s designed to make it easy to A/B test elements of a page without coding skills. Like VWO, tests can be targeted to specific audiences, and Optimizely even includes a predictive targeting feature.

Also like VWO, Optimizely supports multiple experiments at the same time (even on the same page) and offers reporting features that help you visualize and understand the results of your experiment.

The biggest differentiator between the two services may be that Optimizely uses a CDN to deliver its test package to your site, whereas VWO uses an asynchronous code setup.

Optimizely Pricing

Both companies claim their approach is faster. Unfortunately, Optimizely doesn’t offer a free trial, so it may be difficult to try both and make a direct speed comparison before purchasing. Optimizely’s pricing is only available by request.

That said, it’s worth pointing out that Optimizely’s Intelligence Cloud product also comes with AI personalization tools, app feature flagging, additional app analytics, and email features that may interest both marketing and development teams.

SEO Analytics Tools

SEMRush

SEMRush is a fully-featured SEO analytics platform and digital marketing tool that’s designed to be a one-stop shop for SEO analytics and keyword research, but it also includes features for improving content marketing, social media marketing, and more.

On the SEO side, SEMRush includes all of the features you would expect. You can gather data on keywords (one by one or in bulk), analyze backlinks, analyze referring domains to any page (on your site or someone else’s), and track your own site’s progress for target keywords.

It also includes competitive analysis features like “Content Gap” reports that can highlight content areas where you might be lagging behind (or able to beat) competitors.

Digital marketers will like SEMRush because it’s not limited to just organic keywords and research. SEMRush lets you research PPC and PLA keywords to improve your paid marketing campaigns – a feature that competitor Ahrefs doesn’t offer.

Overall, SEMRush covers a broader range of features than its primary competitor, Ahrefs, does, but it’s also generally considered to have a less complete database of backlinks. SEMRush is closer to being general marketing analytics software, whereas Ahrefs is more focused on SEO.

SEMRush Pricing

SEMRush offers a free tier as well as free trials of all of its paid tiers (Ahrefs does not), so it costs nothing to see if SEMRush offers what you need when it comes to SEO analytics.

SEMRush paid plans start at $119 per month.

Ahrefs

Ahrefs is an SEO analytics platform that is very similar to SEMRush: it allows you to research keywords, dig into backlinks, track your site’s rank for target keywords, analyze content gaps with competitors, and more.

Also, like SEMRush, it offers a suite of features to facilitate research and SEO work related to a specific topic, which makes it easy to find trends, do broken link building, etc.

It doesn’t offer some of the other marketing features that SEMRush has, but it makes up for that lack of breadth with depth. Ahrefs is considered to have the more complete backlinks database, and it also offers some SEO-related features that SEMRush doesn’t.

For example, all Ahrefs keyword reports give you an estimate of how many backlinks you’ll need to rank for the keyword in question. SEMRush only includes this kind of estimate for some of its keywords.

Ahrefs pricing

Ahrefs is a very well-liked tool among marketers, but you’ll have to take that on faith, because it does not offer a free tier, or even a free trial! Paid plans start at $99 per month, although you can get a week-long trial of a couple of the paid plan tiers for $7.

Social Media Analytics Tools

Hootsuite

Hootsuite is a complete social media marketing tool that offers scheduling, lots of different account integrations and tools, and even some marketing automation features.

In this article, though, we’re talking about analytics tools, so we’ll focus on Hootsuite’s social media analytics features rather than what it offers to facilitate posting.

Hootsuite allows you to view reporting on posts, followers, engagements, and metrics for each of your social media accounts. The specific metrics tracked vary by account, so your Twitter report will look different from the Pinterest report (for example).

One of its more helpful visualizations is a heat-map-style time series chart that shows the relative engagement levels with your posts over time. This tool can help you pinpoint the best and worst times to post new content, refresh Facebook ads, etc.

Hootsuite also allows you to build custom reports, and export them in a variety of formats, including Excel and CSV files. This is an important feature for anyone who wants to integrate social media data with the rest of their marketing data or do advanced analytics.

Hootsuite Pricing

Hootsuite offers a free tier and paid tiers starting at $49 per month (free trials are also available).

Sprout Social

Sprout Social is another end-to-end social media tool that includes a suite of posting and scheduling features, including some cool marketing automation tools, CRM tools, and more.

Focusing on its analytics offerings (since this is an article about marketing analytics tools), Sprout Social offers per-network reports, but also includes a big-picture social media report that helps you track how your posts are doing across all of your social channels.

Another helpful feature is the competitors’ report, which allows you to directly compare your social media marketing performance with the competition.

However, competitive reports are only available to users above a certain price tier. Other useful reporting features, like response rate and time analysis reports, are also unavailable at the lowest price tier.

Like Hootsuite, Sprout Social allows you to use filters to build customized reports in addition to the default reports it comes with, and you can export data in formats like CSVs or via an API for more convenient integration with other tools and databases.

Sprout Social Pricing

Sprout Social does not have a free tier and paid plans begin at $99 per month (although free trials are available).

Ultimately, it’s unlikely that any business can get away with one or two marketing analytics tools for too long. That’s what makes platforms like Woopra so powerful – they allow you to integrate data from many of the other marketing tools you’re using.

Marketers aren’t developers, but increasingly, they need to think like developers when they’re choosing their tools. Marketers must ensure that their “tech stack” maximizes efficiency, minimizes feature overlap, and has the effort required to integrate each tool into the stack.

Tools that can complement each other and integrate with minimal hassle are the most likely to generate long-term marketing ROI.

Check out the other articles in our Marketing Analytics series: