Navigating the ever-expanding world of marketing analytics tools can be overwhelming. With the market skyrocketing from over $41 billion to a staggering $52 billion in just a year, as reported by Statista, it's clear that businesses are scrambling to harness the power of data to refine their marketing strategies.

This explosion in demand has led to a surge in the development and availability of these tools, making it challenging for marketers to identify which ones truly deliver on their promises. The abundance of options often leads to confusion, leaving many marketers unsure where to start or which tools will genuinely benefit their strategies.

To cut through the noise, we've diligently researched and compiled a list of the top 15 marketing analytics tools of 2024. These are the game-changers that stand out in the crowded market. In this article, we won’t just list these tools; we'll dive deep into why they're essential for your business, helping you make informed decisions in an ever-evolving digital landscape.

Let’s start by addressing some key questions and set the stage for discovering the tools that will transform your marketing effectiveness.

What are marketing analytics tools?

Marketing analysis is a type of research which looks at the current and future marketplace for a product or service. This typically includes an analysis of competing products, competitor companies, customer attitudes, the larger socioeconomic environment, and projections for future growth or diversification.

Under this definition, marketing analytic tools are simple technologies which make this easier by manipulating the large volumes of data that can be derived from the internet and from internal sales data. It includes sub-specialties like sentiment analysis, where bots comb the internet for customer comments on a particular brand, then divide these according to the underlying emotion (approval, displeasure, criticism, frustration, and more).

AI and machine learning marketing tools form the basis of many of these platforms, since the volumes of data being analyzed are often very large, sometimes amounting to millions or even billions of data points.

Types of marketing analytics tools

Marketing analytics tools largely fit into three types:

• Free or low-cost page-specific analytic tools
• Domain-specific analytic toolkits (in-product or social media, for instance)
• CRM platforms with marketing analytics as just one tool of many

Depending on your tech stack, marketing channels, your company size, and budget, you may choose a highly-targeted tool, or prefer to invest in an all-encompassing platform for data analytics.

Our rundown includes examples of all three kinds of tools.

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15 most popular marketing analytics tools in 2024

Here are our top picks for the best marketing analytics tools:

1. Google Analytics
2. Mixpanel
3. Amplitude
4. Tableau
5. Looker Studio
6. Similarweb
7. Bing Webmaster Tools
8. Optimizely
9. Buffer
10. Ahrefs
11. Semrush
12. HubSpot
13. Sprout Social
14. Adverity
15. Heap

Okay, let’s dive a bit deeper into what each one does.

1. Google Analytics

• Best for: Web analytics and tracking user behavior on a website
• Price: Free

It makes sense to start with perhaps the biggest repository of marketing data in existence (although Amazon may come close). Google Analytics primarily a tool to derive maximum real-time information about website visitor behavior and page views on your website. If you do a large proportion of your sales through an ecommerce portal or want to find out how where visitors are coming from when they find your landing page, Google Analytics can assist.

Google Analytics uses the JavaScript page tags which accompany your journey from page to page as you browse. Google returns the information to its customers so that they can track how successfully their marketing campaigns are performing.

Once users connect their sites with Google Analytics, they have access to a dashboard which aggregates all the traffic data and presents it in a comprehensible manner. Rather like the stats that come bundled with YouTube for content creators, you’ll be able to see data on impressions, click-through rates, and conversions. It also leverages Google’s pre-eminence as a search engine, by revealing which search terms visitors use to locate your site.

The basic version of Google Analytics is free, but large corporations can pay $12,500 monthly (or $150,000 annually) to access Google Analytics 360 (soon to be Google Analytics 4). The paid version bundles in advertising and publishing features but even the free version is hugely informative. There’s also a Google Analytics mobile app that lets you stay informed on the go!

2. Mixpanel

• Best for: Tracking in-app behavior and visualizing conversions
• Price: $0-$25 USD/month (They have an enterprise plans as well.)

Mixpanel aims to “help you convert, engage, and retain more users” through proper marketing attribution. It’s used by some big names including Uber, Buzzfeed, Expedia, and Yelp. As its name suggests, Mixpanel allows you create bespoke dashboards which collate information about the performance of your product and service.

It promises to help you understand your sales funnel and identify potential points of weakness. Mixpanel is also designed to be used without programming ability, connecting to large data lakes or virtual warehouses such as Snowflake, BigQuery or Redshift without the need to write SQL connections.

Their dashboards are very colorful, direct, and sharable. For B2B and SaaS websites, there’s an analytics feature called Group Analytics, which lets you dig deeper into how subscribers are using your product, which might help with both marketing and product development.

Suited more to large corporations than startups leveraging no-code platforms, Mixpanel leverages large volumes of data to help you devise marketing campaigns for segmented cohorts of users — helping you make sense of your customer journey. That said, there is a free basic version, and a growth tier at $25 monthly. As you grow, you can unlock all Mixpanel’s capabilities with an Enterprise subscription, for which you’ll need to request a quotation.

3. Amplitude

• Best for: In-product analytics and data visualization
• Price: $0-Unknown (Will need to contact sales)

This product is another big seller, with adopters including Shopify, Ford, Peloton, Webflow, and Pepsico. Amplitude is a data analysis tool that is rated as the best product analytics tool on G2, and the distinction is important. Amplitude plugs into your ecommerce, app, or websites’ portal and gets very granular on your product’s performance. The business intelligence and insights you’ll gain include churn rate, feature engagement, and shopping cart abandonment rates. However, you can track any aspect of your product as you’d like through event tracking.

Amplitude’s site has some very helpful (and convincing) webinars, and they take a very educative stance towards sales and marketing, with what it calls the “6 Click Strategies”. The tool is very much focused upon digital products and the site even quotes a 2019 IDC FutureScape report which predicted there would be 500 million new digital apps and services created by 2023.

To dig deeper into such products, Amplitude includes A/B testing, cohort creation, and analysis of user behavior across multiple devices. If you are developing a digital product which you hope will achieve critical mass, Amplitude would be a good investment for scalability.

As with most of these tools, there’s a freemium version. For all other tiers, which will be priced by data volume, you’d have to request a quote.

4. Tableau

• Best for: Deep-data analytics
• Price: $5-$70 user/month

Tableau is a customer analytics solution owned by Salesforce, so you know you’ll be getting a premium product. Whole Foods Market, Charles Schwab, and Verizon are among their customers, demonstrating the varied business models that draw upon Tableau’s analytic tools.

Tableau is a CRM (customer relations management) platform formerly known as Einstein Analytics, which works alongside Salesforce to derive actionable insight from AI-powered trend analysis. It has a 4.5-star rating from over 1500 reviews on Capterra.

Although powerful in its insight and range of features, some users find the design elements of the UX/UI a little old-fashioned. However, this is a minor quibble as other users report that Tableau has a fantastic range of potential data queries and filters. As a research tool, it performs extremely well with complex statistical analysis and users can design their own dashboards to report on exactly the information they require.

As well as the free basic version, Tableau “creators” would pay $70 per month, while more limited access is available for $42 (“explorers”) or $15 (“viewers”). Tableau will also host your data, for a higher monthly fee, and you can embed key analytics into sites (request a quote).

5. Looker Studio

• Best for: Curating data sources into one central dashboard
• Price: Free

Google’s own bespoke data dashboarding tool has been available since 2016. It goes a stage further than Google Analytics (GA) by drawing upon a dozen data sources (including GA) and allowing users to design their own data reports.

The tool allows you to quickly create graphs, maps, charts, and other visualizations using plug-in widgets and, unlike Google Analytics, these are unlimited. The big draw with Looker Studio (formerly Google Data Studio) is the number of connectors (560) and data sources (800+) you can draw upon.

The tool provides pre-made templates to help you design your reports, and includes many popular data visualizations including gauges, Gantt charts, radar charts, sunburst diagrams, and more. It’s very much a plug-and-play toolset for those who want to build their data reporting functionality into one workflow from scratch.

It’s not the best tool for the non-technically minded, but it is powerful and, best of all, free to all users of Google business products including GA, Adwords, or Google Ad Sense.

6. Similarweb

• Best for: Checking traffic analytics of competitors
• Price: $0-Unknown (You’ll need to contact sales)

Similarweb is a type of comparison site, also described as a “benchmarking tool.” What it does is allow you to compare your brand’s market penetration across a range of sites, marketplaces, and geographical regions. You’ll be able to compare your brand with competitor brands, to see where you’re doing well, and where there’s room for improvement.

Similarweb have curated their own targeted datasets, drawing upon more than 100 million websites and 4.7 million mobile sites in over 190 countries. For instance, you might rank new product mentions across the top ten online review sites in English-speaking territories, compared with competitor brands.

The tool also provides sector-specific trend insights you can use, drawing upon its huge datasets. You can design dashboards to provide the insights you need to make a convincing business case, which might make this a great tool when looking to pivot into a new product line, geography, or sector.

Dashboards are attractively designed, functionality is intuitive, and there’s a basic free version so you can get a feel for it. This has limited functionality however, so you’ll want to request a quotation for full access, which includes three years of historical data.

7. Bing Webmaster Tools

• Best for: Analyzing traffic data from Bing
• Price: Free

Not to be outdone by Google, rival search engine Bing offers a suite of data tools too. By packaging their search engine within Microsoft software, Bing has seen its market share rise in recent years. Having said that, Bing still only scores a 3.14% market share compared to Google, according to Earthweb. Still, for completeness’ sake, it may be worth drawing from this data source too.

Tools in the suite include SEO features, traffic dashboards and a feature which optimizes your site for mobile users. Bing Webmaster Tools are a free part of the Bing offering, so worth looking into.

Given that improving your site SEO will make it perform better on Google too, this could be a cut-price way to optimize your online presence if you’re just starting out.

8. Optimizely

• Best for: Ecommerce and content optimization
• Price: Unknown (You’ll need to contact sales)

Optimizely’s motto is “unlock digital potential” and they offer a “digital experience platform” to clients including Ebay, Pizza Hut, and Dolby. They provide a wide range of interrelated services including content optimization, ecommerce, and site optimization. This breadth of services might allow you to retire some of the creakier parts of your tech stack.

Optimizely is targeted towards gaining conversions in a range of ways including the creation of effective content and utilizing the right pricing strategy. It has a particular focus upon experimentation too, with A/B Testing and a belief in the importance of learning from failure as well as success.

They are also big on personalization, the ability to display different content to different site visitors based upon their past interactions. This can function extremely well with ecommerce portals, helping you convert a higher proportion of browsers into buyers.

All Optimizely pricing is by request, but they claim to offer value for start-ups as well as major brands, so it could be worth firing off an enquiry email.

9. Buffer

• Best for: Social media insights for small businesses
• Price: $0-$100/month

Social Media is king in 2024. Whether its Instagram, Twitter, TikTok or even the VR fantasies of Facebook’s Metaverse, getting your brand out into the social sphere is vital, especially for brands who target a younger demographic. Buffer specializes in this approach, and they count Spotify, Shopify, and Food52 among their clients.

Buffer produces marketing reporting dashboards which will deliver insight into your brand’s reach across a range of social media sites. It can also reveal the key demographics of your customers, so that you can spot opportunities or failings.

Their tailored reports are very easy to read and share, so could be used to create weekly or daily performance updates for your sales and marketing team. There’s a free 14-day trial available and multiple tiers priced per social media channel — from $5 per month per channel to an Agency version costing $100 for 10 channels and team access. This represents very good value for money if your brand has a very active social media presence.

10. Ahrefs

• Best for: Checking and tracking SEO analytics
• Price: $99-$999/month
  
  

Ahrefs is the big name in SEO, having been in existence since 2010 and now boasting a database of over a trillion links. It’s the number one tool for all-in-one search engine optimization, providing detailed insights into how well each page, image, header, alt-description, and keyword is performing.

Ahrefs’ web-crawler will analyze your site to return a health rating for each page, allowing you to optimize your site for maximal performance. Its dashboards display backlinks, organic traffic, keywords and more, and will break these results down by geographical regions and other demographics.

This is the number one SEO site, scoring 4.6 stars on G2 and 4.7 on Capterra. Although you could go crazy trying to score that mythic 100-rating for each page of your site, it’s definitely better to have access to granular data than to operate in darkness.

It’s a little costlier than rival platforms, but still good value — $99 monthly for a single user and up to 500 reports, then several tiers until the Enterprise version at $999 monthly which provides access to almost a decade of crawler data.

11. Semrush

• Best for: All-in-one SEO marketing optimization
• Price: $119.95-$449.95/month

Semrush is a completist business information platform which aims to improve your SEO, content marketing, competitor research and social media presence in one fell swoop. It’s another suite of tools which might allow you to retire some obsolete software from your stack.

Semrush has one of the most impressive client rosters around, including IBM, Amazon, Forbes, Walmart, Apple, Tesla… As their site boasts, they are used by 30% of all Fortune 500 companies. It’s not hard to see why — Semrush offers a LOT of value. You get a full SEO toolkit, market research tools, content marketing analysis, advertising effectiveness information and social media optimization. Basically, in terms of marketing, you can run your whole business from Semrush.

It's hard to go into much detail of the whole offering here but on SEO alone, you have access to analysis of over 21 billion keywords, which gives you an idea of the data you can draw upon. Semrush has a free trial version and, given what it does, pricing is value for money, starting at $119.95 a month and rising to $449.95 monthly for the full pro version.

12. HubSpot

• Best for: Overall marketing insights inside of a CRM
• Price: $0-$3,200/month

If there’s one near-household name in marketing analytics, then it’s probably HubSpot. HubSpot is a CRM platform that’s also become something of an educational and research resource for all things marketing orientated. Their resources section includes an excellent blog, eBooks, courses, certification, and an onboarding service. Support, one would hope, will not be an issue!

HubSpot is divided into five “hubs” — marketing, sales, customer service, content management and operations (ensuring your integrations and lines of communications work). Within each hub you get a suite of tools which you can purchase individually or bundled together.

Within the marketing hub, for instance, you’ll get landing pages and email templates, social media ads, traffic, and conversion analytics for free. Paid versions add more advanced tools, including at the professional level, custom reporting, and marketing automation.

There’s a free trial of each hub, or you can arrange a free demo. If you opt for the paid versions, tiers range from $45 per month for the standard marketing pack to $3,200 for the enterprise version.

13. Sprout Social

• Best for: Advanced social media marketing for larger brands
• Price: $99-$279/month

Sprout describes itself as “a powerful solution for social media management.” Among the various tools they offer is “social listening,” which involves tracking keywords and brand mentions across the gamut of social media channels. Sentiment analysis of both your own channels, and those of your rivals, should help with performance and positioning.

Sprout’s major clients include Shopify, Subaru, and Cinnabon. In terms of analytics, Sprout’s dashboards are clear and informative, allowing you to clearly see the connection between good social media campaigns and conversion rates. KPIs are clearly tracked, and Sprout’s design is intuitive and attractively modern.

Premium version analytics gets extremely granular, breaking down interactions into likes, comments, saves, shares, and more, which should really help you create content which converts. There are free trials at all tiers, and paid versions range from $89 per user per month for the standard version to $249 per month for the advanced tier (on annual plans) based on the number of social media accounts you want to track.

14. Adverity

• Best for: Analyzing campaign performance
• Price: Unknown (You’ll need to contact sales)

Adverity’s marketing analytics platform pulls in data from over 200 sources, from YouTube and Instagram to Google, Amazon, and Quora. It utilizes sentiment analysis, keyword and hashtag tracking, competitor analysis and other methods to connect data from active integrations and passive web-crawling alike.

Once it has scooped up all the data, it can output to third party software, or visually represent it via Adverity’s own dashboards. Where Adverity offers innovation is in its AI-driven predictive capability. There are case studies on their site demonstrating how clients have used their reports to improve campaign performance and product development.

In ecommerce, you can use Adverity’s toolset to segment and target customers and quantify ROI for different online and offline channels. IKEA and JD Sports are amongst the retailers using Adverity for this purpose.

Adverity has a 4.5 score on Capterra but only 22 product reviews. You can book a product demo or request a quotation for pricing.

15. Heap

• Best for: Digital product analysis
• Price: $0-$3,600+ (They have enterprise plans as well)

Another “digital experience” platform, Heap boasts Logitech, Freddie Mac, Bridgestone, and Nielsen among its top clients. It specializes in helping traditional companies develop digital product revenues and optimize how their products are sold online.

Using a digital sales funnel approach, Heap collates customers data and applies product analysis to inform you what’s working and what isn’t. It applies what it terms “data science” to derive KPIs and strategic insights from customer behavior and sentiment. If you’re selling a digital product, particularly a subscription-based one, Heap could help you keep that product delivering.

There’s a strong focus on ecommerce and financial services, and less on purely digital offerings. Heap offers good conversion analytics and is good for teams with a strong sales funnel approach.

Heap offers a free basic version, a Growth plan at $3,600 annually and there’s also bespoke Pro and Enterprise pricing. You can try a short free trial of the Pro version too.

Which marketing analytics software is best?

So many of the above platforms offer a range of tools which extend beyond the pure marketing analytics remit. If we had to choose just two tools to highlight, those would be:

• Google Analytics — for free, general website analytics
• Mixpanel — for in-product analytics, delivering better performance

We hope this rundown has proven helpful to track your marketing performance. Let us know if we missed any tools!