Ranga Kaliyur

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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Marketing analytics is the process of collecting, analyzing, and interpreting data from various digital marketing channels to gain insights into the performance of marketing campaigns.

Various analytics tools are available in the market to help marketers and businesses evaluate and optimize their marketing strategies to increase their revenue and ROI.

Marketing analytics tools help businesses

• Improve targeting by identifying what is valuable to their users.
• Measure performance of their marketing campaigns.
• Reduce costs by saving unnecessary spending on campaigns that do not work.
• Gain a competitive advantage by enabling them to make data-driven decisions and optimize their strategies.

A popular tool that has helped businesses with analytics is Amplitude Analytics.

Amplitude Analytics is a product and web analytics platform that helps marketers gain insights from user data. The tool also allows marketers to visualize the full user journey and identify points of friction that can be optimized to improve conversion rate. 

That said, Amplitude Analytics does have its own limitations. Based on various customer reviews we found Amplitude's setbacks have made users search for its alternatives.

Let’s look at some of these limitations in detail in the next section.

Why Are Users Looking for Alternatives to Amplitude?

Here we analyze in detail some of the limitations in Amplitude Analytics that have led users to search for its alternatives.

1. Issues with new product updates

Quite a few users reported that they faced issues when Amplitude released new product changes. Loss of functionality of certain features or not enough time between updates to get used to the feature.

For a B2B SaaS tool this is a major drawback as the business process comes to a stop or is bottlenecked until the issue is resolved.

2. Lack of training videos and documentation

Every SaaS product should have proper documentation and training resources to help its users in times of need. Users of Amplitude Analytics reveal that the availability of such resources is limited.

This leads to a steeper learning curve.

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3. Long onboarding process

User reviews also reveal that the onboarding process is time consuming. This is a major drawback as the longer it takes for employees to get used to the tool, the lower the productivity. Some users also say the learning curve is quite steep and that with proper training this can be reduced.

But, as seen above, Amplitude lacks the necessary resources for users to get to know the platform better which further increases the  onboarding process.

4. Expensive

User reviews tell us that Amplitude Analytics is an expensive platform for small and medium sized companies and that there are other cheaper tools available in the market.

Many users recommend others to check for competitors to fulfill their business needs.

Amplitude does offer a free version, but its features are quite limited. They are not transparent when it comes to their paid plans, so you have to get in touch with them to get a quote.

In the next section, we will look at 7 Amplitude alternatives that are reasonably priced and have better features than Amplitude.

Top 7 Amplitude Alternatives

We curated a list of 7 alternatives to Amplitude Analytics that can help small to enterprise-grade businesses with analytics. In our list, we discuss the unique features of the tools, what users have to say about them, the available integrations, and their pricing, allowing you to make an informed decision.

So without further ado let’s jump right in!

1. Factors.ai

Factors.ai is a powerful analytics tool that is built for B2B companies. The tool also has revenue attribution, and account intelligence capabilities.

Factors has a range of features to help marketers understand website analytics and user behavior. It has an intuitive dashboard that users can customize to view reports and metrics that are important to them in a single place.

The platform's no-code capabilities, onboarding support, and self-serve UI  ensure that the implementation is done in less than 30 minutes.

Factors' help center and prompt customer support ensure that users don’t have to wait long to get their questions answered. Every customer gets a Dedicated Customer Success Manager at no additional cost.

Key features

• Advanced Web Analytics:

Factors automatically tracks website events in real-time. Some metrics tracked are scroll depth, page count, button clicks, product milestones, etc. Users do not have to spend time setting up custom events or  use other tools for web and user behavior analysis.

• AI-Powered Analysis:

Factors' AI feature 'Explain' empowers marketers with automated insights and root-cause analysis on any conversion goal so they can understand what's working and not working. 

• Multi-Touch Attribution:

Factors also has powerful attribution capabilities that help B2B marketers identify if their marketing activities are bringing in leads and generating revenue. The platform has various attribution models that marketers can use in tandem to identify influential channels that are driving engagement, conversions, and revenue.

• Account identification

Factors.ai provides its users with the ability to identify up to 64% of anonymous companies visiting your website. This feature is extremely useful for businesses that are leveraging Account-Based Marketing. 

Integrations

• Hubspot
• Facebook Ads
• LinkedIn Ads
• Bing Ads
• Google Search Console
• Slack
• Google spreadsheet 
• Rudderstack
• Marketo
• 6Sense
• Clearbit
• Leadsquared
• Drift
• Google Ads
• Salesforce
• Segment

Customer reviews 

Pricing

Factors provides three pricing plans.

Analytics & Attribution: 

• Starter plan for Early-Stage teams – $399 per month.
• Growth plan for High-Growth Marketers – $799 per month.
• Custom and Agency – Contact for a quote.

2. Kissmetrics

Kissmetrics is a product and marketing analytics tool built for SaaS and Ecommerce businesses. The tool helps businesses track and analyze application user and website visitor behavior.

With insights from Kissmetrics, marketers can identify what drives conversions and optimize marketing strategies to reduce friction and improve revenue and ROI.

Key features

• Customer Segmentation: 

This feature allows marketers to segment users based on certain shared characteristics. By doing so, marketers can target individual segments with personalized marketing campaigns to increase engagement and conversion rates.

• Digital Analytics:

Kissmetrics allows businesses to track individual users throughout their journey, from first visit to conversion. This information enables marketers to  take the necessary steps to improve user experience.

• Advanced BI Reporting

In Kissmetrics, marketers can query raw data collected by the tool directly with SQL to get valuable insights. This eliminates the need to export data into databases and for reporting. 

Integrations

• Slack
• Shopify
• Marketo
• Wufoo Forms

Customer review

Pricing

Kissmetrics has two paid plans and a custom plan. They also offer a free trial for their paid plans.

• Silver - $299 per month for 10K visitors
• Gold - $499 per month for 25K visitors 
  

3. Heap

Heap is a web and product analytics platform that helps businesses identify how users interact with their digital products.

It has different categories of tools for data analysis, data management and data foundation. Marketers can leverage the Heap platform to analyze customer journey mapping and user segmentation and more to improve their web or mobile platform.

Key Features 

• Customizable Dashboards:
  The customizable dashboards offered by Heap allow businesses to track specific KPIs and metrics in a way that suits their needs. Companies can visualize and analyze data that makes sense to their customized business needs without wasting time on irrelevant information.

• Auto Capture:
  Heap can automatically capture and track user interactions without any need for manually setting up event tracking. This alleviates any developer dependency and encourages rapid, ad hoc reporting for marketing teams. 

• Behavioral Segmentation:
  B2B companies can use this feature to segment users based on how they interact with their website or app. This allows them to target visitors more effectively and provide a personalized experience.

Integrations

• Snowflake
• Salesforce
• Mailchimp
• Segment

Customer reviews

Pricing details

Heap has a free plan and three paid plans. Heap does not have a transparent pricing model. Businesses interested in the tool can contact them to get a quote. 

4. Google Analytics

Google Analytics is a free website analytics tool that provides businesses with insights on website traffic and user behavior.

GA is the initial go-to analytics tool for most businesses, however, as the requirements of businesses increase, they gradually turn to other tools that have more extensive features. With GA, marketers can better understand their website visitors and identify the sources that are driving traffic to their website.

Key features

• Real-Time Analytics Data:

Google Analytics provides real-time data that shows the number of users, engagement time, views, sessions, etc. Marketers can use insights from the platform to optimize their strategies to improve engagement.

• eCommerce Tracking:

E-commerce businesses can use Google analytics to track sales and analyze performance of various sales campaigns and channels.

• Custom Reporting:

With GA users can create customized reports with the metrics they want. There are 9 types of reports that you can create in Google Analytics.hey are 

• Real Time Report
• Acquisition Report
• Engagement Report
• Monetization Report
• Retention Report
• Advertising Report
• Demographic Report
• Tech Report
• Firebase Report

Integrations

• Zoho
• Hubspot
• Mailchimp
• Campaign Monitor

Customer review

Pricing

Although there is a free version of Google Analytics, it isn’t enough for most  businesses’ use cases.

Google Analytics 360 is the paid version available for enterprises. The pricing starts at $150,000 per year.

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5. Mixpanel 

Mixpanel helps businesses optimize their products and improve their customer experience by tracking and analyzing customer interactions across different platforms.

Mixpanel supports both coded and codeless integration. Users can quickly implement automated event tracking with the codeless integration without the need of developers.

Users can also leverage coded integrations with assistance from technical teams. According to Mixpanel, it takes a minimum of 30 minutes of development time to implement a single tracked event. 

Key feature

• Behavioral Analytics: 

Mixpanel, like most tools in the list, is also capable of segmenting users based on behavior and how they interact with the product and website. Marketers can then target the groups with personalized experiences like ads or emails to reduce friction and increase conversion. 

• Custom Alerts:

Mixpanel enables its users to set custom alerts that notify them when certain conditions are met. For example you can set a custom alert to get notified if the present week’s website traffic has increased compared to the previous week’s. Insights such as this will help teams identify any discrepancies or friction points as soon as they arise.   

• Data Export: 

Data from Mixpanel can be exported to a number of other tools to carry out enhanced analytics. This feature enables businesses to leverage other tools to gain more information on data collected by Mixpanel. 

Integrations

• Segment
• RudderStack
• Snowplow
• Freshpaint

Customer review

Pricing

Mixpanel has a free version for up to 20M events per month. The paid plan includes;

• Growth - starting at $20. For up to 300M events per month
• Enterprise - starting at $1667 for 5M - 1B + events per month

6. Plausible Analytics

Plausible Analytics is a lightweight, open-source web analytics tool. Unlike traditional analytics tools, it does not collect personal data or use cookies, ensuring the privacy of website visitors.

Plausible Analytics provides real-time data on website traffic, page views, bounce rates, and other key metrics. The tool is designed to be easy to use and provides users with a simple dashboard that displays all relevant data in one place.

Key features

• Traffic Segmentation:

Users can segment visitor traffic in Plausible Analytics based on a variety of metrics. This helps them break down traffic and better understand the various sources.

• Shareable Dashboards:

Plausible Analytics enables marketers to share their analytics dashboard for easier collaboration and reporting.

• Lightweight Script

Plausible script code is less than 1KB making it lightweight. This ensures the loading speed of the website remains unaffected.

Integrations

• Shopify
• Segment
• Hubspot
• Webflow

Customer review 

‍Pricing 

Plausible Analytics has a free trial available. The paid plans start from just $9 per month for 10K visitors.

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7. Contentsquare 

Contentsquare is a digital analytics platform that can track and analyze customer behavior and provide insights into customer engagement.

Some of the engagement metrics that Contentsquare tracks are clicks, scrolls, hovers, etc. The platform also helps businesses visualize customer journeys, making it clear and easy to understand. Key features include;

• Session Replay:

Contentsquare records all the website traffic. The feature captures every click, hover and any intent-driven behavior. This helps marketers to visually see how visitors are interacting with the website and identify what is impacting site performance. 

• Zone-Based Heatmaps:

This feature allows users to analyze how website visitors have interacted with their website. Users can also use this feature to analyze A/B tests and come to conclusions based on visitor behavior and engagement. 

• Form Analysis:

Contentsquare enables users to gain complete understanding of how visitors engage with forms. It helps identify friction points so that users can take action to improve user experience.

Integrations

• Invoca
• Medallia
• Zoho Survey
• Heap Analytics

Customer review

Pricing

Contentsquare does not have a transparent pricing plan. You have to contact their sales  team for more details. 

Takeaway

To conclude, if you are looking for an Amplitude alternative, there are several options available. The tool you select will depend on your business requirements and goal. 

For example, if you want to improve your digital product’s performance and user experience, then consider tools like Mixpanel or Heap.

On the other hand, if you want to improve your overall marketing efforts, then consider tools like Factors.ai. With a ton of features and little to no burden to your budget, Factors is your go to platform for web analytics, marketing and revenue attribution and not to forget website visitor identification.

We suggest you take advantage of the free trial or free version offered by the tools to find the best fit for your business needs.

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Marketing attribution is extremely valuable for B2B marketers. It measures the impact of campaigns on revenue and identifies which efforts to scale in order to optimize budget allocation. One such tool that helps B2B SaaS companies attribute revenue to their marketing and sales effort is Dreamdata. 

Dreamdata helps analyze marketing expenditure, measure ROI and optimize campaigns to maximize marketing efforts. Some of the key features of Dreamdata are

• Digital analytics
• Revenue analytics
• Performance attribution
• Customer journey mapping

The tool easily integrates with marketing automation and CRM platforms. However, even with all these benefits, it also has some drawbacks.

In this article, we will evaluate the limitations of the tool and also highlight the best 7 Dreamdata alternatives that businesses can consider. We will discuss key features, customer reviews, and pricing of each alternative. 

Let's dive in. 

Why are marketers looking for Dreamdata alternatives

Upon evaluating customer reviews on platforms like G2, Capterra, and Trustradius, we find that Dreamdata

• Is difficult to set up
• Has a steep learning curve for users
• Does not have an intuitive UI 
• Can’t gather granular insights on campaigns  

Dreamdata is priced higher than its competitors. Also, the available features are very limited in their free version.

All the above factors have led users to look for an efficient alternative.

Read on to learn about the best Dreamdata alternatives and how to choose the right one for your business.

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An overview of Dreamdata alternatives and competitors

Top 7 Dreamdata alternatives

Here are some Dreamdata alternatives that you can check out for your business’s analytics and attribution needs:

1. Factors.ai

The first in the list of Dreamdata alternatives is Factors. It is a marketing analytics and attribution platform built for B2B marketers. 

The tool is easy to implement with itRule Analyticss no-code capability. Once set up, Factors can automatically track all events on the website and also offers retroactive data capturing.

Factors allows easy and no-code integration with CRM, Clearbit, Google Search Console, and other necessary tools. These integrations help centralize customer data and provide actionable insights across departments. Factors also allows users to create customizable dashboards, which help them visualize customer data at a glance. 

Also, Factors has a dedicated customer success management team to attend to each business’s unique requirements and objectives.

Key features

• Revenue Attribution: 

Factors' revenue attribution feature lets you know about the impact of your marketing efforts on the pipeline. It offers a range of attribution models to choose from and helps attribute revenue without marketing leakage. 

• Account Timelines:

This feature breaks down the complex B2B sales cycle, helping marketers identify how different touchpoints in the customer journey impact revenue. It maps out all interactions both on the account and user levels. In doing so, it allows us to understand the prospects and reveal upsell opportunities. 

• Account Identification:

This feature enables teams to identify anonymous accounts across website, ad impressions and product reviews. It helps understand where the visitors are coming from and analyze details like revenue range to segment their target customers. 

• ABM Analytics:

Factors provides dedicated campaign, website, and funnel analytics to take ABM to the next level. 

• Campaign analytics enables marketers to combine and analyze data under a single roof.
• Website analytics uses automated button tracking and custom domain tracking to understand and improve conversion rates.
• Funnel analytics creates ad hoc funnels to connect and analyze data from different channels.
• Journey Analytics:

This feature helps companies get a more in-depth understanding of the customer journey. It gives insights into how the marketing efforts drive conversion by cohort. Its AI-powered analytics can evaluate what works in favor of the defined goal and what doesn't. 

Pricing

Look up the pricing plans of Factors.

For Analytics & Attribution:

• Starter - $399 per month
• Growth - $799 per month

They also have a Custom plan for tailor-made analytics and an Agency plan for marketing agencies. Contact the Factors team for more details. 

For Deanonymization:

• Starter - $99 per month
• Professional - $179 per month
• Growth - $499 per month

Custom - Contact the Factors team for more details.

For Professional Services:

They offer consulting and technical support tailored to each business. The pricing for the service is as follows. 

• Tier 1 - $500 per month (For Early-Stage Teams)
• Tier 2 - $900 per month (For High-Growth Teams)
• Tier 3 - $1200 per month (For End-to-End Consulting)

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2. HockeyStack

HockeyStack is another Dreamdata competitor that provides attribution solutions. The tool is intuitive and easy to implement. 

In addition to attribution, HockeyStack also offers a range of functionalities that help marketers;

• Visualize customer journeys with funnels.
• Optimize Ideal Customer Profile (ICP) by using CRM properties like companies and contacts to segment metrics.

• Collect customer feedback through surveys.

Key features

• Revenue Attribution:

By attributing revenue to each aspect of marketing, HockeyStack can help understand which channels or campaigns bring more ROI. As a result, it enables marketers to prioritize and focus their efforts and drive more conversions.   

• Funnel Analytics:

This powerful feature from HockeyStack allows users to visualize different sales stages in detail. Marketers can understand how their customers move down the sales funnel and improve the stages that are not performing well. 

• Account-Level Journey:

HockeyStack tracks customers' pre- and post-conversion journeys with touchpoints, including website visits and demo calls. It also visualizes the account journey showing the different journey stages and the actions users take at each stage. Therefore, it enables marketers to understand the customer journey comprehensively.

Pricing

HockeyStack’s pricing starts from $949 per month. Book a demo with their team to get a detailed quote for your needs. HockeyStack also has a live demo that gives you a sneak peek into the platform.

3. Marketo Measure (Bizible )

Bizible or Marketo Measure is Adobe's attribution solution. It has a touchpoint-based data model that can collect data at each touchpoint, offering insights into the customer journey. This allows marketers to identify the high-performing touchpoints at each stage and improve those not performing well. 

Even Though the tool has all these features and benefits, it is difficult to set up and has limited integration capabilities. 

Key features

• Attribution: 

This feature enables marketers to leverage attribution models that align with their business goals. It helps attribute revenue to influential campaigns and boost conversion rates. The fact that Bizible can run multiple attribution models in parallel makes it stand out from the rest. 

• Intuitive Dashboards: 

Bizible’s dashboard reports insights on marketing KPIs in a highly visual and intuitive format. The KPIs include ROI, pipeline velocity, marketing expenditure, and more. As a result, marketers can easily understand the campaigns' effectiveness and optimize them. 

Pricing

The pricing details of Bizible are available upon request.

4. Rule Analytics

Ruler Analytics is a marketing attribution tool that tracks online and offline touchpoints. Its attribution feature automatically links revenue with channels and campaigns.   

On top of customer journey tracking, Ruler Analytics also delivers insights into how quality leads behave. This further helps marketers optimize their campaigns and target high-quality leads. 

The tool is intuitive, easy to set up, and provides good customer support. Also, Ruler Analytics allows users to leverage various attribution models to build reports on all essential data. 

Key features

• Marketing Attribution:

Ruler Analytics’s attribution feature automatically attributes revenue to the most influential touchpoints. They track all visitor touchpoints, match leads to marketing data, and attribute revenue to appropriate campaigns.

• Predictive Analytics:

The feature uses statistical modeling and machine learning to analyze historical data and forecast business outcomes. It can interpret and make sense of the sales and marketing data and identify patterns and trends. This helps marketers optimize marketing strategies to yield better results.

• Marketing Mix Modelling (MMM):

This feature uses statistical modeling to understand how marketing activities impact sales results. It also makes marketing reporting easier and provides view-through attribution. 

Pricing

Ruler Analytics’ pricing plans are as follows. 

• Small/Medium Business - £199 per month (0 - 50K visits) 
• Large Business - £499 per month (50K - 100K visits)
• Enterprise - £999 per month (100K+ visits)

It also has an Advanced plan with pricing available upon request (POA).

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5. Singular

Singular is another marketing platform that provides attribution solutions. With singular, marketers can

• Measure and report on all channels
• Analyze ROI by combining attribution with cost aggregation
• Track and analyze the customer journey
• Monitor a single-managed pipeline for analysis-ready marketing data. 

Its open integration framework enables marketers to measure performance across apps, web, SMS, referrals, email, and TV. The tool is easy to set up and delivers robust support for server-side integrations.

Key features

• Mobile Attribution:

It offers marketers a complete view of ROI and performance and analyzes the impact of every dollar spent. It allows marketers to set up attribution settings for each channel. The feature can prioritize touchpoints based on their impact on the users' decision to install or engage with the app. The attribution methods include multi-touch, UTM tracking, and website-to-app attribution forwarding. 

• SKAdNetwork Attribution:

This is specifically for improving ad performances on iOS devices. This feature helps marketers save time and effort by automating the conversion value decoding process. In addition, it provides more accurate insights into ad performance on SKAN. 

• Cross-Device Attribution:

This feature can track and analyze user engagement and acquisition across multiple devices. These devices can be desktops, smartphones, or tablets. Thus, this feature gives marketers a comprehensive view of customers' journeys and interactions. 

Pricing

Singular offers a free version and a free trial for their paid plans. Contact their team for details on plans - Growth and Enterprise.

6. Full Circle Insights

Full Circle Insights is another marketing analytics and attribution platform that can help optimize marketing efforts. The tool is built on the Salesforce App Cloud, ensuring seamless integration between the two platforms. 

It provides various features, including funnel metrics, camping attribution, and performance reporting. It also offers customizable dashboards and reports to meet each business's unique needs and goals.

Key features

• Pipeline analysis:

This feature helps users identify influential touchpoints at each stage of the customer journey. In addition, the tool’s detailed reporting enables businesses to optimize and improve their marketing efforts with ease. 

• Out-of-the-box Attribution Models:

Marketers can choose from various attribution models and customize them to track and analyze their GTM efforts. This helps marketers make data-driven decisions for allocating marketing resources.

Pricing

Full Circle Insights’ pricing plans are not transparent. Contact their team to get more details.

7. LeadsRx

LeadsRx is a SaaS platform that provides attribution solutions. It helps marketers and agencies measure the performance of their marketing efforts. 

LeadsRx can track and measure the impact of touchpoints across multiple channels (online & offline). It enables marketers to understand how each channel drives conversion and revenue and optimize their campaigns accordingly to maximize ROI. 

It has a responsive and intuitive UI and gives excellent customer support. And it also enables easy set-up.

Key features

• Radio and Television Attribution: 

LeadsRx is able to attribute radio and television along with other marketing channels. Its flexible attribution window allows users to change the period from hours to seconds. Additionally, the tool also allows users to monitor decay curves and arbitrate station overlap. 

• Attribution for Podcast, Audio Streaming, and Video Streaming Advertising:

LeadsRx supports multi-touch attribution for all audio and video streaming platforms. It also provides insights into how well podcast ads perform and helps optimize them to improve ROAS. LeadsRx is the first-ever marketing analytics company to measure real-time podcast ad performance.

Pricing

Contact the LeadsRX team for details.

Takeaway

As you can see, there are several great available for Dreamdata. Each tool we discussed has its unique features as well as drawbacks. 

Factors will be an ideal choice if you are looking for an affordable B2B attribution solution. At the same time, choose Singular if you want to attribute across mobile apps and desktops.  

Ultimately, the right attribution tool depends on your business needs and preferences. So take some time to research and evaluate each tool to the fullest, and choose the one that best fits your business. 

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It’s official. Leadfeeder has joined forces with Echobot to form Dealfront — a Europe-centric go-to-market platform. As a result of this merger, Leadfeeder’s pricing plans have increased to start at $215+ per month with limited seats and data. 

Several Leadfeeder users are looking for comparable sales intelligence alternatives to help identify and track anonymous website visitors. 

If you’re in the same boat, or are simply considering your options, this is the right place for you. 

The following article explores 5 comprehensive Leadfeeder alternatives to help your team make a seamless switch. We'll highlight key features, benefits, and drawbacks with each Leadfeeder alternative.

By the end of this article, we’d like to help you find an equally effective, if not better, alternative to your current visitor identification tool.

Looking to learn more about visitor identification? Check out these further readings:

• Account identification explained
• Identify website traffic with Factors

Leadfeeder Alternatives For Website Visitor Identification

1. Factors.ai

Leading off our list is Factors.ai. Factors is unique in that it’s originally built upon strong analytics and attribution foundations. A recent partnership with 6sense, a leading enterprise-grade ABM platform, has propelled Factors into becoming a rising star in the visitor identification software space. 

With this collaboration, Factors delivers industry-leading visitor identification, firmographics, and account timelines along with its existing ABM analytics and multi-touch attribution capabilities.

Factors.ai Key Features 

Here’s a brief breakdown of Factors.ai’s key features

1. Account Identification 

Of course, every tool featured on a list of Leadfeeder alternatives must be capable of identifying and tracking accounts visiting the website. Factors is no exception to this. In fact, as a result of its collaboration with 6sense, Factors taps into enterprise-grade IP data to identify up to 64% of anonymous companies — including firmographics (employee headcount, industry, location, etc) and website activity (page visits, time spent, scroll-depth, etc).

Factors also provides real-time Slack alerts to help teams stay on top of high-intent visitors and strike while the iron’s still hot. These alerts can be configured to go off based on specific firmographic features and website behavior — so you can target ICP companies visiting your site. 

2. Account Scoring & Timelines

Factors integrates with campaigns, website, and CRM data to provide cross-channel account scoring and full-funnel timelines across the customer journey. With this feature, users can see exactly what touchpoints (ads, blogs, emails, webpages, etc) are influencing accounts to progress from top-of-the-funnel visitors to paying customers. Users can identify and prioritize high-intent accounts for focused outreach and re-marketing efforts

3. Advanced Analytics:

Unlike other solutions on this list (including Leadfeeder), Factors provides a wide range of analytics and attribution capabilities in addition to visitor identification. A few advanced analytics features include:

• ABM analytics - Integrates with ad platforms, CRMs, CDPs and more to unify reporting and support campaign analytics, website analytics, funnels, and more at an account level. 
• Path analysis - View aggregate user behavior and identify points of inflection in conversions and drop-offs along the customer journey 
• Multi-touch attribution - Connect the dots between go-to-market initiatives and pipeline, optimize resource allocations across campaigns, and prove marketing ROI with a wide range of multi-touch attribution models. 

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Benefits of Factors.ai

Here are a few reasons why you may prefer Factors.ai to other tools:

1. Data accuracy: As previously mentioned, Factors taps into 6sense’s extensive database to provide industry-leading website visitor identification. In fact, rigorous testing with a sample data set of over 20,000 domains reveals that Factors identifies upto 27% more accounts than the closest alternatives — including established brands such as Clearbit and Demandbase. 

2. Granular metrics: Given Factors’ roots in account analytics, it’s capable of reporting granular metrics and events as compared to other visitor identification alternatives. A few of these include:

• % scroll-depth
• Auto-button captures
• Cursor engagement 
• Page time spent

3. Scoring & Alerts: Not all your website visitors are immediately read-to-buy. Some are further along the funnel than others. According, Factors supports custom account scoring models so you can qualify and be alerted to high-intent, ICP accounts engaging with your company in real-time.

Drawbacks of Factors.ai‍‍

Contact-level enrichment  - No privacy-compliant software can identify exactly which individual visited a website without having a visitor explicitly submit a contact form. That being said, the majority of tools on this list can source a list of ideal prospects to reach out to from the companies they’ve identified. 

At the moment, Factors cannot provide this information natively. Instead, users can find contact information on third party tools such as Zoominfo or Apollo. 

Factors.ai Pricing

Learn more about pricing here: factors.ai/pricing

Curious to see Factors in action? Book a personalized demo here.

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2. Albacross

Next up, we have Albracross. Albracross is one of the leading visitor identification and intent data companies in Europe. The Sweden-based platform works with over 10,000 companies to provide customer data enrichment, sales alerts, and intent signals.

Key Features

1. Account Identification: Like the other tools on this list, Albacross identifies anonymous accounts, firmographic information and visitor intent. Albacross features one of the largest proprietary first-party databases in the world.

2. Personalization: Albacross natively integrates with popular personalization tools such as Optimizely and VWO to customize website content based on who’s visiting the site. This is a powerful feature for product marketers looking to identify visitors and tailor messaging based on their profiles.

3. Display ads: A nifty feature offered by Albacross is the ability to launch and monitor display ads within the platform itself. The software partners with several publicists such as The New York Times and Daily Mail to distribute account-level targeted ads. 

Benefits of Albacross

Here are a few reasons why you may prefer Albacross to other tools:

1. Experimenting: Given that Albacross is one of the few Leadfeeder alternatives to integrate with personalization tools, it offers the unique benefit for product marketers to experiment and run A/B tests in conjunction with visitor identification and intent data. 

2. Customer success: Several reviews rave about Albacross’s stellar customer success management. Given that Albacross is considered to be an involved, enterprise-level tool, it’s essential to have this level of support to get the most value out of the product. 

Drawbacks of Albacross:

Here are a few reasons you may consider other tools over Albacross:

1. Rigid firmographics and filters - Albacross seems to lack agility when it comes to filters and breakdowns. Reviews reveal that it’s currently not possible to filter identified companies based on firmographics such as name or size. As a result, users seem to find sorting and reporting somewhat challenging.

2. Buggy integrations: Multiple reviews claim that Albacross’s integrations, especially with CRMs like Salesforce, could do with some work. Given that visitor identification is primarily used to support ABM, this can be a major drawback to B2B teams. Tools like Zapier may be used to smoothen out workflows for now. 

3. Lead Forensics

Founded in 2009, Lead Forensics is the oldest, most established website visitor identification software in this list. They own a sizable database of over 1.4 billion IP addresses, adding up to 55 millions contacts every year. 

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Key Features

Lead Forensics doesn’t have too many bells and whistles as compared to the other tools on this list. Its primary features are limited to visitor identification and contact data.

1. Account identification: Like Leadfeeder, Factors, and Albacross, Lead Forensics identifies anonymous businesses visiting your website by connecting the dots between IP addresses and company names. In the case of multinational companies, Lead Forensics is capable of showing which specific office is interacting with your website. This is handy for businesses looking to sell to large corporations. 

2. Contact data: Lead Forensics also helps teams identify key contacts within companies visiting your website to assist with retargeting and outbound reachout. Here’s a brief summary of the kind of details that Lead Forensics can provide: 

• Business name
• Contact details of key decision makers
• Telephone, email and LinkedIn details
• Demographics
• Search behavior
• Financial data

Benefits of Lead Forensics

A unique benefit with Lead Forensics is its mobile application. With their “Essential” plan, users can have trigger reports sent directly to their phones.

Drawbacks of Lead Forensics 

Here are a few reasons you may consider other tools over Lead Forensics:

1. Poor UI - Lead Forensics is one of the oldest visitor identification software around. While experience is generally a positive sign, several users complain about Lead Forensics’ UI remaining outdated and unintuitive. Users find the tool to have limited functionality in terms of ad-hoc analysis, dashboards, and filters as well.

2. Pricing - While Lead Forensics does not openly reveal its pricing plans, it’s generally considered to be on the more expensive side. While this may not be a barrier for larger, enterprise-level companies, pricing may be prohibitive for small to mid-market start ups — especially when there are cost-effective alternatives available.

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4. Clearbit 

Fourth in our list is Clearbit. Clearbit is another well-established B2B data activation platform that offers a wide suite of products within its platform. 

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Key Features

Clearbit is divided into three broad products: 

1. Reveal - Clearbit identifies anonymous website visitors using IP-lookup. Given that every tool on this list does this, data accuracy and pricing are two important considerations when differentiating between alternatives. 

2. Enrichment - Clearbit also provides firmographics from over 250 data sources. This includes technologies, headcount, revenue, location, contact information, and more.

3. Capture - like Leadfeeder Contacts, identifies best-fit contacts from companies visiting your website to reach out to with retargeting campaigns or outbound efforts

Benefits of Clearbit

1. Free plan: While Clearbit’s paid plans are relatively expensive, they offer a nifty free plan to de-anonymize anonymous traffic. That being said, the free plan is quite limiting as users can enrich only 50 domains a month. This becomes an issue as website traffic starts to scale over time. Still, it’s free — so who can complain? 

Here’s a breakdown of what Clearbit’s free plan offers:

• Identify site traffic
• Calculate total addressable market size
• Determine ideal client profile
• Enrich domains and emails (up to 50 per month)
• Find email addresses (up to 100 per month)

2. Smart chat: Smart chat is a handy feature for sales reps to connect with high-value, high-intent visitors with personalized conversational ABM while visitors are live on the site. Chat prompts can be triggered based on visitor characteristics and behavior such as industry, page views, headcount, etc.

Drawbacks of Clearbit

1. Pricing: Clearbit does not reveal pricing details on its website. But several user reviews suggest that pricing is on the higher side for early to mid-stage startups.

2. Customer support: Clearbit works with a wide range of clients from early-stage startups to enterprise-level companies. Users from the former seem to face issues when it comes to customer support, claiming that it’s often slow and inadequate.

5. Visitor Queue

The final option on our list is Visitor Queue. Visitor Queue is a Canada-based visitor identification and personalization platform that identifies the name, contact detail and user data of accounts visiting your website.

Key Features

1. Visitor identification: What separates Visitor Queue from the rest of the tools on this list is its ability to aggregate company social profiles in addition to standard firmographics and contact information. 

2. Personalization: Like Albracross, Visitor Queue allows users to personalize their website based on configurable criterias such as industry, source/medium, location, and more. This helps product marketers differentiate their brand from competitors and experiment with different messaging to improve conversions.

Benefits of Visitor Queue

1. Unlimited users - Most tools on this list (excluding Factors.ai) limit the number of seats per account. Given that visitor identification is used by sales, marketing, and customer success teams, it’s valuable to have an unlimited number of users with Visitor Queue.

2. Pricing - Visitor Queue is a more affordable option as compared to the likes of Clearbit and Lead Forensics with prices starting at just $31/month to identify 100 companies per month. This makes it a good option for early-stage teams that are working with tight budgets.

Drawbacks of Visitor Queue

1. Rigid reporting - While Visitor Queue does well at the basics, users complain about its restrictive UI when it comes to ad hoc reports, filters, and dashboards. As a company starts to grow, its requirements for tailor-made reporting do too. Visitor Queue wouldn’t back a good fit for custom usage.

2. Data issues - User reviews complain about data inaccuracies with Visitor Queue. While no tool is perfect, Visitor Queue seems to lag behind industry-standards in terms of accurately identifying visitors. While it’s great to have an inexpensive alternative, a visitor identification tool won’t be of much value unless it identifies the right visitors. 

And there you have it! A brief summary of 5 comprehensive Leadfeeder alternatives to help you identify anonymous website visitors. Each of these tools have their pros and cons — and one is likely to be better suited to your needs than the others.

Top Leadfeeder Alternatives

Businesses seeking cost-effective and feature-rich website visitor identification tools can explore various alternatives.

1. Leading Alternatives: Factors.ai for advanced analytics and attribution, Visitor Queue for affordability and effective lead tracking.

2. Key Features: Pricing flexibility, seamless integrations, high data accuracy, and real-time visitor insights.

3. Decision Factors: Evaluate based on budget, integration needs, and business-specific requirements.

Selecting the right platform enhances lead generation, improves marketing efficiency, and drives better conversion rates.

Let’s make the decision easier for you: 

• If pricing and account-level data accuracy are priorities, Factors.ai is likely the best option. 
• If the ability to personalize your website based on who’s visiting your site is what you’re looking for, Albacross and Visitor Queue are two great options.
• If you’re a larger enterprise without budget constraints, Clearbit could be the right option.

Factors.ai identifies up to 64% of anonymous visitors — the highest match rate in the industry. Looking to learn more about how Factors can help? Book a personalized demo here! 

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GA4: End Of The Road For Google Analytics?

Over the last decade, Google Analytics has dominated the marketing analytics space. This uncontested reign can be attributed to a couple of key reasons: One, GA is free. And two, GA maintains a monopoly over historical data for an enormous install base. While the former isn’t likely to change, the introduction of GA4 is set to crush 10+ years of backward compatible data for millions of websites — including yours.

By breaking history and forcing a migration from Universal Analytics to GA4, Google Analytics loses an important advantage. This, coupled with a host of issues around UI, functionality, and privacy has resulted in a dramatic turn in tides. If users are going to lose out on their historical data by next year anyway, there’s little incentive for them to stay — especially when the best Google Analytics alternatives are readily available.  

“We will begin sunsetting Universal Analytics — the previous generation of GA —  next year. All standard UA properties will stop processing hits new hits on July 1st, 2023” - GA Support

“GA4 feels like a huge step backwards. Tons of functionality in the previous version is missing or replaced with smart “insights” — which always goes wrong. A good time to move on to something better” - Hacker News

With this in mind, The following article compares Google Analytics (specifically, GA4) with Factors to demonstrate why, now more than ever, the latter is better suited for B2B marketing analytics, web analytics & CRO, multi-touch attribution, and more. 

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Data Integration

To be of any value, B2B marketing analytics requires substantial data from a wide range of sources. This includes granular metrics across all your ad campaigns (Google, Bing, Facebook, Linkedin, Capterra, etc.), website, and CRM (HubSpot/Salesforce) events. Ideally, this body of information is unified under one platform to ensure normalized data and alignment across demand gen teams. So how does Factors compare with Google Analytics when it comes to data integration? Here’s the rundown:

Ad Campaign Metrics

Google Analytics can report basic traffic data from most commonly used social platforms — Google Ads, Facebook/Meta, Linkedin, etc. Integrating non-Google sources, however, is significantly more challenging on GA. It requires the construction of custom campaigns using URL builders (read: a time-consuming, laborious chore). Factors, on the other hand, deliver immediate no-code integrations. 

The real issue with GA, however, is that it cannot pull metrics that matter from any source that isn’t Google Ads. Commonly tracked figures like impressions, engagement, click-through rates, etc cannot be reported, let alone linked with website or CRM data. This is a headache for users looking to consolidate all their marketing efforts under one roof. Factors solves for this by automatically pulling granular metrics across the board.

CRM Integration

This is another big point for Factors. Unlike GA, Factors provides robust integrations with HubSpot, Salesforce, and soon, Leadsquared. The implications of this are significant. Marketers will have the ability to connect the entire customer journey from first touch to deal won. In turn, marketers can determine exactly how their efforts across ad campaigns, web content, and offline events are contributing to larger business objectives like pipeline and revenue. This is simply not possible on Google Analytics as it does not integrate with any CRM whatsoever.

Third-party Integrations

Another reason Factors has the edge over Google Analytics is third-party integrations. Factors integrates with the likes of Clearbit Reveal (Deanonymization), Segment (CDP), Drift (Chatbot), and more to ensure an actionable web + marketing analytics experience. Again, this is impossible on Google analytics because GA4 does not integrate with third-party platforms. Consequently, this affects the quality of customer journey insights. Even with sophisticated manual analysis, the data derived from Google Analytics is likely to remain superficial at best. In later sections, we’ll explore the implications of this issue in detail. 

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Implementation & Onboarding

So far, we’ve established that data integration (including third-party) makes more sense with Factors. Next, let’s examine how the two marketing analytics tools compare with regards to implementation and onboarding. For context, if you’re currently using Universal Analytics, you either have to upgrade to GA4 by next summer (June 2023) or find a GA alternative like Factors. 

What does it take to upgrade to GA4?

12-steps. That’s right. It requires 12 steps before you can upgrade from Universal Analytics to GA4. What’s more? As previously mentioned, integrating with non-Google ad platforms needs elaborate orchestration with custom campaign URL/UTM builders. Additionally, GA4 requires users to manually tag each event they want to track. In short, this means significant labor effort, engineer dependency, and time-spent waiting for incomplete datasets.

What does it take to set-up Factors.ai?

Maybe about 30-min. In fact, it’s probably closer to 10 with Google Tag Manager. Simply place the superlight SDK onto your website and integrate (no-code!) with your ads platforms, CRM, CDP, Chatbot, and more. Before you know it, all your marketing + web data will begin pouring into a single, normalized platform. Easy as pie.

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B2B Marketing Analytics

Now, let’s discuss functionality. Here’s how Factors compares to Google Analytics when it comes to core use-cases of a B2B marketing analytics tool.

Right off the top, it should be noted that GA isn’t built for B2B marketing analytics. It struggles to support tracking for journeys that involve several months, touch-points, and stakeholders. Unfortunately, these are the precise characteristics of a standard B2B sales cycle. Customers often experience countless (well, on average, 7) touchpoints — both online and offline — across ads, emails, webinars, blogs, web sessions, etc before converting. These touchpoints can occur within a window of one week, one month, or sometimes, even longer than one full year. Unlike Factors, GA4 isn't designed to analyze or attribute lengthy, sporadic interactions for B2B marketers. 

Additionally, and as previously mentioned, GA is unable to track and measure granular campaign or event metrics from non-Google platforms. Since B2B marketers target (and retarget) marketing efforts to their audience across several channels, it’s nearly impossible to consolidate these figures on GA alone. 

Factors eliminates this data silos issue for marketers and demand gen folk with the help of aforementioned third-party integrations. Once data has been collected, Factors delivers an end-to-end marketing analytics suite that’s tailor-made for B2B teams.
This includes web analytics, funnels, custom events and KPIs, multi-touch attribution and more. Let’s explore why Factors has the edge over GA across these use-cases.

Data Accuracy, Marketing Funnels,
Revenue Attribution, & More

At its core, Google Analytics is a website analytics service. And to be fair, GA does a half decent job at it, especially for a free tool. That being said, there are significant limitations with GA that Factors solves for:

Data Accuracy

‍Certain web metrics are not precise on GA. Let’s say a lead lands on a blog on your website. Before they can start to read the article, their doorbell rings and they leave to answer with the blog page open on their laptop. The lead returns in about 8 minutes, clicks out of the blog to schedule a demo. Google Analytics would inaccurately assume that the blog played a massive role in this conversion because of the significant (8 min) time spent on page. In reality, however, the lead did not scroll even a little to read the rest of the piece. Factors solves for such issues by tracking granular details like cursor activity and scroll depth percent to ensure your data, and the insights derived from that data, is as accurate as can be.

Marketing Funnels

‍On GA4, you’re limited to page-to-page funnels. That is, GA4 only considers funnels wherein each webpage is a separate step. As such, GA4 struggles to track multi-session engagement. Let alone a funnel across ads, web, and CRM. Funnels on GA may only be used to reliably measure drop-offs and conversions that occur in the length of a single web session (Eg: Blog -> Pricing -> Schedule Demo in one web session). Additionally, event funnels are not supported on GA4. Hence, if you’d like to track how specific website content is contributing to MQLs, leads, & revenue, GA4 won't suffice. 

Customer Journey + Revenue Attribution

As previously mentioned, GA does not integrate with CRMs like HubSpot, SalesForce, or Leadsquared. This severely impedes cogent customer journey analysis and revenue attribution. Without laying the entire map from ads, offline efforts, web sessions, and CRM events, you are left with an incomplete picture of what’s driving revenue and pipeline. Consequently, this affects data-driven decision making, which ultimately results in suboptimal marketing strategy and ROI. It is not feasible to derive end-to-end marketing insights into what’s working and what’s not with Google Analytics. While GA might be able to track the source of traffic, it cannot determine the cause.

Usability - UI and UX

What’s surprising  is that even with these significant drawbacks, users complain about GA4’s useability. It can be overkill — unintuitive, excessive, and far too technical — for marketers looking for basic reports. And completely irrelevant to marketers looking to dig deeper into their data. Let’s let twitter expand upon this…

Website owners, is it just me or is the new GA4 just HORRIBLE? It's like it's designed only for retail sites or something, very hard to get the basic info that I used to rely on... Think I'll switch back! Awful!

Trevor Long (@trevorlong)

I usually can find my way round any piece of software quickly. But Google Analytics 4 is making me cry...I've never seen a tool upgrade that made simple things sooo complicated :face_palm: Non-tech business owners were already struggling to use it. But now they have NO chance.

Gill Andrews (@StoriesWithGill)

1. The UX of Google products in general suck
2. GA4 is a new level of suckiness
3. I get the feeling Google doesn't have a UX team and/or never tests the usability of their products
4. If you are not a monopoly you would never be able to get away with this

Tom Kasperski (@TomKaz)

Factors is simple by design. Users go from onboarding to creating powerful (and basic) marketing reports in a matter of minutes.

Now Is The Best Time to Switch Over From Google Analytics To Factors.ai

And there you have it. A non-exhaustive set of reasons as to why Factors.ai makes far more sense for B2B marketers over Google Analytics. With the imminent arrival of GA4 (and the consequent break in years of historical data), now is the best time to make the move to Factors.

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