B2B go-to-market teams are increasingly relying on marketing and website analytics tools to track and optimize performance. In response to this growing demand, established product analytics tools like Amplitude and Mixpanel are attempting to introduce their own versions of website analytics, marketing funnels, and multi-touch attribution.
There’s no doubt that Amplitude is great at what it does. In fact, it’s rated as one of best product analytics solutions in the market today. But how does a tool that specializes in product analytics fare against a purpose-built marketing analytics solution like Factors.ai? And more importantly, what’s the better choice for your use-case?
This blog compares Amplitude vs Factors.ai. Here’s what we’ll be covering:
tl;dr:
Before diving into the comparison between Amplitude and Factors.ai, it’s worth highlighting the difference between marketing analytics and product analytics.
Marketing analytics tools are geared towards tracking and optimizing performance across campaigns, website, and CRM. Popular marketing analytics tools you may have heard of include Google Analytics, Factors.ai, and Adobe Analytics. Marketing analytics can help answer questions such as:
Product analytics tools like Amplitude, Mixpanel, and Heap are better suited to tracking event-based data within web and mobile products. These tools help understand how customers use specific features within a product. Product analytics can help answer questions like:
Needless to say, marketing analytics tools are better suited to marketing & sales teams while product analytics tools are more helpful to product teams. Here’s a quick brief about Amplitude and Factors.
Amplitude is an established product analytics platform that works with commercial and enterprise-level companies like Atlassian, Dropbox, and Adidas. The platform is divided into three products:
Factors is an AI-fueled marketing analytics and attribution platform that works with SME and mid-market B2B companies like Razorpay, Chargebee and Clickhouse. The platform is divided into 4 broad categories:
As Amplitude begins to dip its toes into website analytics, it makes sense to compare the two solutions. Here's a breakdown of thei common features:
As discussed, Amplitude is primarily a product analytics platform while Factors.ai specializes in marketing and web analytics. However, since both solutions rely on event-based analytics, a comparison makes sense.
1. Data
On paper, Amplitude offers a wider range of integrations than Factors. That being said, most of these integrations are geared towards product analytics use-cases.
As a result, Amplitude’s integration with ad platforms (Google, Linkedin, etc) and CRMs (HubSpot, SalesForce, etc) tends to be limited. In turn, Amplitude’s functionality as a website analytics platform comes into question.
For instance, Amplitude cannot stitch website data with CRM data such as lead stages (MQLs, SQLs, etc), offline events (sales calls, emails, etc), or revenue figures (deal size, LCV, etc). Instead, Amplitude users are limited to website analytics that’s in isolation to the rest of the buyer journey. As B2B marketing teams become increasingly responsible for driving bottom line metrics, siloed website data is a serious limitation.
Factors integrates with ad platforms, CRMs, and CDPs. As a result, it’s capable of linking website touchpoints, campaign data, and CRM events for holistic analytics and reporting.
2. Metrics & KPIs
Businesses rely on a wide range of metrics to measure website performance and guide the decision-making process. Standard metrics like bounce rates and monthly visitors are available on both Factors and Amplitude. However, granular metrics like scroll depth or engagement rates become tedious to configure on the latter.
Given that Factors.ai is designed for B2B website analytics, it offers the ability to track a wide range of KPIs and metrics out-of-the-box. Furthermore, creating custom KPIs is easier on Factors, involving zero developer dependency.
Overall, both Amplitude and Factors do a good job of basic website analytics and reporting. But if you’re really trying to identify visitor behavior, track top-performing content, and drive BoFu conversions — Factors is probably the better choice.
In short, a funnel is a sequence of steps taken by users across campaigns, website, CRM, and product. Here’s a funnel of prospects visiting the pricing page, submitting a demo form, qualifying as an SQL, creating an opportunity, and closing the deal:
Even before trying its hand at marketing and website analytics, Amplitude delivered powerful funnels for product analytics. With Amplitude, product teams can learn how to improve onboarding, see how customers progress from free plans to paid ones & more.
Amplitude is now offering a similar, event-based funnel feature for websites. At the moment, Amplitude provides more room for funnel configurations and breakdowns as compared to Factors.
Factors is on par with Amplitude for most B2B funnel use-cases. That being said, Amplitude offers a few advanced functionalities that Factors doesn’t. For example only Amplitude can exclude specific events between funnel steps and compare multiple events at a single step.
Note that while Amplitude’s funnel capability is more flushed out than Factors, it is unable to bring in CRM data. As a result, Amplitude cannot create funnels across website and CRM events.
For instance, Amplitude and Factors can create the following funnel:
Homepage -> Pricing page -> Features page -> Newsletter signup -> Demo request
But only Factors can create a funnel to visualize this journey:
Homepage -> Demo request -> Opportunity created -> Deal created -> Deal won
Amplitude’s funnel is mature and better suited to product teams. Factors’ funnel showcases the wider picture and is better suited to GTM teams.
In short, path analysis or Pathfinder helps track aggregated customer flows across website and product. It helps map out events fired by users as well as the sequence of those events taken by users within a specific time period.
Pathfinder is a core feature in Amplitude. As a result, it's currently better than Factors’ path analysis in terms of refinement and functionality. Given that path analysis is a recent feature on Factors, it’s a matter of time before both tools are on par with each other.
In short, B2B marketing attribution is an analytics technique that measures the influence of various marketing touchpoints on desired conversion goals such as demos, pipeline, and revenue using a range of multi-touch attribution models.
While Amplitude is a well-established brand in product analytics, it’s only just entering the marketing attribution space. Unlike Amplitude, marketing attribution has always been a cornerstone feature for Factors.ai. Given that this is Factors’ expertise, it outperforms Amplitude comprehensively when it comes to marketing attribution.
Here are a few limitations with Amplitude’s marketing attribution that Factors solves for:
Factors counters each of these limitations by delivering multi-touch attribution across keywords, ad groups, campaigns, channels, website, and CRM events at an account-level. All in all, Factors is the better choice when it comes to B2B marketing attribution.
So what’s the right tool for you? The answer depends on what you’re looking for. To break it down further, here are a few pointers on what each platform does that the other doesn’t.
This is the primary consideration when deciding between Amplitude and Factors — are you looking to monitor and improve your product? If so, Amplitude is the better choice. Are you a B2B team looking to monitor and optimize GTM performance? If so, Factors probably makes more sense.
In summary...
Still on the fence about which tool may be better suited to you? See Factors in action over a quick demo
Compare Factors.ai with other tools:
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