In the modern marketing landscape, making fast and accurate decisions based on your data is more crucial than ever, helping to drive customer engagement and improve the return on investment of your marketing efforts.
However, becoming a data-driven organization doesn’t happen overnight. It requires a lot of planning, a strategic approach to data management, and investment in the right tools and technology to support your evolution on the data maturity curve.
One of the most critical tools to invest in is the right data integration platform, which can help you centralize and standardize your data so it’s ready for analysis.
However, to truly unlock the value of your integrated data, you must be able to effectively and efficiently analyze it to make informed decisions that drive business performance.
This is where the role of marketing analytics tools comes in.
Access to the right analytics tools is one of the most important priorities for many modern marketers, allowing them to make meaningful optimizations across their marketing campaigns.
What are the different types of marketing analytics tools?
Marketers are spoilt for choice when it comes to analytical tools for marketing.
To help simplify things, it can be helpful to view marketing analytics tools as falling under two broad categories: business intelligence (BI) solutions and data visualization platforms.
BI solutions offer in-depth data management, analysis, and reporting capabilities. They are ideal for detailed data processing, complex analytics, and strategic business reporting.
On the other hand, data visualization platforms focus on presenting data in an easily understandable format, making them perfect for at-a-glance insights and more real-time data analysis.
Your choice of which marketing analytics tool is right for you largely depends on your specific business needs — whether you require deep analytical capabilities or more straightforward, visually-driven data analysis.
To help you make your decision, we will explore four of the most popular marketing analytics solutions, each with its unique features and benefits so that you can make a more informed choice.
4 of the best marketing analytics tools
|
Power BI |
Tableau |
Looker Studio |
Snowflake |
|
|
Who is it for? |
Organizations looking for a BI platform to drive data-driven decision-making through interactive reports and dashboards. |
Data-rich businesses focused on visual storytelling for business insights. |
Businesses looking for an easy-to-use yet powerful BI solution to make data insights accessible for all stakeholders. |
Innovative businesses looking to develop custom analytics applications and use AI and machine learning for deeper data insights. |
|
Key strengths |
User-friendly, supports natural language queries, Microsoft ecosystem integration. |
Stunning data visualization capabilities, real-time analysis capabilities |
Interactive visualizations, templated reports, collaboration tools, and integration with Google Workspace ecosystem. |
Scalable data infrastructure, easy integration of machine learning models, and ability to build bespoke analytics apps for unique business insights. |
|
Ease of use |
Designed to be easy for all stakeholders to use |
Easy for all users to create basic reports, but requires knowledge of business data for advanced analysis. |
Designed to be easy for all stakeholders to use |
Requires involvement from IT and infrastructure teams to configure. |
|
Collaboration tools |
Integrates with Microsoft 365 tools like Teams and SharePoint for easy sharing of dashboards and reports across teams. |
Allows discussions on reports, and presentation mode enables users to share interactive visuals |
Easy to share reports via URL, embed reports in other applications, and automate delivery to relevant stakeholders. |
Securely shares data across teams to enable company-wide collaboration. |
|
Clients |
DocuSign, Adobe |
Vodafone, HP |
Lenovo, HelloFresh |
Mastercard, Disney |
|
Costs |
Starting from free, $10 per user per month for Pro, $20 per user per month for Premium. |
Creator licenses from £60 per month, and viewer licenses from £12 per month. |
Free for basic access, Looker Studio Pro from $9 per user, per project, per month. |
Unit-based pricing per hour of virtual data warehouse time, starting from $2.00 per credit. |
Power BI
Power BI is Microsoft’s business intelligence platform aimed at helping organizations gain optimal value from their data and empower better decision-making.
The platform is designed to enable all users across a business to extract insights from business data through interactive visualizations, reports, and dashboards.
Intuitive drag-and-drop tools empower non-technical users to create reports and dashboards easily, and the ability to interrogate reports with natural language queries further improves the accessibility of insights for all users across your business.
As part of the Microsoft ecosystem, Power BI offers seamless integration with popular applications like Excel, Teams, and other Microsoft products.
The familiar Microsoft interface is also helpful for ensuring adoption amongst users across your business.
At the enterprise-level price point, Power BI delivers strong data governance and security features, and the platform is available as both a cloud and on-premises solution.
Discover how easily Adverity can integrate with Power BI
Tableau
Tableau is well known as a leading data visualization and business intelligence platform that enables users to easily create sleek, interactive data dashboards using a drag-and-drop interface.
It quickly and easily transforms your business data into powerful visualizations that help teams spot trends, identify issues, and make data-driven decisions.
While the drag-and-drop approach makes it easy for users to build reports, Tableau still requires familiarity with your business data to generate advanced insights.
One of the areas where Tableau shines is in its processing and visualization of large, complex data sets, making it a logical choice for data-rich businesses focused on visual storytelling.
Tableau has strong data governance capabilities and supports the creation of real-time dashboard updates by connecting to live data feeds or data integration solutions.
Discover how easily Adverity can integrate with Tableau
Looker Studio
Looker Studio is a cloud-based business intelligence platform owned by Google that aims to make data insights accessible and easy to understand for all organizational stakeholders.
Looker Studio has an intuitive interface that enables users to visualize data easily through interactive dashboards, charts, and graphs.
Pre-built templates and drag-and-drop components allow for quick and easy report building to spot trends and identify opportunities.
Looker Studio also has functionality to encourage collaboration across your business, including report scheduling, sharing via URLs, and embedding visualizations in custom applications.
The platform is offered in a free version and Looker Studio Pro, providing additional functionality, access control, and support for larger teams.
For businesses that are looking for a platform that balances simplicity with powerful insights and is already part of the Google Workspace ecosystem, Looker Studio is worth considering.
Find out more about Looker Studio
Discover how easily Adverity can integrate with Looker Studio
Snowflake
So, technically, this one is a bit of an outlier as it’s not really a data analytics platform.
But with the increasing importance of machine learning in data analysis and the rising trend for businesses building their own bespoke analytics apps, this list wouldn’t be complete without mentioning Snowflake.
Snowflake is a cloud-based solution that supports a wide range of functions, including data storage, data engineering, data science, data application development, and secure data sharing.
Its scalable architecture ensures that businesses of all sizes can manage and analyze data efficiently without worrying about infrastructure limitations.
This flexibility allows businesses to unlock the power of machine learning and AI to unlock deeper insights from their data, making it a valuable platform for organizations looking to innovate and adapt to the changing technological landscape.
Additionally, Snowflake's platform is particularly powerful for businesses looking to build bespoke analytics applications. Snowflake enables any organization to create applications that leverage their business data, helping them unlock unique insights that standard analytics solutions might not provide.
Discover how easily Adverity can integrate with Snowflake
What should you look for in a marketing analytics tool?
When you’re looking for the right marketing analytics tool, it's essential to ensure it aligns with your specific business needs.
Some of the key areas that you’ll want to consider include:
Compatibility with your centralized source of marketing data
Your data integration platform and marketing analytics platform need to work hand in hand.
If your data isn’t standardized and centralized, you won’t be able to take accurate analysis from it.
If you don’t have the right analytics tools, you’re unlikely to get the most from your centralized database of high-quality data.
So it’s really important that your data integration platform is compatible with your choice of marketing analytics tool.
Luckily, some of the leading data integration platforms are capable of loading data into almost any destination of your choosing, so you’ll never have this problem.
As a quick recap, Adverity seamlessly integrates with all four major analytics platforms we reviewed.
Enhanced analysis and customization capabilities
Technology is evolving all the time, and recent advancements in AI have led to many marketing analytics tools developing impressive features that use machine learning and data models to help identify patterns in data and enable functionality like predictive modeling and scenario analysis.
It's important that you check the capabilities of your chosen analytics platform and also understand the likely future development roadmap to ensure you can fully capitalize on technological advancements in the market.
Additionally, ensure that your chosen analytics platform has the flexibility to allow you to tailor reports and dashboards to the specific needs of users within your business, creating detailed treemaps for your data analysts as easily as you can create line charts and column charts for top-level analysis. This ensures that your chosen analytics tool will be able to support all your different business goals and KPIs.
User-friendly interface and visualizations
Your marketing dashboards and reports are only going to deliver value for your business if all relevant stakeholders can access, analyze, and act on the insights.
So, it’s important to choose a marketing analytics tool with an intuitive, easy-to-use interface to democratize access to data and cater to the different technical capabilities of stakeholders across your business.
Choosing a platform that can allow users to ‘drill down’ from high-level summaries into more granular analysis is another way to ensure suitability for different users based on their business needs.
Real-time analysis and reporting
In the fast-paced world of modern marketing, real-time data analysis is invaluable for enabling marketers to make timely analyses and optimizations to deliver a competitive edge.
This is why it’s important to choose a marketing analytics tool that can integrate with your centralized database in near real-time, to help your business make timely, data-driven decisions from the freshest data possible.
Make better decisions based on up-to-date data.If you choose to work with a data integration platform like Adverity, this process becomes easier as you’re able to fetch data as often as every 15 minutes from each of your data sources, consolidate it, and load it directly into your chosen analytics tool.
Collaboration and sharing features
If you’re looking to establish a data-driven culture within your business, it’s important to enable easy collaboration between teams and departments.
To help achieve this, your ideal marketing analytics platform should enable seamless sharing of reports, dashboards, and findings across your business.
It’s also worth checking if your chosen marketing analytics tool allows users to annotate reports and visualizations to aid with joint analysis and decision-making.
Cost-effectiveness
Cost is obviously going to play a part in your decision on which marketing analytics platform to choose, and it’s essential to carefully weigh up the costs of each platform relative to the features and benefits offered.
However, it’s also worth balancing the costs of any platform against the gains in efficiency, revenue growth, and competitive advantage that you’re able to gain from cutting-edge data-driven decision-making.
More advanced analytics platforms might require a sizeable financial investment upfront, but the right solution can pay for itself many times over by empowering your marketing teams to develop more informed strategies and campaign optimizations.
Adverity can load accurate, enriched data into your chosen marketing analytics tool in near real-time
Business intelligence tools and data visualization platforms are critical for unlocking actionable insights from your marketing data.
However, to realize the full potential of your chosen marketing analytics platform, it is crucial that any reports and dashboards are built from a foundation of accurate, reliable data.
This is where Adverity comes in.
Our leading data integration platform automates the complex process of centralizing and standardizing all your marketing data, ensuring its consistency, accuracy, and quality.
Key features and benefits of the Adverity platform include:
- More than 600+ pre-built connectors, enabling you to connect to all your marketing sources
- The ability to easily set up custom connectors for specific business data storage
- Powerful data enrichments to map, validate, and enhance your data
- Seamless loading of your unified data into any business intelligence tool, data visualization platform, or database
Adverity allows your marketing teams to access more accurate, meaningful insights from your analytics tools.
So, if you’re looking for a data integration platform to power your data analytics solution, book a demo with Adverity today.
