analytics

8 Best marketing analytics tools to use in 2024

At the end of the day, marketing is all about building valuable customer relationships. Yet, today’s customer journeys are hardly straightforward. 

Research by Google shows that 60% of customers take six or more actions before deciding to buy a product. This makes it challenging for marketing leaders to gain a solid grasp of customer behavior across channels. Marketing analytics tools can help solve this mystery. Not only do these tools give you real-time insights into customer behavior, but you can also track the effectiveness of your campaigns, identify lead nurturing opportunities, and make strategic investments. 

If you’re looking to supercharge your marketing strategy, here are the top marketing analytics tools of 2024 that will help you drive the ROI of your campaigns. 

Table of contents:

8 best marketing analytics tools of 2024

1. ThoughtSpot: Best overall for business intelligence (BI)

We’ll kick off this list with a shameless plug of our own offering. ThoughtSpot for marketing brings together data from various sources, such as CRM systems, advertising platforms, and social media channels, to build interactive Liveboards. With natural language search, you can uncover granular insights by simply asking questions in natural language, such as ‘What are the daily conversations by channels?’ 

With an intuitive, search-driven approach, you can drill into specific searches, track crucial marketing KPIs, identify trends, and quickly get to the ‘why’ of things. Moreover, with AI-powered capabilities like ThoughtSpot Sage and SpotIQ, you can get a 360° view of customer data, allowing you to deliver personalized experiences at every touch point. 

Here’s how our Senior Demand Generation Manager, Katie Dunn, uses ThoughtSpot internally to analyze tons of data and drive our marketing funnel: 

Core features: 

  • Search-based interface for building marketing dashboards   

  • Interactive data visualizations

  • Real-time Liveboards and KPI reporting

  • Connectivity with multiple cloud databases

  • Advanced data analytics capabilities like change analysis

  • ThoughtSpot Monitor for automated alerts on essential KPIs.

  • Easy report sharing and in-Liveboard collaboration

  • Mobile accessibility for insights on-the-go

Sign up for a free-trial to experience how easy it is to connect your data and start finding invaluable insights with Liveboards.

2. Mode: Best for data exploration and ad-hoc analysis

Mode features a Notebook interface with an intuitive Visual Explorer that allows your data team to connect data from various databases, run queries, and turn raw data into interactive visualizations. Whether you want to analyze which customers are at risk of churn or perform A/B testing for optimal marketing spend, Mode empowers marketers to partner with their data team for quick ad-hoc analysis and decision-making.

Here’s how Honeycomb’s marketing, sales, and customer success team improved product stickiness with Mode: 

With all of their data sources connected in one place, Honeycomb’s marketing and sales teams can ask questions and get answers about their product usage. They also leverage Mode’s Notebook environment to slice data and build visualizations using Python. By partnering with their data team to quickly query data with Mode’s SQL editor and explore that data in Python, Honeycomb’s marketing and product team gained a solid grasp on important customer trends, helping them level up their product marketing game. 

Core features: 

  • Intuitive SQL editor with AI Assist to run and format queries

  • Notebook interface for faster data modeling

  • Visual explorer for interactive dashboards and visualization

  • Connectivity with multiple cloud databases

  • Data view to understand query results

See how Mode can help you discover valuable customer insights. Start your free trial today.

3. Google Analytics: Good for tracking website performance

Google Analytics is a marketing analytics software that gives businesses more visibility into their website and mobile app visitors. It is a part of the Google Marketing Platform, which allows marketers to build reports and measure website metrics, such as session duration, pages per session, traffic source, and bounce rates. Users can also review the performance of online campaigns by analyzing conversion rates. Although Google Analytics is a popular digital marketing tool, it fails to offer a comprehensive view of customer behavior across different channels. 

Core features: 

  • Real-time reporting

  • Data visualization

  • Collects data from various sources

  • Integration with Google Cloud and Google Search Console

  • Tag management

4. Zoho Analytics: Good for traditional dashboard

Zoho Analytics is a cloud-based BI platform that helps marketers visualize data using interactive dashboards. With this marketing analytics tool, users can extract insights about their marketing campaigns, forecast data, and create detailed reports. The platform also offers an AI-powered chatbot that lets users ask questions about their data and get answers in the form of KPI reports or visualizations. While Zoho is known for its custom dashboards, it does require a more technical setup which may be difficult for non-technical business users. 

Core features: 

  • Data visualization

  • KPI reporting

  • Real-time data monitoring

  • Multiple data connectors

  • Integration with the Zoho Workspace

  • AI assistant

5. Domo: Good for basic data analysis and reporting

Domo is another marketing analytics software that provides a range of features to gather, analyze, visualize, and share data from various sources. The marketing analytics platform provides a high-level view of marketing metrics and lets users identify critical trends and areas that need immediate attention. Users can also build and share reports across organizations to make informed business decisions about their media mix. Although Domo offers many features, its data discovery features aren’t as inherently intuitive for non-technical users.

Core features: 

  • Reporting and dashboards

  • Pre-built data connectors

  • Report sharing and collaboration

  • Cloud infrastructure

  • Mobile accessibility

6. Tableau: Good for visualization

Tableau is Salesforce’s data visualization platform that allows marketing analysts to visualize and interact with data to make informed decisions. With a drag-and-drop interface, Tableau helps marketers build KPI dashboards, ask ‘what-if’ questions, build data analytics models, and identify trends. However, for novice marketers, navigating the platform and analyzing large datasets often requires the help of a data team.

Core features: 

  • Data connection 

  • Data visualization

  • Dashboard creation

  • Drag-and-drop interface

  • Trend analysis 

  • Mobile accessibility

💡Related read: Top Tableau competitors and alternatives to consider

7. Looker: Good for the semantic layer

Although Looker cannot beat ThoughtSpot’s natural language queries or keep up with Tableau’s data viz library, it does offer data teams a robust semantic layer.  This semantic layer provides pre-built controls for managing data modeling and data sharing. This gives marketers more confidence in the quality and reliability of their insights. Looker allows integrations with open-source solutions through the Google Cloud Platform, helping data teams create a single source of truth. 

Core features: 

  • Custom dashboards and reports

  • Data visualization

  • Data modeling

  • Drag-and-drop interface

  • Integration with Google Cloud Platform

💡Relevant read: Looker vs Power BI

8. Power BI: Good for digital analytics

Power BI is Microsoft’s data analytics platform that allows marketers to capture and analyze data related to various marketing activities. This marketing analytics software can compile data from sources like websites, mobile apps, and online campaigns to help users gauge the effectiveness of their campaigns and create strategies to optimize them. Power BI also includes features such as dashboard building, data modeling, and report sharing. 

Core features: 

  • Dashboards 

  • Custom visualizations

  • Integration with the Microsoft ecosystem

  • Microsoft Copilot (AI feature)

  • Mobile app availability

💡Relevant read: Top Power BI alternatives and competitors to consider

Reach the right customer at the right time

Marketing analytics gives you the insights you need to build pipeline, maximize investments, and improve your bottom line. With ThoughtSpot, you are bringing together all your sales, marketing, and customer data into a single, actionable source of truth so every marketer can understand the past, inform the present, and plan for the future.

Unlock the value of your marketing data—schedule a live demo today.