Which SaaS solutions can best measure your marketing performance?

Many SaaS solutions can help you measure the performance of your digital campaigns. From Google Data Studio to out-of-the-box solutions, there’s no shortage of choices. Yet the challenge remains the same: gathering data from all channels with one tool.

Three simple letters and a whole program: KPI, or Key Performance Indicator. A digital marketing campaign is based on a strategy around clear and measurable objectives. The first steps, then, are establishing goals and measuring progress toward them.

The good news is that evaluating the effectiveness of a marketing campaign is much easier in the online world than offline. Traffic, numbers of new visitors, leads, shares on social networks, and sales are all good indicators to be aware of, but they’re typically scattered across many tools. Compiling them manually would thus become tedious and time-consuming. Therein lies the usefulness of solutions capable of uniting all the KPIs to give them broader meaning.

Which KPIs should I monitor?

It all starts with the key question: what do you want to measure?

01. Measure your website’s attractiveness

Before you can achieve your marketing goal, whatever it may be, you need to attract visitors to your site and then get them to act or become interested in your products.

The main indicators are as follows:

• the number of unique visitors
  
• the number of loyal visitors (close to becoming customers)
  
• engagement (time spent on the website, number of page views)
  
• navigation path (path, pages, and contents most consumed)

02. Measure the results of your marketing campaigns

• number of leads generated
  
• lead generation rate (percentage of visitors who leave you information via a contact form or newsletter subscription)
  
• acquisition cost and average per channel

03. Measure sales effectiveness

Your main goal is to grow commercially, so the KPIs are as follows:

• total revenue and number of sales
• amount per customer
• conversion and response rates
• income per channel

04. Measure your brand image and customer loyalty

Is your company well known? Does it have a good reputation? Measure: brand awareness and share of voice through mentions (in the media, on social networks, in search intentions). Are your customers so satisfied that they recommend you? Regularly evaluate your net promoter score (NPS).

That’s about it for the main KPIs, but the Content Marketing Institute goes even further and lists many more:

Which SaaS solutions should you use to measure your marketing performance?

Gathering so many KPIs implies aggregating data from many sources and solutions: web and social media analytics, SEO tools, marketing automation, CRM… To make this data “activable” (i.e., sufficiently intelligible to inform management), it must be collected, aggregated, correlated, and visually displayed. This is complicated to do by hand each month in spreadsheets or in a presentation. That’s why SaaS-based data visualization tools have multiplied.

First of all, there are tools that are similar to dashboard construction workshops. They require technical knowledge to connect the data as well as to elaborate the restitutions.

Google Data Studio

Widely adopted because it’s free for the most part, Google Data Studio allows users to aggregate, visualize, and share data—directly when they come from the Google environment (Google Analytics, Adwords…), but less directly for third-party sources such as social networks, marketing automation solutions). That said, many paid “connectors” are available. These options vary in the wide variety of visual outputs they offer, including tables, maps, and diagrams) and in the simplicity of access rights management.

Power BI

This is like the alter ego of Google Data Studio in the Microsoft environment. Here too, the solution offers a wide range of visual representations. But, here too, technical skills will be required to connect data sources and prepare them to obtain the most readable results. Not surprisingly, Power BI easily interacts with Microsoft’s offerings. Note that a partnership with Adobe facilitates access to analytics of Adobe marketing solutions.

There are other solutions on the market like Databox that are more ready to use and require less technical expertise. They offer direct integration with third-party solutions or restitution models and layouts that accelerate dashboard design.

Beware of “black box” SaaS software

While all companies (within their resources) can find a SaaS marketing solution for a global view of performance, these solutions must agree to share their data. A selection criterion that is sometimes underestimated. Every solution—from a complete marketing automation platform to a simple email tool—includes a dashboard. Beware, as not all martech solutions define “sharing” in the same way. Some are even like “black boxes” from which it is very difficult to extract data.

The ideal scenario is a specific dashboard within each solution while keeping the possibility of integrating this data when needed. This is the scenario Letsignit offers to measure performance of email signature campaigns. Within the solution itself, it is possible to analyze the performance of the current campaigns, to identify the best performing signatures or the groups of users for whom the signatures are the most clicked.

Moreover, Letsignit also proposes to rely on UTMs (parameters inserted in the URL) to read the performance of email signatures through web analytics and thus integrate these data in a dashboard produced with a specialized tool. Useful for example to compare the performance of your email signatures to other channels used for the same campaign (emails, posts on social networks, content hosted by third party sites, sponsored links).

The data from your martech solutions can therefore “speak” as long as you are able to aggregate it and render it within a global performance measurement system.

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