How our marketing agency uses MarTech

Google Analytics ↗ creates powerful reports and data visualizations that we use to analyze your website’s traffic. It’s free to start, but there is a paid version, Analytics 360, for large enterprises that need to manage 50+ properties and views.

Insights we can pull:

• What content are users engaging with?
• What content should or shouldn’t you remove on a new site launch?
• How much traffic are you getting a month?
• Where are conversions and leads coming from?
• What referring sites are driving traffic to your website?
• How long are users staying on the site? How can we improve that?
• What channels are driving the most traffic? Leads?
• And more. Connect with us to find insights for your business or the businesses that you manage.

Google Tag Manager ↗ is a free software that manages your website’s tags so you can better understand conversions and site analytics. There’s also a paid version, Tag Manager 360, that’s perfect for large enterprises that need to manage different goals and events for their locations.

Insights we can pull:

• Phone number click tracking
• YouTube video views on your site
• Form submission tracking
• Webpage load or element load tracking (think Calendly)
• Hotjar heatmap tracking
• And more

Google Search Console ↗ is a free tool we use to measure your website’s search performance and the organic traffic coming to your site.

Insights we can pull:

• Ranking keywords/queries
• Average position on Google search
• Impressions/views from Google search
• Ranking pages
• Issues with sitemap errors
• And more

Similar to Google Analytics (GA), Adobe Analytics provides reports and data for web and marketing analytics. Unlike GA, Adobe Analytics is a paid-only tracking model that provides complex daily insights for site traffic and engagement.

Similar to Google Search Console, Bing Webmaster Tools ↗ is a free SEO tool that allows us to analyze Bing search results and optimize your website for more traffic. 

These third-party reporting tools & software provide visual marketing reports with charts and graphs and include integrations with tools such as Google Analytics, Google Ads, Google My Business, Facebook, Twitter, and so much more. You can customize your reports to feature specific KPIs, making it easier to analyze and take action versus manually reporting on these metrics.

• DashThis ↗: This is Data Driven Marketers’ favorite! It includes reporting for SEO, PPC, and social media. You can export this data into PDFs or share links to the report. It’s $33/month, billed yearly for three dashboards (you typically need one dashboard per client).
• Google Data Studio ↗: This is a free tool that integrates with other Google tools and has a fully customizable dashboard you can alter for all sorts of digital marketing reports.
• Databox ↗: This software includes several common integrations as well as third-party integrations, such as Trello, Gmail, and Dropbox. A professional license is $169/month for 25 users.
• Ninja Reports ↗: This is primarily for SEO audits and reporting. It starts at $29/month for a business.
• Agency Analytics ↗: This tool is designed for SEO, PPC, social, email, review and call tracking dashboards. It starts at $49/mo.
• Hotjar ↗: This is a source for heatmaps, recordings, and surveys for user experience research. It’s $99/month for 500 daily sessions of data capture.
• SEMrush ↗: This is software for SEO research, competitive research, PPC, content marketing, and social media marketing. The cost is $449.95/month for businesses, agencies, or e-commerce projects.
• Moz Pro ↗: This is used for SEO reporting, keyword research, link building, backlink queries and all other SEO-related tasks. The cost for a large team is $249/month.
• Other noteworthy tools to consider: Rebrandly, Cyfe, Supermetrics, Megalytic, RavenTools, Tap Analytics DataHero, Dasheroo, and Klipfolio.

Audiense is a powerful audience research tool that allows us to plug into target buyer insights and pull information related to their location, online behavior, social activity, and more. To access advanced capabilities, pricing starts at $696 per month, billed annually.

Insights we can pull: 

• Demographics
  • Gender
  • Location
  • Language
  • Age
  • Common names
• Socioeconomics
  • Education
  • Job industry and title
  • Relationship and family status
  • Household income
• Social data
  • Twitter profiles
  • Bio keywords
  • Top social influencers
  • Top engaged content
  • Recently posted content
  • Shared social posts
  • Top social networks
• Online interests & habits
• Media affinity
  • Top TV shows
  • Top radio channels
  • Top newspapers
  • Top in-person events
  • Top places
• Personality
  • Neuroticism
  • Agreeableness
  • Extraversion
  • Conscientiousness
  • Openness
  • Needs
  • Values
• Buying mindset habits

SparkToro allows us to gather data across social and web profiles to find out what your target audience listens to, watches, reads, and talks about online. Pricing starts at $38 per month.

Insights we can pull: 

• Content that our audience frequently talks about + hashtags they use 
• Political interests 
• Top keywords in their profiles/bios 
• Followers of specific social accounts 
• Top hashtags in shares, comments, and general content 
• Audience data related to activity on a specific website 
• Podcast engagement
• And more

SEMrush’s tools are complex but insightful! We utilize SEMrush’s competitor analysis ↗ and market analysis ↗, paid advertising research tool, competitor PR monitoring, social analysis tools, and more to discover how to reach your target audience. SEMrush’s pricing starts at $119.95 per month with add-on costs for large reports.

• Similar Web ↗: SImilar Web is a website traffic analysis tool used for competitor analysis. There’s a free plan as well as an enterprise-level plan.
• Social Bakers ↗: Social Bakers provides us with audience analysis and social media insights. It starts at $200 per month, billed annually.
• BuzzSumo ↗: We use BuzzSumo for content trends and research and for finding influencers. The starting cost is $99 per month.
• Rival IQ ↗: Rival IQ is our go-to social media analysis tool that provides audience insights related to top engaged content and behavior. We also utilize Rival IQ’s landscape analysis to review competitor insights and activity.
• People Pattern ↗: People Pattern is an occasional  tool we use for audience analysis, competitive analysis, content strategy, and influencer discovery.
• Answer the Public ↗: Answer the Public is a market, customer, and content research tool that helps us discover user questions related to your service offering. Plans start at $99 per month.
• Google Trends ↗: Google Trends is a free tool we use that helps us analyze popular search queries across the globe. We can see where people are searching from, what they’re searching for, and what key terms are trending for improved content strategies.

SEMrush is our primary SEO ↗ & content marketing tool ↗, providing insights related to ranking competitor keywords to keyword opportunity and tracking, backlink analysis, and more. SEMrush’s plans start at $119.95 per month.

Reports we can pull for data storytelling & strategy:  

• Competitor traffic analytics
• Organic keyword reports based on selected key terms or keywords we research
• Keyword gaps (what are your competitors ranking for that you’re not?)
• Backlink gaps (what potential sites can you reach out to?)
• In-depth keyword data
• Topics and questions related to target keywords
• Technical SEO website analysis
• Keyword and post tracking
• And more

When searching for content gaps within the market and backlink opportunities/threats, we utilize Ahrefs auditing and research tools. Pricing for Ahrefs starts at $99 per month.

SEOquake is a free browser extension we use to conduct on-page SEO audits, examine links, and evaluate your competitor’s ranking pages. 

Google Trends is a free tool that allows us to see popular keywords across different regions and compare the popularity of specific keywords and/or content topics. 

SpyFu is a great tool for keyword research and opportunity identification, rank tracking, and content marketing ideas. Plans start at $33 per month.

• Keywords Everywhere ↗: Keywords Everywhere is a browser extension that allows us to conduct keyword research on specific pages and/or across entire sites. It’s a pay-as-you-go service that starts at $10 for 10 keywords.
• BuzzSumo ↗: When evaluating the popularity of a content topic over a specific period of time, BuzzSumo is our go-to tool. Not only do we gain insights related to content topic popularity, but we get information related to content and social engagement, length, and best times to publish. BuzzSumo’s starting cost is $99 per month.
• Alexa SEO ↗: Alexa SEO’s keyword research tool helps us in more ways than one, fueling us with content ideas and gaps within the market. Alexa SEO’s pricing starts at $149 a month.

ClickUp ↗ is our favorite project management tool! In addition to tracking projects & showing where tasks are in our pipeline, ClickUp has built-in automation and customizations that save us time. ClickUp pricing starts at $5 per member per month, billed annually.

Notable features:

• Custom fields feature for tracking, sorting, and filtering our projects.
• Offers built-in goal and time tracking features.
• Features built-in board, calendar, gantt, and timeline views.
• Calendar view can help you stay on top of projects and plan ahead.
• Board view can help you track and move tasks through a vertical workflow (like Trello, but better).
• Customizable dashboards/widgets help track KPIs.
• Hierarchical structure aligns with most strategic approaches (spaces, parent tasks, sub tasks).
• Collaboration is easy with @mentions and assignees.
• Provides document storage for important attachments.
• Email directly from the platform.
• Workload view can tell you what’s on your team’s plate.
• Notifications are customizable to fit your preference: no notification fatigue here.
• Gives you the ability to assign tasks to users outside the platform.

Data Driven Marketers’ favorite features: We can automatically assign tasks to certain people, change a task’s status (like from in progress to complete), update priorities, and notify involved team members via Slack without leaving the interface.

Like ClickUp, we like Teamwork ↗ because of its project task and subtasks feature. Teamwork is a great tool for growing businesses that need to break down larger projects into bite-sized tasks. Pricing starts at $10 per user per month, billed annually.

Similar to ClickUp, Asana ↗ provides you with several ways to visualize your projects. It also has reporting capabilities, tasks and subtasks, milestones, and several integrations. Asana is an excellent option for expanding teams. Pricing begins at $10.99 per user per month, billed annually.

If you’re a freelancer, Hive ↗ is the project management tool for you! It comes with project and task features, time tracking, and different visual views for your projects. Not to mention, it comes with over 1,000 integrations to make the software work harder, so you don’t have to. Monthly pricing starts at $12 per user when billed annually.

For smaller teams and agencies, Monday ↗ takes the cake. Also similar to ClickUp, Monday allows you to plan and track your projects with different templates and views. It also lets you set up automations to save you time and add integrations to speed up your workflow. For single teams, pricing is $8 each month.

SEMrush ↗ is a powerful site audit tool. Check your site health and monitor technical errors, warnings, and notices within a single dashboard. See special technical reports when you’re interested in viewing site speed, crawlability, HTTPS, internal linking, use of markups, and international SEO. Costs start at $119.95 per month. The good news is that you’re actually paying for more than just a site audit tool–you’re also getting a tool that helps with SEO & PPC keyword research, content marketing, market research, and social media management.

Our favorite tool for websites with over 50 pages is Lumar ↗. We love this tool because it points out technical SEO errors, saving your site from losing revenue and rank. It can automate code testing too, preventing code errors from going live and negatively impacting SEO. Pricing is customized based on your business size.

Another tool that’s great for site audits is Agency Analytics ↗. Small businesses or budding agencies can improve their search rankings and visibility, catch SEO errors, and see real-time 24/7 results with customized dashboards. Pricing starts at $149 per month.

Screaming Frog ↗ is an industry must-have for SEOs and developers. We use Screaming Frog to repair and analyze broken links, generate sitemaps, crawl pages for duplicate content, and more. Annual pricing starts at £149 ($202.95 USD) per user per year.