Big List of Marketing Automation Software

Administrator — Tue, 17 May 2011 18:35:00 GMT

Marketing automation software is here to stay. No longer an emerging trend or the domain of a select few savvy businesses, these software platforms streamline sales and marketing departments by replacing high-touch, repetitive manual processes with automated solutions. Sounds good, right? But what do these solutions really enable your organization to do, how can it benefit search marketing efforts and who are the real leaders in the space?

Users of marketing automation software platforms, typically those responsible for marketing a website or business (search, email, social, advertising), are able to specify criteria and outcomes for tasks and processes that are then interpreted, stored and executed by the software. While that undoubtedly sounds complex, the objectives are simply to increase efficiency and reduce human error. One possible cause for a lack of adoption in small and medium size businesses is that these solutions come in a variety of forms with a lot of feature cross-over. Before moving forward it is important to understand the various classifications of marketing software.

- Marketing intelligence software tracks behavior (what activity did the user engage in and where) for the purpose of understanding intent, enabling marketers to improve targeting based on interest and vertical market. Appropriate for any size organization.

- Marketing workflow focuses more on budgeting and planning, workflow and approvals, collaboration, asset creation and management internally within an organization. Marketing workflow solutions are typically designed for larger enterprises.

- Marketing automation software focuses on lead generation with marketing programs to drive awareness and interest in products/services. The best solutions on the market couple marketing technology with sales processes as delineated by a CRM program.

These are very broad definitions of the marketing software classifications that should help identify what type is appropriate for your business and in particular your search, social, email and advertising campaigns. Ultimately, any marketing software should aid in performing functions and tasks including analyzing marketing campaigns (and customer behaviors), managing those marketing campaigns, and organizing and storing customer data. So who are the best of the best in the marketing automation software business? WM has listed a few top tier vendors below.

Eloqua

Marketo

Pardot

Optify

InfusionSoft

RightNow

Genius.com

NetSuite

Aprimo

Loopfuse

Silverpop

Unica

Yahoo! Analytics Beats Google Analytics

Pete Prestipino — Tue, 17 Feb 2009 15:17:00 GMT

According to research by analyst firm CMS Watch, Yahoo!'s Web Analytics service surpassed Google in several key categories in relation to use by enterprises. You might remember that Yahoo! acquired analytics vendor IndexTools back in early 2008.

CMS Watch released its 470-page Web Analytics Report 2009, which evaluates 20 web analytics platforms against 12 potential use-cases. Vendors reviewed include Bango, Coremetrics, GlanceGuide, Intellitracker, Lyris, Nedstat, Omniture, Unica, Visible Measures, and WebTrends, as well as Google and Yahoo!.

CMS Watch found that Yahoo! Web Analytics surpasses Google in several key areas, including:

Better access control options and simpler approach to multi-site analytics
Larger default monthly page-view limits (200MM vs. 5MM – unless you have an active AdWords campaign)
Access to traffic data: Both vendors retain the right to hold and use your web analytics data for their own purposes, but Yahoo! gives you the ability to export out your raw, unaggregated data
Longer historical availability of raw data

CMS Watch also found that Yahoo! Web Analytics had its drawbacks, including an administrative complexity that accompanied its functional richness, and present lack of 24/7 tech support. "Ultimately, for some enterprises, neither Google nor Yahoo! makes a good fit," explained CMS Watch founder Tony Byrne, "and those customers should consider fee-based web analytics solutions."

'Net Features : unica

Big List of Marketing Automation Software

Yahoo! Analytics Beats Google Analytics