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As a B2B marketer, proving your marketing ROI is likely one of your highest priorities. According to HubSpot, 40 percent of marketing decision-makers say that their biggest concern is proving the ROI of their marketing activities.
The right marketing technology platform can help you do that, but it’s important to understand what metrics to evaluate. And the major martech platforms offer very different analytics.
In this post, we’ll discuss the metrics we believe prove B2B marketing ROI the best, as well as how HubSpot, Marketo and Pardot compare in terms of analytics.
Which Metrics Can Ultimately Prove B2B Marketing ROI?
To prove your B2B marketing ROI, you can use your marketing automation platform to set specific goals and then choose the metrics that you want to track. A singular dashboard in one martech platform makes viewing lead conversion rates easier than siloing this function through email platforms or Google Analytics.
Key metrics to track include:
- Landing page metrics. How many visitors are coming to your landing pages, and from what traffic sources? What’s the bounce rate? What actions are they taking from there, such as downloading content, signing up for an email list or reaching out to schedule a call? Did any of those leads convert into customers? These metrics will show what traffic sources you should prioritize in future campaigns and whether you need to further optimize the copy, images, CTAs, content offers or other aspects of your landing pages.
- Email marketing metrics including open rate and click-through rate. Even if the prospects who opened the email and clicked on a link haven't yet converted, these are metrics that show the interests of your prospects and how successful your messaging is.
- Social media metrics. By prioritizing by the platforms where you have the most engagement — likes, comments and shares — you can track where content and landing page traffic is coming from, and determine your social traffic ratio to compute overall ROI.
As you already know, it’s very easy to get into the weeds with analytics. There are virtually limitless metrics you can consider when calculating ROI. We like to make sure we’re tracking the above list, as well as a few others like search engine rank, session activity length and conversions by traffic sources.
Hubspot, Marketo & Pardot Analytics Dashboards: A Comparison
Here’s a breakdown of the analytics that each of the three major martech platforms offers:
HubSpot Analytics
HubSpot comes with a robust suite of analytics tools intended to track the entire customer lifecycle in addition to website analytics by the whole site or page-by-page. HubSpot provides a conclusive list of what's included on their analytics dashboard, which includes metrics like bounce rates by source and page, and what devices your visitors are using.
You can also customize analytics to your organization's individual needs and priorities. The Basic version includes the entire analytics dashboard but professional and enterprise versions contain more sophisticated analytics designed for goal-based lead nurturing.
HubSpot counts page views, clicks and other events as sessions. Source reports are generated based on the source of that contact's first-known session. The contacts in that report are categorized by the date of their first conversion.
Attribution reports only come with the enterprise version, with a "lite" report option available to professional users. The report lets users pinpoint which sources and channels lead to the most conversions down to URL and referrer. Users can customize attribution reports and see information beyond original sources, such as pages contacts visited prior to conversion and blog posts and web pages that drive the most conversions.
Only HubSpot’s Enterprise package, which starts at $2,400 per month, provides full attribution and custom event triggering reports in addition to predictive lead scoring.
Marketo also has highly-detailed attribution capabilities and traffic sourcing. Their attribution model utilizes both dynamic content and customizable CTAs based on the prospect's records or previous activities on your website.
Marketo Analytics
Marketo takes a more customer-journey approach to analytics so that users can better understand the steps of the customer journey where prospects and leads demonstrate engagement. It has tools including Smart Lists that help marketers target specific groups of people, with incredibly extensive filters pertaining to both source/channel and location down to country, state and even zip code. The lowest tier comes with basic web page analytics that can help tie campaigns to revenue. Higher-priced tiers unlock more advanced analytics.
Marketo also has highly-detailed attribution capabilities and traffic sourcing. Their attribution model utilizes both dynamic content and customizable CTAs based on the prospect's records or previous activities on your website.
Because Marketo can be adapted to your needs via stack, you can also create APIs that track first and last touch to determine which sources are producing the most conversions. But like other aspects of Marketo — such as creating landing pages and emails, which require HTML and CSS proficiency — specialized knowledge is required to do some of that tracking.
Pardot Analytics
Pardot offers its own B2B marketing analytics dashboard that is fully customizable with multi-touch attribution. While less fine-tuned than Marketo, you can get holistic channel views to see which ones are the most effective.
Pardot also lets users build on the dashboard themselves with the Salesforce AppExchange Lightning Data store, based on the specific analytics needed. These data sources are third-party, and some of the tools are free and others have monthly or annual subscription fees that vary. Make sure you have the proper financial and technical resources in place if you go this route with Pardot.
All editions of Pardot enable you to track prospects' interactions with your brand using any Pardot marketing assets. If your organization runs events and uses Eventbrite, it's noteworthy that Pardot also has an additional events report tool designed for verified Eventbrite connectors to glean valuable data from prospects who sign up for your events.
Pardot uses a campaign influence attribution model that show you the first through last touches that take a contact from a prospect to sales-qualified lead to customer. You can separate new contacts by source and determine which ones result in the most conversions, and run ROI reports in both Pardot and Salesforce if you are also a Salesforce user.
Which Platform is Best for Proving Marketing ROI?
If you need to target very specific leads or regions and deliver reports with fine-tuned attribution, check out Marketo. If your team has data science expertise and the ability to work with several third-party data sources, look at Pardot. If your company is focused on content performance and channel tracking, we think HubSpot is the best option — and that its many other features make it the best choice for most midsize and growth-driven B2B marketers. 
