New Gartner report spotlights analytics tools that map customer data across channels

As customer journeys, customer experience and customer data become the key drivers of modern marketing, analytics tools have become the compasses.

To help marketers learn about their options, Gartner is out with a new “Magic Quadrant for Digital Marketing Analytics” for what it describes as the “booming business” of analytics.

It notes, for instance, that more than 40 percent of US and UK marketing leaders say analytical tools are among their top five investments. (A complimentary copy of this report is available from several of the named vendors, including Adobe.)

Analytics tools are described as standalone “applications used to understand and improve digital channel user experience, and prospect and customer acquisition and behavior, and to optimize marketing campaigns, with an emphasis on digital channels and techniques.”

The report surveyed the field and evaluated tools from a dozen vendors, based on such criteria as product functions, pricing, market responsiveness, customer experience and operations. Media measurement tools for attribution were excluded, as were analytical tools that focus on ads.

In general, it finds that tools are increasingly emphasizing cross-device identity matching, predictive analytics, improved user interfaces and customer journeys that cross channels and devices.

The Leaders

The capabilities of the tools, the report says, are focused in five key areas: customer and journey insights, data integration, data exploration by discovering useful patterns and presenting visualizations, advanced models that can find trends over time, and data integration to implementation tools.

In the report’s Quadrant, three vendors are named as Leaders: Adobe, SAS and Google. IBM and SAP are second-place Challengers, while Thunderhead and ClickFox are characterized as Visionaries. In the bottom quadrant of Niche Players are FICO, AgilOne, AT Internet, Optimove and Pitney Bowes.

Although some functions overlap, many of the tools have carved out their own characteristics.

Adobe Analytics, for instance, resides as the core of that company’s Experience Cloud, while AgilOne has positioned itself as a customer data platform that unifies first-party profiles into cross-channel IDs.

AT Internet is supporting the European Union’s upcoming General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), and ClickFox is launching standalone apps that provide specific functions at a lower cost, such as one that identifies the most important steps in a customer journey to reach a sale.

IBM’s Customer Experience Analytics Suite could have a bright future working with Watson, the company’s famous supercomputing system, while Optimove and Thunderhead were highlighted for their intuitive user interfaces.

Credit score maven FICO has entered this analytical tool space, Google Analytics remains as the most used tool, and Pitney Bowes — busily reinventing itself beyond postage meters — is developing data science tools in its product. And AgilOne, ClickFox, Optimove, Pitney Bowes and Thunderhead are focusing on providing the cream of the data crop with master customer records based on first-party data.