Five Tools That Show You What Your Marketing Is Doing
You know what you spend on marketing each month. Ask which part of that spend produced last week's enquiries and the answer usually turns into a guess.
Five tools come up again and again for small businesses. Before the detail, the thing most round-ups leave out: these five do three jobs, not five. Google Analytics and Matomo answer the same question. Klaviyo and Mailchimp answer the same question. HubSpot answers a third. Buying two from the same row is money spent twice.
| Tool | The job it does | What it will not tell you |
|---|---|---|
| Google Analytics 4 | Site analytics | Who the visitor is, or what they are worth |
| Matomo | Site analytics, on your own servers | The same blind spot, plus you carry the upkeep |
| Klaviyo | Revenue from email and SMS | Anything happening outside email and SMS |
| Mailchimp | Email performance | Which orders your emails produced |
| HubSpot | Marketing joined to the sales pipeline | Anonymous traffic, before someone gives you a name |
Google Analytics 4
Where visitors come from, which pages they use, and which of them complete something you care about. Google Analytics covers the whole site rather than one channel, and it is free with no expiry: the sampling and event limits on the free tier sit far above anything a small business will generate, and the paid 360 tier is priced for enterprises.
The catch is effort. The reports were built for analysts, and the conversion events that make the whole thing useful have to be configured deliberately. Out of the box you get traffic. You do not get the thing you want, which is enquiries by source.
It also cannot tell you who anyone is. Analytics counts sessions, not customers, so it will show you that paid search sent 400 people and stay silent on the two who became clients.
Matomo
The same job as Google Analytics, with the data under your control. Run the Community edition on your own servers, free and unlimited, or use Matomo Cloud from €29 a month at 50,000 hits, hosted in Frankfurt. Consent handling and data retention are configurable rather than assumed.
Pick it when your sector is regulated, your legal review is cautious, or sending visitor data to Google is a conversation you would rather not have. Self-hosting is free, so long as you count your own time at nothing: upgrades, backups, and the server are yours now.
Klaviyo
Email and SMS with the orders attached. Klaviyo ties each campaign and automated flow to the revenue that followed it, and segments your list on what people bought rather than what they opened. That is the reason online retailers pick it.
It needs a shop to connect to. Plugged into Shopify, WooCommerce, or BigCommerce it reads your order history and the attribution works; without that connection you are paying for a capable email tool and using a fraction of it. The free plan covers 250 active profiles and 500 sends a month, and paid pricing scales with the number of profiles you hold, so a large, quiet list costs real money.
Its blind spot is everything else. Klaviyo will tell you email produced £4,000 last month and nothing at all about the ads, the referrals, or the walk-ins.
Mailchimp
The lighter option, and for a lot of businesses the right one. Opens, clicks, list growth, forms, and landing pages, with less setup and a gentler interface. The Mailchimp free plan runs to 250 contacts and 500 emails a month, then pricing steps up by contact count through Essentials, Standard, and Premium.
What it gives up is the link to money. You will see that 300 people opened and 40 clicked, and you will be inferring the rest. If your business is services, appointments, or enquiries rather than baskets, that inference is usually good enough, and the depth Klaviyo charges for would go unused.
HubSpot
The only one of the five that follows a person from first visit to won deal. That is what makes it different: it answers which marketing produced customers, not which marketing produced clicks, and for a business where someone has to pick up the phone before money changes hands, no amount of site analytics substitutes for it.
The HubSpot price shape deserves attention. The free tier covers two users, Starter is $7 per seat per month, and then Professional jumps to $800 a month with a $3,000 one-off onboarding fee. Most of the features people choose HubSpot for live above that step. Budget for the cliff, not the entry price.
It sees nothing before the form fill. Someone can read four pages, leave, come back a fortnight later and convert, and HubSpot only starts the story at the moment they identified themselves.
Prices are the published list prices in September 2026.
The tool is rarely the problem
Most businesses we meet already own two or three of these. The software is not what is broken. The numbers disagree with each other, "lead" means something different in every system, nobody owns the weekly report, and the decisions get made on instinct anyway.
Buying a sixth tool will not help. Decide what you need to know, track it the same way everywhere customers meet you, and put the answer somewhere you will read it on a Monday morning.
Where we come in
The team at #sharp does that joining work, as part of our Digital Products service. We map how enquiries and sales reach you, agree what counts as a lead, configure the tracking so the tools you already pay for agree with each other, and build the one view that tells you where the month's marketing money went and what it brought back.
Bring us your spend and the question you cannot answer about it. Book a call and we will show you what a week of clear numbers looks like.
