Act-On Software Adds Benchmarking Tool to Online Marketing Platform

Act-On Software just released a new tool to track an organization's presence in social media and other online channels. Called Act-On Insight, the software is designed for use with the Act-On marketing automation platform and allows an organization to benchmark its performance against competitors. 

Atri Chatterjee, Act-On Software chief marketing officer, that small- and medium-sized businesses (SMBs) are continually struggling to keep up with the online marketing capabilities of larger companies. Chatterjee said that Insight is an “important new weapon” in the Act-On marketing platform, which acts as “an equalizer, leveling the playing field by enabling” SMBs to reach key audiences faster and more effectively.

Website, Blog Monitoring

The Act-On marketing automation platform includes web conferencing, an email engine, customer relationship management, lead generation and nurturing, content syndication, social media prospecting, design tools for web forms, landing pages and other features. The platform integrates with Salesforce.com and SugarCRM, and is offered on a no-contract, monthly subscription basis.

Insight adds several capabilities to the Act-On platform. These include the ability for a marketer to compare a website’s performance to other companies from the platform’s dashboard, with tracking of site popularity and of search terms that help to drive traffic.

The tool also allows businesses to monitor their blogs, which they can also track compared to others’. As one example, the company cited the ability for marketers to follow the trends in a blog’s topics, compare the popularity of competing blogs, and then utilize such factors as the volume of dialogue to measure the quantity and quality of a given blog.

Social Media Channels

For three of the leading social media channels -- Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn -- Insight provides measurement of such factors as activity and number of followers, and also offers a relevance measurement, based on such metrics as “amplification of dialog.”

For the fourth of the top social channels, YouTube, Insight enables the tracking, measurement and comparison of a company’s YouTube channel with those of its competitors.

Headquartered in Beaverton, Oregon, Act-On Software offers a cloud-based, marketing automation platform, which it promotes as providing integrated marketing technologies without the need for dedicated database maintenance or IT support.