How Vendr gets back 2+ days every month with streamlined marketing analytics from Attribution
When Vendr needed to understand the true impact of marketing on their software marketplace, they used Attribution to decode complex user journeys and prove channel effectiveness.
8.6x
increase in ROAS
2-3 days
saved per month in manual analysis
6 months
of building time saved
About
Vendr is a SaaS (Software as a Service) procurement and negotiation platform designed to simplify and optimize the process of buying and managing software for businesses. As a leader in B2B software sales, Vendr provides access to current pricing benchmarks and negotiation insights, enabling businesses to make informed purchasing decisions and avoid overpaying for software.
With over 500 customers globally — including notable companies like HubSpot, Canva, Webflow, Brex, and Lattice — Vendr helps organizations streamline vendor relationships and optimize their tech spending.
“If you’re looking to save time and sanity when trying to knit your marketing data together, Attribution is a useful tool to give you insights and take a lot of that lift off your plate.”
Perin Adams
GTM Business Systems Manager @Vendr
Challenge
Tracking complex user behavior with limited marketplace attribution
As a B2B software marketplace, Vendr faced unique challenges in understanding the effectiveness of their marketing efforts. Unlike standard SaaS companies, their team needed to track other user interactions besides closing sales — including engagements with suppliers, product signups, and marketplace transactions.
“When someone comes to the site interested in purchasing from a supplier, do they finish that transaction or drop off? That’s not tracked in our backend systems as a traditional opportunity,” adds Perin Adams, GTM Business Systems Manager at Vendr.
However, basic attribution tools like Google Analytics and Mixpanel didn’t provide the granular insights needed for these complex user journeys. What’s more, visitors may only be tracked for up to 90 days — sometimes even less — depending on the platform. So, a site visitor who returns after that time frame gets labeled as new, skewing Vendr’s referral data — an issue compounded by the fact that many site visitors may never create an account. All this was compounded by the inefficiency of their analytics workflow, requiring the team to spend two to three days every month manually combining and analyzing data from Snowflake to piece together insights.
Their team needed a solution that:
Tracks metrics beyond traditional sales conversions, such as supplier engagement and marketplace transactions
Identifies and tracks site visitors regardless of whether they sign up for an account
Understands complex marketplace user journeys
Analyzes performance across organic and paid channels
They considered building an in-house solution. However, Perin quickly realized a software build would cost the engineering team approximately six weeks and multiple team members to complete. What’s more, updates and maintenance would require additional engineering moving forward.
Thankfully, that’s when Vendr came across Attribution. The comprehensive tracking capabilities aligned with their marketplace model.
“We needed a more robust attribution solution to answer our questions around how paid ad spend drove certain actions within our site, and that’s when Attribution came on our radar. We knew it would offer the clarity and insights we had been looking for.”
Perin Adams
GTM Business Systems Manager @Vendr
Solution
Revealing nuanced marketplace insights without engineering overhead
Perin found that the Attribution team provided extensive support from day one — answering questions and customizing the platform to handle Vendr’s multiple opportunity types and unique conversion tracking needs. This hands-on partnership empowered Vendr to quickly transform how they gather and analyze data, making insights accessible across the organization:
The marketing team measures channel effectiveness, tracking how campaigns drive specific actions and uncovering valuable traffic sources
The product team uses dashboard insights to understand user behavior patterns and optimize the marketplace experience
The finance team leverages it for budget planning and performance tracking
With Attribution consolidating data from all their platforms, Vendr no longer needs to manually combine data in Snowflake. Instead, Attribution shows the conversion rates and ROAS at a glance, reducing their analysis time from days to minutes. Now teams simply look to their Attribution dashboard for the insights they need.
With more data flexibility, Vendr can now monitor various interactions and conversion types specific to their business model, including traditional sales opportunities as well as actions unique to their marketplace — like supplier engagement and request completion rates. This capability helps Vendr understand user journeys in a more granular way, allowing their teams to make smarter, data-driven decisions.
This capability is supported by Attribution’s user identification method, which assigns unique IDs to site visitors so even anonymous users can be tracked. That means Vendr can track each visitor’s journey with the brand and connect it back to their marketing efforts — even if that user never creates an account. During onboarding, the Attribution team identified a previously unknown data issue: Mutiny was overwriting URL parameters, resulting in false data for GA4 and other marketing analytics platforms.
This additional data also led the Vendr team to a major “aha” moment. While using Attribution to analyze organic channel performance, they discovered unexpected traffic sources. For example, when Vendr invested in their SEO strategy this year, Attribution helped them discover high traffic coming from AI tools like ChatGPT and Claude.
This visibility allows Vendr to isolate segments and analyze specific actions, giving them an understanding of how these AI sources drive specific user actions. By combining this referral data with actionable insights, Vendr can determine which sources contribute to the most valuable user actions and adjust their content strategy accordingly. In the case of referral traffic from AI tools, Vendr is now considering how to optimize content for AI, and not just Google Search.
“Attribution was really proactive and supportive. They were very willing to go the extra mile to help us customize our dashboard. The support from the Attribution team is incredible.”
Perin Adams
GTM Business Systems Manager @Vendr
Results
Saving up to 3 days per month and uncovering new growth opportunities
Since implementing Attribution, Vendr eliminated days of manual data analysis and gained unprecedented visibility into complex marketplace dynamics. By centralizing their disjointed data sources into one platform, they transformed scattered insights into actionable analytics.
With Attribution, Vendr has achieved:
2-3 days saved monthly in manual data analysis
[Repeat metrics from intro when we get them]
Looking ahead to 2025, Vendr plans to expand Attribution usage to more teams, expanding their access to self-serve analytics so they can uncover valuable insights independently.
“Attribution merges our data, so I don’t have to do a bunch of work in Snowflake or spend the resources to build out a custom attribution model.”
