A marketing automation strategy, read from 42 homepages: one platform each, and ten companies loading two tools to ask who the visitor is
Stack audits go looking for a second automation platform. I loaded 42 homepages and did not find one. The duplication sits a layer earlier, in the tools that try to name the company behind an anonymous visit.
- Of 42 B2B SaaS homepages, 33 load an automation platform before any consent click: Marketo on 26, HubSpot on 7. None load two.
- 27 of 42 load at least one tool that tries to name the visitor's company, and 10 load two or three of them. Gong loads 6sense, Clearbit and Demandbase.
- The median homepage loads 3 tools from our list. Gong loads 7. Five load none: Notion, Figma, Pipedrive, Sentry and Vercel.
- Of 26 companies also in our SPF sample, 11 authorise a marketing mail platform their homepage does not load. Box loads Marketo and authorises HubSpot and Eloqua to send.
- 25 of 42 run a consent tool such as OneTrust, and from our connection every tool counted here loaded without a click.
Every marketing automation strategy review I have sat through opens the same way: somebody finds a second automation platform left over from an acquisition, and the meeting becomes a migration plan. I assumed that was the usual state of a B2B SaaS stack.
So I loaded 45 homepages in a headless Chrome on 24 September and recorded every network request for eight seconds, one scroll, no click on the cookie banner. Three returned an error page to the headless browser (Freshworks, Smartsheet, ZoomInfo). For the other 42 I matched request hosts to tools: munchkin.marketo.net means Marketo, b.6sc.co means 6sense, ws.zoominfo.com means ZoomInfo, and so on.
Not one of the 42 loaded two automation platforms.
33 loaded one. Marketo on 26, HubSpot on 7. Nothing else from the platform list appeared at all: no Pardot, no Eloqua, no Customer.io.
The duplication was somewhere else.
27 of 42 homepages load at least one tool whose job is to name the company behind an anonymous visit: 6sense, Demandbase, ZoomInfo or Clearbit. Ten load two or more. Twilio, Box, Dropbox, Outreach and Confluent each load 6sense and ZoomInfo together. Rippling loads Clearbit, Demandbase and ZoomInfo. Gong loads 6sense, Clearbit and Demandbase, next to Marketo, Marketo Measure, Qualified and Chili Piper. Seven tools on one page, the most in the sample.
The median homepage loads three.
Where a marketing automation strategy actually doubles up
A second platform is expensive and visible, so somebody eventually kills it. A second identification tool is a tag. It gets added for a pilot, it writes an industry and an employee count into the CRM, and nobody decides which of the two versions is true.
The other split runs between the website and the mail. 26 of these companies were also in our SPF read of 52 domains. At 11 of them the SPF record authorises a marketing platform that the homepage does not load. Box loads Marketo and authorises HubSpot and Eloqua. Atlassian and Loom load Marketo and authorise Salesforce Marketing Cloud. The form captures the lead in one system; the newsletter leaves from another.
What to check on your own site
Open your homepage in a private window with the Network tab open. Leave the cookie banner alone. Filter for these hosts: marketo, hs-scripts, hsforms, 6sc.co, company-target, zoominfo, clearbit, segment, qualified, intercom, chilipiper.
Write every tool you find on its own line, and next to it the one question it answers. Who is this company. What did this person do. Should a human talk to them now. Who sends the mail. Two tools on one question is where your data starts disagreeing with itself.
For each doubled question, name the tool that owns the CRM field and set the other to read only. The CRM automation guide has the rule: one system owns each field, the others lose write access.
Then check what feeds your score. A company name from a reverse IP lookup is a guess about a network, not something the person did, and the lead scoring guide builds scores from behaviour for that reason.
Finally click accept on the banner and compare the second list with the first. Adobe’s documentation says Munchkin tracks anonymous visitors with their IP addresses. Under Article 5(3) of the EU ePrivacy Directive that needs consent unless it is strictly necessary for something the visitor asked for.
What the requests could not tell me
A loaded script is not a contract. I cannot tell a pilot from a renewal, or whether a second identification tool feeds anything at all. My connection was geolocated to Ukraine, and 25 of the 42 sites run a consent tool such as OneTrust or TrustArc, which may hold more back from a visitor in Berlin. Five homepages loaded nothing from my list. Either they hold everything until consent, or they route data through their own domains, where a host name tells me nothing.
Sentry is the one I cannot explain. Its homepage loaded none of the tools. Its HTML carries a Marketo address, app-ab48.marketo.com, that never fired in eight seconds and one scroll. It may be waiting for a click on a form I did not open, or for nothing at all.
Questions people ask about this
What should a marketing automation strategy cover besides the platform?
Each question the stack answers: who is this visitor, what did they do, should we talk now, and who sends the mail. On the 42 homepages we loaded, the platform was the one layer nobody duplicated, while the company identification layer was doubled on 10.
Is it a problem to run 6sense and ZoomInfo together?
Not by itself. It becomes one when both write a company name or an intent score into the same CRM field, because then the record changes depending on which one synced last. Decide which tool owns the field and make the other read only.
Does Marketo track anonymous visitors?
Yes. Adobe's documentation says the Munchkin code tracks all visitors, anonymous ones included, along with their IP addresses. For sites with hundreds of thousands of visits a month, Adobe recommends switching anonymous tracking off.
Do these scripts need cookie consent?
In the EU, Article 5(3) of the ePrivacy Directive requires consent before storing or reading information on a visitor's device, unless it is strictly necessary for a service the visitor asked for. Tracking and identification scripts are not in that exemption, which is why 25 of the 42 sites run a consent tool.
How do I see which tools my own site loads?
Open the homepage in a private window, open the Network tab of the browser's developer tools, leave the cookie banner alone and filter by the hosts listed in this piece. Then click accept and compare the two lists.
- Adobe Marketo Engage, Add Munchkin tracking code to your website. Checked 2026-09-25.
- HubSpot Knowledge Base, Install the HubSpot tracking code. Checked 2026-09-25.
- Twilio Segment, Analytics.js source documentation. Checked 2026-09-25.
- Directive 2002/58/EC (ePrivacy), consolidated text as amended in 2009, Article 5(3). Checked 2026-09-25.
- UK Information Commissioner's Office, Cookies and similar technologies. Checked 2026-09-25.
- Playwright documentation, Network events. Checked 2026-09-25.
Run the same check on your own domain. It reads live DNS, the same records Gmail reads, and tells you which of the three is missing.
Check your domain free → Open the glossary