Modern marketing teams swim in oceans of data and numbers, from social media analytics to advertising platform metrics, customer journey tracking to conversion monitoring. And yet, a startling new report reveals most marketers, even today, still have no clear idea what’s actually working and what isn’t.
Research from marketing intelligence platform Funnel and insights firm Ravn Research, based on surveys of 238 marketing professionals, strikes at the heart of this issue. 86% of in-house marketers and 79% of agency marketers struggle to determine the impact of each marketing channel on overall performance, whilst, perhaps even more concerning, 72% of in-house marketers report actually having mountains of data which they can't turn into actionable insights.
In the words of Alanis Morissette; isn’t it ironic, don’t you think? Years of technological advances and adoption - in which we have seen marketers overrely on cookies and last-click attribution, for example, to discern the impact of their campaigns - and still seeing the forest from the trees is proving rather difficult.
Modern marketing’s complexity may just be to blame. Customer journeys, far from being simple, now travel through dozens and dozens of potential touchpoints across multiple devices and platforms. A single conversion - supposedly simple - may involve the customer seeing a social media ad, clicking on a search result days later, and then visiting the website multiple times, and finally making the purchase after receiving an email. Tracking and understanding these byzantine, fragmented paths is difficult for most teams.
Clicks, impressions, and followers are all examples of the misplaced vanity metrics that are now out of date. Yes, numbers like these are easy to track and report, but do they tell you anything about business impact? Not really. Funnel’s report found that 76% of respondents claim they connect their efforts to business goals, but are hamstrung by their ability to communicate this very effectively to finance departments (13%).
Thijs Bongertman, chief data officer at agency SPAIK, notes in the report that “a lot of companies have a reporting culture instead of an actionable insight culture. And what's often missing is business acumen, understanding the nitty-gritty about what actually drives the business.”
A potential salve to these problems of tracking and miscommunication could well be AI tools, the much-championed technology of our age that promises to cut through complexity and surface-level insights automatically. The reality of implementing AI is more muddled than one might think.
ChatGPT, Perplexity and Gemini have all come to the fore, often transplanting users’ traditional methods of search: about two-thirds of marketers (64%) foresee customers using traditional search engines less frequently in the next few years, their heads turning towards AI. Shifting from traditional search engine optimization (SEO) to “generative engine optimization” (GEO) is symptomatic of this change in people’s habits for finding information online.
Knowing this, only around half of in-house marketers (52%) are creating content optimized for these AI platforms and - potentially worse - just 44% are training their teams on AI-driven search and visibility practices. An even smaller 30% are automating content optimization tasks, low-lift work that should be freeing marketers up for strategic input.
The double-edged sword that is AI shows the rock-and-hard-place marketers are faced with, requiring them to navigate both time-saving and creative output (which must avoid being classed as “AI slop”). While 54% of survey participants say AI enhances creativity on their teams, 39% of agency marketers and 23% of brand marketers find that AI tools generate repetitive, generic campaigns.
A key standard for marketing teams must therefore be the ability to adapt and experiment with new techniques for producing creativity and measuring the efficacy of campaigns (something which many survey respondents found to be lacking). 56% of in-house marketers and 43% of agency staff aren't consistently empowered to try their hand at new marketing approaches. Raising concerns and challenging existing strategies is a further quandary, whereby 41% of in-house teams aren’t fully comfortable, and Gen Z-ers are four times less likely to make a fuss and pivot from existing methods than their oldest colleagues.
This allows consequences to play out in cautious, risk-averse behaviors which get marketers stuck in a rut. 64% of in-house and 53% of agency respondents haven't launched a campaign in over three months that meaningfully deviates from their usual practices. Amidst bewildering technological change, playing it safe has somehow seeped into teams and become a dominant strategy. “People are afraid to change old habits for fear it will be unsuccessful,” one marketer highlights, “[as it] would put a target on their back.”
Tom Roach, VP of Brand Strategy at Jellyfish, argues that this represents a major misunderstanding of risk. “Playing it safe is actually the riskiest long-term strategy, as it leads to stagnation. Brands can make bolder moves by adopting a test-and-learn mindset and ring-fencing a small innovation budget.”
Underwriting all of this is a gaping hole in analytical capabilities where only 8% of in-house and 21% of agency teams consistently use advanced analytics methods like marketing mix modeling (MMM), attribution modeling, and incrementality testing to understand effectiveness. Why is this critical? Because robust measurement determines marketers' understanding of the impact of their actions, whether implementing strategies new or old.
Among those that do use advanced analytics consistently, a high proportion (76%) feel empowered to experiment with new marketing approaches, a figure that sinks to 36% among those with limited or no advanced analytics capabilities.
Most marketers, in fact, lack some of the basic skills in these areas. 27% rate themselves as “advanced” in attribution modeling, just 18% advanced in incrementality testing, and a meager 15% consider themselves advanced in MMM.
Tom Roach points out: “Data analysts are very good at reporting on what happened. But to interrogate why something happened requires additional skills, including a broader understanding of how communications work, how campaigns are supposed to work, how brand growth works, and the myriad ways things can go wrong. That’s less about data analysis and more about detective work.”
In charting a path forward, marketers are now compelled to address multiple challenges at the same time. Leadership teams need to put money behind a clean, unified data infrastructure at a foundational level. These same leaders must instate structured opportunities to allow their teams to gain analytical skills; specifically, 70% of marketers want to improve their MMM capabilities. Experiment with new strategies and technologies - within reason - must be rewarded, not punished.
Simply documenting what happened with your data is no longer enough: marketers need to understand why it happened and what to do differently next time. The tools and technology exist to solve these problems, but what's missing is businesses’ commitment to using them properly.
Until that changes, marketers will continue swimming in data while thirsting for insight, surrounded by powerful tools they’re unable to fully leverage, playing it safe in a marketing environment that demands boldness, not blandness.
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