Overview
Most marketers aren’t working without clear visibility by choice. They’re navigating an environment where the volume of data keeps increasing, but clarity doesn’t follow at the same pace.
Over the past few years, the marketing landscape has expanded in every direction. New channels, new formats, new tools, and now AI-driven workflows that make it possible to launch and iterate faster than ever. What once felt manageable now stretches across dozens of touchpoints, each with its own metrics, dashboards, and definitions of success.
Even as marketing has become more complex, the core responsibilities haven’t changed. Marketers are still expected to understand their audience, measure impact, and make informed decisions about where to invest next. But doing that now requires piecing together signals from platforms and systems that were never designed to work together.
That’s where things start to break down.
The visibility gap isn’t just about missing data. It shows up in the day-to-day reality of how marketing teams operate. Insights arrive too late to act on. Signals conflict with one another. And over time, even well-instrumented teams start relying more heavily on instinct to fill in the blanks.
56% of marketers often or always rely on gut instincts or past experiences to make marketing decisions. 73% of marketers say they regularly realize a campaign is underperforming only after it’s too late. 26% of marketers actually base their investments on current performance, leaving budgets misaligned with what works.
These patterns aren’t signs of inexperience or poor strategy. They reflect a system that makes it difficult to see clearly, even when the data is technically there. The gap, however, is not fixed.
When teams are able to connect performance across channels and understand how individual interactions contribute to outcomes, the picture starts to come together. What felt fragmented begins to show patterns. Decisions become more timely and better informed. Marketing shifts from reactive to intentional.
Based on a survey of more than 250 marketing professionals, this report explores where visibility breaks down today, how it shapes performance, and what changes when teams begin to close that gap.
Ask any marketer what they do, and you’ll rarely get a simple answer. Most are managing a wide range of responsibilities at the same time. From planning campaigns, creating content, and running paid programs, to analyzing performance and distributing across channels, they’re doing it all, and often all at once.
That breadth adds up quickly. At least seven core marketing responsibilities are owned or executed by a third or more of marketers. Each one comes with its own goals, tools, and definition of success. As more of those responsibilities sit with a single team, maintaining a consistent view of how everything is working together becomes increasingly difficult.
Which of the following marketing responsibilities do you regularly own or execute in your role?
- Creating marketing content
53% - Managing social media programs
48% - Planning or managing campaigns
44% - Analyzing marketing data
37% - Managing paid media campaigns
35% - Distributing or promoting content
34% - Tracking campaign performance
32%
The complexity goes beyond the number of tasks. Each channel, tool, and workflow produces its own set of signals, and those signals don’t always align in a way that makes decision-making straightforward.
When teams are spread across that many moving parts, measurement starts to follow a different logic. Focus tends to shift toward what is easiest to track and quickest to access. Engagement and audience growth rise to the top of the priority list, largely because the data is immediate and visible.
Outcomes like pipeline, revenue, and long-term retention operate on a different timeline. They take longer to surface and require connecting multiple signals across systems. As a result, they are often harder to prioritize in day-to-day decisions, even though they carry more weight for the business.
Which outcomes are most important for your marketing team today?
#1
Engagement and audience growth
#2
Customer retention and loyalty
#3
Revenue impact
#4
Brand awareness
#5
Lead generation
#6
Conversions or sign-ups
#7
Pipeline creation
This distribution of priorities reflects more than preference. It points to how accessible different types of measurement actually are. Engagement and audience growth tend to be easier to observe in real time, while deeper business outcomes require more coordination across systems, teams, and data sources.
That difference shapes how marketers approach measurement. Some metrics feel immediate and dependable, while others require more effort to connect back to specific activities. Over time, that gap influences where attention goes and how success is evaluated.
- Easy
- Neutral
- Difficult
Engagement
63%
19%
16%
Conversions or sign-ups
62%
20%
16%
Leads or inquiries
60%
24%
14%
Customer retention or repeat activity
60%
19%
18%
Revenue or sales impact
55%
24%
16%
Pipeline or opportunities
46%
34%
16%
** Not sure responses excluded*
Engagement, conversions, and lead generation are widely seen as straightforward to track. As measurement moves closer to revenue, that sense of clarity begins to drop. Pipeline stands out as the point where confidence is lowest, even though it represents one of the most important indicators of future growth.
Marketers today are expected to know what’s working, but when campaigns span a growing mix of channels, tools, and touchpoints, getting a clear and confident answer is harder than it sounds. And now that AI has made it possible to launch, test, and iterate faster than ever, campaigns that once took weeks can now be created in hours. The volume of activity has increased, but the ability to clearly understand what’s driving results has struggled to keep pace.
With zero-click behavior emerging, private sharing, AI-generated answers, and “dark funnel” interactions, AI is both helping marketers move faster while also making it harder to connect audience engagement back to outcomes. As visibility continues to be a challenge, the interactions marketers can measure become even more valuable for understanding performance and making confident decisions.
Which channels are part of your current marketing mix?
72%
Organic social media
54%
Dedicated campaign landing pages
47%
Email or lifecycle campaigns
44%
Paid social
37%
Events or field marketing
33%
Blog posts or guides
31%
Partner or influencer marketing
31%
Search or paid search
28%
SMS or text messaging
25%
Display or programmatic ads
A handful of channels carry most of that weight. Organic social, for example, is used by 72% of marketers, making it one of the most relied-on parts of the mix. Email, landing pages, and paid social also sit at the center of how campaigns are built and scaled.
The challenge is that these channels don’t tell the same story. Social platforms surface engagement almost instantly, but those signals rarely show how attention turns into action. Landing pages capture conversion activity, but offer limited visibility into what brought someone there in the first place. Email connects directly to known audiences, but often operates in isolation from everything happening around it.
The channels doing the most work are not always the ones providing the clearest view of performance. And as more channels are added, that disconnect becomes harder to ignore.
To keep up, marketers have added more tools over time. The result is a growing stack, with the average team now relying on six different platforms to measure performance. Each of these tools focuses on a specific part of the journey. Social platforms track engagement, analytics tools capture on-site behavior, CRM systems follow customer relationships, and automation platforms manage campaign execution. Taken together, they should provide a complete view of performance. In practice, that view is often fragmented.
On average, marketers use six different tools or platforms to analyze performance, with more than a third using seven or more tools.
The most common types of marketing tools and platforms used to measure and analyze performance include:
- Social media management or analytics
51% - Web or digital analytics
47% - Email marketing platforms
44% - Customer relationship management (CRM) platforms
41% - Marketing automation platforms
40% - Paid media / advertising platforms
34% - Business intelligence or reporting tools
28% - Customer data platforms (CDP)
23% - Attribution or marketing measurement tools
19%
What stands out is how measurement is distributed. The most widely used tools are focused on individual channels or specific stages of the funnel. Social, web analytics, email, and CRM all sit near the top of the list.
Tools designed to connect performance across those touchpoints are far less common. Attribution and measurement platforms, which are built to link activity to outcomes, are used by a much smaller share of marketers.
The result is a fragmented view of performance. Teams can see what is happening within each channel, but struggle to understand how those channels work together to drive results.
Work across tools without losing visibility
Bitly’s integrations with tools like ChatGPT, Claude, and Copilot bring link creation, tracking, and analytics directly into the workflows marketers already use. Every campaign asset is tracked from the moment it’s created, without the context-switching that fragments your data in the first place.