Marketers have more data than ever, but a new report from Bitly suggests they’re still struggling to answer a fundamental question: What really works?
According to Bitly “Marketing Visibility Report,” the average marketing team now uses six different tools to measure performance. But only 18% of marketers say they have a clear view of what’s really working.
Part of the problem is that marketing now happens everywhere.
The report, which surveyed more than 250 marketing professionals, found that 72% of marketers use organic social media, making it the most common channel in the marketing mix. Dedicated campaign landing pages, email campaigns, and paid communications also rank among the most used channels.
That creates a visibility challenge because each channel tells a different story. Social media generates communication metrics almost instantly. Landing pages show conversions but often reveal little about what drove visitors there. Email connects brands to a known audience but often works differently than other marketing systems.
The result is that marketers are trying to piece together a complete picture from a collection of disconnected signals.
More tools don’t solve that problem. The report found that the most widely used measurement platforms focus on individual channels, including social analytics, web analytics, email platforms, and CRM systems. Tools are specifically designed to connect performance across channels and combine work with results that are often highly unusual.
That divide is most evident in the channels that marketers rely on the most.
When asked where they see the biggest visibility gaps, marketers ranked organic social media first, followed by dedicated campaign landing pages, paid social, search and email campaigns.
The organic social effect is very noticeable. It’s the channel used by nearly three-quarters of advertisers, but it’s also the channel where visibility issues are most pressing. The report says marketers can easily see activity on social media but often struggle to connect it to meaningful business results.
Landing pages present a similar challenge. They stay close to conversions and often serve as a source of truth in campaign performance, but rarely explain what influenced visitors before they arrived. Without that context, marketers know what happened but not why.
The report suggests that the problem may get worse before it gets better. AI-generated responses, zero-click behavior, private sharing, and dark funnel activity create more interactions that marketers can easily track. At the same time, AI accelerates campaign creation and optimization, increasing the volume of work that teams must understand.
In other words, marketers don’t suffer from a lack of data. They suffer from a lack of communication between the data they already have. The challenge no longer collects tokens. It turns a growing number of disconnected metrics into a clear view of what drives business results.
The full report can be found here. (No registration required)
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