Marketers have more data than ever, but a brand new report from Bitly suggests they still struggle to reply a basic query: What’s actually working?
According to Bitly’s “The Marketing Visibility Report,” the typical marketing team now uses six different tools to measure performance. Yet only 18% of marketers say they’ve a transparent view of what’s actually working.
Part of the issue is that marketing now happens in all places.
The report, which surveyed greater than 250 marketing professionals, found that 72% of marketers use organic social media, making it essentially the most common channel within the marketing mix. Dedicated campaign landing pages, email campaigns, and paid social also rank amongst essentially the most heavily used channels.
That creates a visibility challenge because every channel tells a distinct story. Social platforms generate engagement metrics almost immediately. Landing pages show conversions but often reveal little about what drove visitors there. Email connects brands to known audiences but continuously operates individually from other marketing systems.
The result is that marketers try to assemble an entire picture from a group of disconnected signals.
More tools haven’t solved that problem. The report found that essentially the most commonly used measurement platforms give attention to individual channels, including social analytics, web analytics, email platforms, and CRM systems. Tools built specifically to attach performance across channels and tie activity to outcomes remain far less common.
That fragmentation shows up most clearly within the channels marketers depend on essentially the most.
When asked where they experience the largest visibility gaps, marketers ranked organic social media first, followed by dedicated campaign landing pages, paid social, search, and email campaigns.
The organic social result is particularly notable. It’s the channel utilized by nearly three-quarters of marketers, yet it is also the channel where visibility problems are most severe. The report argues that marketers can easily see activity on social platforms but often struggle to attach it to meaningful business outcomes.
Landing pages present the same challenge. They sit near conversion and infrequently function a source of truth for campaign performance, but they rarely explain what influenced visitors before they arrived. Without that context, marketers know what happened but not necessarily why.
The report suggests the issue may worsen before it gets higher. AI-generated answers, zero-click behavior, private sharing, and dark-funnel activity are creating much more interactions that marketers cannot easily track. At the identical time, AI is accelerating campaign creation and optimization, increasing the quantity of activity that teams need to grasp.
In other words, marketers aren’t affected by a scarcity of knowledge. They are affected by a scarcity of connection between the information they have already got. The challenge is not collecting signals. It’s turning a growing pile of disconnected metrics into a transparent view of what drives business results.
The full report could be found here. (No registration required)
The search engine optimisation toolkit you already know, plus the AI visibility data you would like.
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