This study surveyed 103 senior marketers across North America to understand the state of marketing analytics and decision-making. The findings reveal a pattern that cuts across industries and company sizes: most marketing organizations have reached a level of analytics capability that is functional but not yet strategic. KPIs are consistent but primarily used for reporting; only 30% of marketers trust them enough to drive strategy. Data is consulted in decision-making, but only 29% can trace decisions back to a data-supported rationale. Analytics capabilities are growing in sophistication, but just 22% describe them as robust. Across governance, data trust, attribution, and data unification, roughly half the sample sits in a “partial” or “moderate” tier, enough to operate, not enough to lead.
Within this landscape, a segment of Advanced Marketers (29% of the sample) stands apart, not because they use different tools, but because they’ve built fundamentally different organizational infrastructure. They are twice as likely to trust their data at face value (70% vs. 36%), nearly twice as likely to use KPIs for strategic decision-making (57% vs. 30%), and significantly more likely to have established cross-functional CLV ownership between marketing and finance (53% vs. 35%). Their advantages compound: better governance leads to higher data trust, which enables more strategic use of measurement, which drives better decisions. These organizations didn’t leapfrog the rest with technology. They invested in the less visible, harder-to-build structures, dedicated analytics resources, formal data governance, and collaborative ownership models that make technology productive.
The study also surfaces differences between B2B and B2C organizations. B2B marketers are more likely to measure ROI at the customer level (53% vs. 32%), center their success metrics on lead generation (50% vs. 32%) and lean harder on third-party enrichment (60% vs. 45%). B2C has built stronger cross-functional collaboration on CLV (41% vs. 20%), the one dimension where B2C clearly leads. Neither side has a definitive advantage; they carry different strengths and different blind spots.
The implication for marketing leaders is that the next wave of analytics maturity will not come from better tools or more data. It will come from organizational decisions, where to place dedicated resources, how to govern data, who co-owns the metrics that matter. The distance between the advanced and the rest is not a just technology gap. It is a leadership gap.
