The State of Performance Marketing

The study uncovers a fundamental tension: while 80% of marketers aim for a balanced approach across brand, performance, and customer experience, short-term pressures continue to drive reactive budget shifts toward performance spending. This creates operational strain as marketers now deploy an average of four audience targeting approaches and manage martech stacks spanning eight different tools for a single campaign.

Measurement remains a critical challenge, with marketers struggling to bridge the gap between real-time engagement data and the rigor of long-term planning tools. Only 50% feel prepared with first and zero-party data capabilities, while martech integration challenges affect over 70% of respondents. Just 25% express strong satisfaction with talent and training investments, even as AI adoption grows in content versioning and targeting.

Looking ahead, the research points to four principles for transforming performance marketing from tactical execution to strategic orchestration: integrating performance practices across disciplines, building measurement capabilities that match execution speed, embracing creative agility as a core performance lever, and developing the talent and trust needed to unlock martech and AI potential.