The critical Performance Marketing gap to address in 2025

The rules of performance marketing have fundamentally changed. Yesterday's playbook of “growth at all costs” has been replaced by a new mandate: delivering profitable, sustainable results. Marketing teams are now under greater pressure to prove the impact of their efforts, often within tight budgets and shorter timelines. 

This shift comes at a time of unprecedented change in digital marketing. Each week brings a flood of new opportunities: emerging channels, latest campaign formats, and AI tools that promise to transform how we work. The pace of innovation shows no signs of slowing.

Marketing teams have responded to these challenges. They've brought performance marketing in-house, invested in sophisticated tools, and automated manual tasks. Recently, many teams started using Gen AI to scale creative production. By all measures, marketing teams are executing more campaigns and running more tests than ever before.

Yet despite these advances, a fundamental challenge persists: accessing the insights needed to make confident decisions in time. Without timely, actionable data, even the most sophisticated marketing operation can't reach its full potential.

The budget leak challenge

Most marketing organizations face the same challenge. Gaining actionable insights is essential for effective decision-making. Yet, it is often:

1) Delayed by dependence on data teams overwhelmed with requests, or

2) Incomplete when marketers build analyses themselves using Excel or platform dashboards.

This gap between data and decisions is what we call the budget leak. It's a series of missed opportunities and delayed optimizations that compounds over time (read more in the testing tax article). 

Consider these real scenarios we've observed:

• Scaling an AI-powered campaign, only to realize weeks later that the extra growth hurts your margins.

• Bidding highly for keywords your SEO team already worked hard to rank for.

• Realizing too late that creative fatigue set in and new creatives were needed.

• Targeting the wrong audience segment for a campaign, wasting ad spend on low-converting users.

• Running promotions on products with limited inventory, leading to missed sales opportunities and frustrated customers.

The cost of these insights gaps isn't just wasted budget – it's the opportunity cost of optimizations not made and learnings not applied. While marketing teams have never been more capable of executing campaigns at a large scale, their ability to learn from these campaigns hasn't kept pace.

Most marketers can share similar examples if you ask them. With that in mind, let’s explore how the best teams address these challenges.

A new approach to marketing agility

The best marketing teams are 100% focused on campaign optimization, strategic projects, and new tests. They are free to explore every hypothesis and don’t waste time updating manual reports. To achieve this, they have built systems and processes that help them:

• Access insights independently and quickly (data democratization)

• Answer follow-up questions and ideas in real time

• Iterate on tests and strategies without unnecessary delays

• Uncover deep optimization opportunities in and across their existing channels

We see this transformation across our customers - Uber, On, HelloFresh, Delivery Hero, On, etc. Despite operating in different markets, they share one crucial trait: the ability to move faster and learn quicker than their competitors. Read more into what sets the best teams apart.

This is precisely why we built Clarisights. It’s not another BI tool you have to maintain. Instead, we're providing marketing teams with a new way of working to go from questions to insights in minutes.

Moving forward

Marketing teams deserve better ways to work. The goal isn’t just to do more but to do it more effectively and efficiently. With better tools and processes, teams can focus on what matters: learning from their campaigns and driving meaningful results.

Let’s work towards a future where insights are easier to access, budgets are used more effectively, and strategies are informed by real-time understanding of what works.

Note to data teams: while this article addresses the marketing side of the issue, the impact on data teams is equally significant. For them, this usually manifests in working on too many ad-hoc requests, leaving little to no time for strategic projects like MMM or incrementality tests. 

For further reading, explore our related guide on keeping the peace between marketing and data teams.