According to the 2025  Unified Marketing Analytics Report by Clarisights 45% of marketers still use spreadsheets regularly, and 28% rely on them constantly.

You launch a new product campaign. Channels are live. Spend is rolling in. And what do you get when you ask for performance data?

A spreadsheet.

A 13-tab Excel sheet with filters you don’t understand, naming conventions that differ across platforms, and timeframes that never align. It’s version 3.2B, but you’re not even sure if the numbers were pulled this week. The dashboards built to automate this process haven’t been touched in weeks.

Welcome to modern marketing analytics.

Why spreadsheets still Rule the Analytics Stack

Spreadsheets are not modern tools. They were never designed to handle multi-channel performance data, dynamic cohort breakdowns, or creative-level reporting. But they persist. Why?

Because the alternatives haven't been delivered.

The promise of business intelligence platforms was to replace manual workflows. But in reality:

• Dashboards often lack flexibility and campaign-level depth

• Configuring a report requires engineering help

• Definitions vary across teams and tools

• Stakeholders don’t trust the metrics
  
  

The result: Spreadsheets become the default, not by design but by necessity.

And so, marketers stay stuck in the cycle: export, paste, clean, merge, format, question, resend.

Data Teams: trapped in the cycle of reactive marketing reporting maintenance

The Real Cost of Spreadsheet-First Workflows

Every product marketer has lived it: spending hours consolidating data when you should be working on positioning, launches, or performance insights.

From the report:

"Marketers often don’t even look at dashboards anymore. They go straight to spreadsheets."

Here’s the fallout:

• Hours Lost: 6–12 hours per week per analyst on manual reports

• Decisions Delayed: Optimizations stalled due to late or inconsistent data

• Broken Trust: Conflicting spreadsheet versions kill confidence

• Limited Depth: No filtering, trend comparisons, or deep creative insights
  
  

It’s not just inefficient, it's unsustainable.

Before Clarisights, reporting looks like this:

1. Pull data from Meta, Google, TikTok, etc.

2. Paste into Sheets

3. Fix formulas, format tables, explain anomalies

4. Export to PDF, Slack it to the team

5. Prepare for 10 follow-up questions

This isn't agile. It's exhausting.

After Clarisights: A Real Reporting Layer for Marketing

Clarisights eliminates the dependency on spreadsheets entirely. Built for marketing teams not analysts it lets product marketers access real-time dashboards tailored to their role.

After adopting Clarisights:

• Data flows automatically from every channel

• Dashboards are purpose-built for performance marketers, product marketers, and CMOs

• Slack and Sheets integrations make sharing painless

• Definitions are standardized, and metrics are trusted

• Time-to-insight drops from hours to seconds
  
  
  

Breaking the Habit: It’s Not Just About Tools

Spreadsheet addiction is a result of systemic failure. A failure of alignment. A failure of infrastructure. A failure of trust.

Fixing it means:

• Giving marketers tools they actually control

• Empowering teams to self-serve without engineers

• Enforcing consistency in how performance is measured

Clarisights enables this by unifying reporting around the people who need it most not the people who used to own it.

The Bottom Line

According to the report:

• 72% say turning data into decisions is still a major challenge

• 79% cite lack of stakeholder trust as the #1 barrier in measurement

• Only 3% say their measurement stack actually exceeds expectations
  
  
  

  

  
  

This isn't just about spreadsheets. It's about what they represent: a system that hasn't evolved to meet the needs of modern marketing.

Clarisights is the system upgrade.

To see how teams are replacing fragile reporting workflows with clarity, speed, and confidence get the full Unified Marketing Analytics Report by Clarisights here.