THE STATE OF PERFORMANCE MARKETING
It’s time to reframe for strategic growth.
The next era of performance will not be defined by speed alone but by strategic orchestration, creative scalability, and measurable contribution to business outcomes.
“In this report, we uncover why performance marketing is the critical link between strategy and business outcomes.”
Marissa Dacay
Global VP, Enterprise Marketing, Adobe
Key Learnings
Looking ahead, marketers are prioritizing investment in measurement, attribution, and content automation to meet rising demands for accountability, personalization, and speed. To make the most of these investments, senior marketing leaders must champion a shift from tactical execution to strategic orchestration. This shift will rely on four principles:
Strategic cross-disciplinary integration will revolutionize performance marketing's potential.
Performance marketing must evolve from a budget-heavy, short-term practice into a strategy-led discipline that drives long-term growth. It must align with brand and customer experience — not compete with them. Intentional integration will close the gap between aspiration and execution.
Measurement capabilities must keep pace with execution.
The ability to move fast means little without meaningful ways to measure impact. Marketers need frameworks that bridge the speed of real-time signals with the rigor of long-term planning tools like media mix modeling (MMM).
Creative agility and content velocity have to be embraced as core performance levers.
As real-time signals and personalized content experiences take hold, marketers must build tighter loops between insight and creative execution while investing in quality content development that scales.
Unlocking the full potential of martech and AI requires talent and trust.
Automation alone isn’t enough. Success depends on building internal capabilities, addressing talent gaps, and establishing governance that ensures AI and martech are used confidently, effectively, and responsibly.
Executive Summary
For the inaugural The State of Performance Marketing report, MMA Global surveyed more than 380 senior marketers across North America, EMEA, and JAPAC. The findings bring into sharp focus a longstanding duality at the heart of modern marketing: the need to balance short-term spending with long-term growth outcomes. Performance marketing was once defined by speed and automation. Now, it’s a precision-driven growth strategy that ties marketing investment directly to measurable business outcomes.
This paradox reveals a deeper tension in how marketing is managed today. Eight in ten marketers claim to aim for a balanced marketing approach across brand, performance, and customer experience rather than being driven solely by performance. Yet in practice, performance spending continues to grow, as short-term pressures from the C-suite and quarterly reviews lead to reactive budget shifts.
Marketers report low confidence in their ability to evolve their performance.
While performance marketing is becoming more sophisticated — driven by data-led targeting, agile activation, and a focus on measurable outcomes — it’s also becoming far more complex. Marketers now deploy an average of four audience-targeting approaches and manage martech stacks consisting of eight different tools to launch and measure a single campaign, adding operational strain to already stretched teams.
Measurement remains one of performance marketing’s most significant hurdles, as marketers struggle to reconcile the slow pace and rigor of tools like marketing mix modeling (MMM) with the immediacy of real-time engagement data. The latter, while highly accessible, may not be robust enough to support budget allocation decisions. In addition to these broad challenges in measuring performance marketing, companies face their own unique hurdles that vary by marketing approach: brand-led organizations struggle with ROI visibility, performance-led teams cite speed and resource constraints, and customer experience- (CX) led companies grapple with activating insights effectively.
Multiple other capability gaps limit marketers’ capacity to solidify their real-time insights and attribution to create personalized content. Specifically, marketers report low confidence in their ability to evolve their performance in terms of data, talent, and martech. Only half of marketers feel prepared when it comes to first- and zero-party data, while martech integration is seen as an important challenge for over 70% of survey respondents. Adding to this, only 25% express strong satisfaction with talent and training investments. While AI adoption is growing — particularly in content versioning, targeting, and planning — concerns about quality and control continue to hold many back from fully participating with the technology fully.
SECTION 1
The Performance Paradox
Budget Dominance without Strategic Direction
Performance Marketing’s Rising Influence
As marketing budgets evolve to reflect an era of heightened accountability and digital acceleration, performance marketing now commands more than half of the total spend among global senior marketers’ budgets. Its promise of measurable returns and precision targeting has made it the go-to lever for growth under pressure, leading to further budget increases. 23% of marketers increased their allocation towards performance in the last 12 months, 70% remained stable, and only 7% reported a decrease.
57% of marketing budget goes to performance marketing.
This paradox is not trivial. It reveals a structural imbalance in how marketing is planned, resourced, and executed. Performance marketing is being treated as a financial lever rather than a strategic pillar — deployed aggressively but integrated poorly into business strategy.
The Strategic Shortfall
Why does this disconnect exist? The research points to two key forces at play.
Strategic aspiration versus operational execution.
An overwhelming 80% of marketers intend to balance their strategic planning between long-term brand equity and short-term performance. However, organizational processes incentivize optimizing for immediate impact, often at the expense of long-term value. Frequent budget reviews play a key role, with 50% of marketers conducting them quarterly, and 36% doing so monthly or more often. These behaviors risk spurring overcorrections based on limited information given the measurement and attribution challenges.
Executive pressure.
More than customer trends, market conditions, bigger innovation, and technology trends, C-suite mandates are the primary driver of budgetary decisions. These mandates are often motivated by quarterly results and KPIs, both of which encourage short-term results and are most influential among performance-led companies (43% of which say that C-Suite priorities are the most important factor vs. 35% on average).
Performance marketing is being treated as a financial lever — rather than a strategic pillar.
In Search of Internal Alignment
While most firms aim to balance their planning between short-term and long-term objectives, and claim to be aligned across disciplines — brand, CX, and performance — the data reveals discrepancies in the depth of that alignment:
- In performance-led firms, internal alignment is the weakest:
44% are “somewhat aligned”. - CX- and brand-led firms report better alignment:
20%-24% say “somewhat aligned”.
SECTION 2
Where Performance is Heading
Balancing Complexity with Speed to Deliver Better Outcomes
An Evolving Definition
What marketers mean by “performance marketing” is no longer consistent — and this matters. Performance marketing today is driven less by speed and automation alone, and more by a deliberate, data-driven mindset focused on outcomes. 75% of marketers now explicitly prioritize measurable outcomes supported by data-led audience strategies as the primary drivers of their performance approach. This goes to show that performance marketing is maturing and beginning to live up to its full promise as marketers seek to better understand measurable ROI and sophisticated capabilities to increase personalization.
This evolving definition is also reflected in how marketers measure impact. While cost per acquisition (CPA) and return on ad spend (ROAS) remain common, many are shifting towards broader metrics like customer lifetime value (LTV) and even brand lift metrics, which signals a more holistic view of performance success.
The Role of Demographics in Audience Approaches
Marketers use an average of at least four distinct audience targeting approaches, approximately half of which employ data-driven methods like retargeting, behavioral, first-party data, and geotargeting. Contextual and cohort-based approaches are also used by four in ten marketers, highlighting their need to address privacy changes and meet their audiences in more environments. This is particularly evident in EMEA, while JAPAC marketers show a bigger focus on first-party, behavioral, demographic, and contextual data approaches.
Overall, while most marketers experiment with a variety of approaches, at least half of them continue to struggle with data and admit being dissatisfied with their first- and zero-party data initiatives. In the end, despite the desire for more sophistication, demographic targeting remains a key pillar for almost 50% of companies, most of whom see their marketing approach as being more brand-led.
The Balance Between Complexity and Speed
Increasingly, marketers expect their performance campaigns to leverage increasingly sophisticated audience targeting methods. This comes at a cost. The martech stack required to execute performance effectively is sprawling, averaging eight tools, which adds both complexity and fragmentation. Despite this, marketers report surprising agility — most claiming they can launch a new campaign in under a month.
SECTION 3
The Measurement Gap
Fast Execution, Slow Insights
A Critical Disconnect
Measurement is the cornerstone of performance marketing’s promise, but for many organizations, it remains its most persistent point of failure.
The study found that despite their ability to launch campaigns quickly, most marketers struggle to measure performance with the precision and depth needed to inform strategic decisions. They’re increasingly caught between “slow and rigorous” tools like MMM and “fast but directional” data signals that lack incremental impact or long-term validity.
Challenges by Orientation
According to the research, each type of organization experiences the measurement gap slightly differently.
- Brand-led organizations: struggle to prove ROI and scale measurement.
- Performance-led organizations: report a lack of speed and resources despite having the most to gain from fast, accurate insights.
- CX-driven organizations: face difficulties activating insights across touchpoints in time to meaningfully influence the customer journey.
Taking a regional lens adds more granularity to the above picture. Resource issues are more evident in NOAM, while EMEA struggles with scaling and cross-channel measurement.
The result in all cases is a fragmented performance landscape. Execution often outpaces understanding and optimization remains reactive, since performance results come too late to inform action for the next campaign. This inhibits marketers’ ability to optimally allocate their budget and proactively optimize campaigns based on real-time insights.
SECTION 4
Building the Capability
Content, Tech, and Talent as Performance Enablers
The Next Frontier
Real-time Insights and Content Velocity
For performance marketing to scale effectively — and deliver more than just tactical, short-term wins — organizations must invest in the foundational capabilities that enable speed, personalization, and accountability. Our survey reveals marketers are increasingly aware of these needed capabilities yet still fall short in execution.
Real-time insights
Agility in creative development and testing
Integrated martech and talent strategy
Measurement
Marketers can't truly evolve without significantly streamlining the entire creation and approval process.
The Next Frontier
Capability-driven Performance
The ability to generate and act on real-time insights is now considered one of the top enablers of performance success, yet these demands are pushing content production workflows to their limits. Marketers cite several content production challenges, the most pressing of which are speed, scaling personalization, and approvals and compliance.
Martech
More Tools, Less Satisfaction
While the average organization uses eight martech tools, many marketers struggle to make those tools work together effectively. 54% of performance marketing workflows are automated, but much of this automation remains basic and fails to properly utilize the advanced personalization and decisioning capabilities of journey orchestration tools (used by only 10% of marketers).
Within this context, martech stacks are reassessed approximately every 18 months, but improvements are hard to execute, primarily because of budgetary constraints and technical resourcing issues. Marketers also report challenges in technical integration. Although most companies expect integration to help increase effectiveness, performance-led companies are less optimistic about integration impact and more critical about the overall effectiveness of martech.
Ultimately, despite the high number of tools and frequent re-evaluations, marketers struggle to:
Effectively integrate their martech stacks.
Achieve advanced automation.
Drive tangible performance improvements amidst budgetary and technical constraints.
Integrated Talent and AI Strategy
Performance outcomes are increasingly tied to an organization’s ability to train teams, build cross-functional fluency, and embed AI responsibly and effectively. Put differently, as complexity grows, organizations must evolve from solely buying tools to building capability across these tools.
Currently, only 25% of marketers express strong satisfaction with their investments in training and talent, with performance-led organizations reporting the lowest numbers.
Also, while marketers are turning to AI — particularly for content versioning, audience targeting, and planning — adoption is uneven as concerns about quality and control remain widespread.
AI’s anticipated benefits vary too, because AI strategies are shaped by distinct organizational priorities.
- Performance-led firms prioritize AI for speed to market and volume.
- CX and hybrid teams focus on AI for personalization and decisioning.
- Brand-led organizations are more focused on using AI for insights and content versioning.
The path to stronger performance relies on a mix of team upskilling, cross-functional collaboration, and responsible AI integration. Still, most organizations struggle with training satisfaction, face uneven AI adoption due to quality and control concerns, and pursue varied AI strategies based on their distinct priorities.
Organizations must invest in the foundational capabilities that enable speed, personalization, and accountability.
Future Investment Priorities
Looking ahead, marketers’ top investment priorities include:
SECTION 5
Strategic Implications
A CMO Playbook for Performance Reinvention
From Tactics to Strategic Orchestration
The State of Performance Marketing report reveals a clear imperative for marketing leaders: evolve performance marketing from a collection of tactical efficiencies into a cohesive, insight-led growth strategy.
This transition requires more than budget reallocation. It demands the rearchitecting of how marketing functions plan, measure, and execute across brand, CX, and performance. CMOs and other marketing leaders must lead this evolution, not by increasing spend but by increasing strategic coherence.
Performance marketing must be reframed as a strategic growth system — one that unifies near-term outcomes with long-term value creation.
4 Imperatives for Performance Marketing Leadership
Strategic integration is the next frontier.
Performance must evolve from a budget-heavy practice into a strategy-led discipline — one that aligns with brand and CX rather than competes with them. Intentional integration will close the gap between aspiration and execution.
- Break down silos to establish shared goals, KPIs, and data foundations.
- Coordinate planning cycles and success metrics across functions.
- Ensure that performance objectives reflect brand and customer impact as well as efficiency.
Measurement must catch up to execution.
The ability to act fast means little without meaningful measurement. Marketers need to modernize measurement to support both speed and rigor.
- Evolve beyond either/or measurement models and combine real-time agility with the depth of long-term tools like MMM.
- Use real-time signals as leading indicators, not final decision-makers.
- Design measurement systems that enhance both decision quality and speed.
Creative capacity needs to scale with agility without sacrificing quality.
With real-time insights and personalized execution on the rise, marketers must invest in content development and production capabilities to sustain performance at scale.
- Create a tighter link and feedback loop between insights and creative that prioritizes quality.
- Invest in content systems that support versioning, personalization, and in-flight optimization, treating content velocity as a performance lever, not a production challenge.
- Use AI to augment rather than replace creative development — and ensure that it remains anchored in governance and subject to quality standards.
Unlocking martech and AI requires talent and trust.
Automation alone won’t drive success. Marketers must address talent gaps, build internal skills, and create governance structures that enable confident, quality-focused AI adoption and smarter use of martech systems.
- Address the capability gap by embedding training and experimentation into performance operations.
- Enable cross-functional fluency covering marketing, data science, and tech.
- Invest in governance frameworks that allow AI and automation to scale responsibly.
Elevating Performance to Drive Holistic Growth
Performance marketing’s dominance in budget share underscores its operational value, but its full strategic potential remains unrealized. The research shows that while organizations have made great strides in executional agility, gaps across measurement, talent, and alignment will continue to limit performance’s impact on enterprise growth.
For CMOs, this is a moment of opportunity. By transforming performance from a short-term tactic to a strategically integrated growth engine, marketing can achieve greater resilience, personalization, and impact.
The next era of performance will not be defined by speed alone but by strategic orchestration, creative scalability, and measurable contribution to business outcomes.
Methodology
This report is based on a global online survey conducted between April 1st and May 11th 2025, among 389 senior marketing professionals. Respondents represented companies across North America (48%), EMEA (33%), and JAPAC (19%), spanning industries such as retail and ecommerce, consumer packaged goods, manufacturing, financial services, and healthcare.
Most companies reported annual revenues between $100 million and $10 billion, with 57% operating in both B2B and B2C models. Participants held senior roles — primarily senior director, VP, or above — and worked across a range of marketing functions including strategy, brand, operations, advertising, media, and other digital marketing disciplines.
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