An additional 13% said that investing in tools to aggregate, manage and analyze their data has been an expensive experiment that isn’t paying off. While these results indicate that most respondents weren’t terribly satisfied with the returns on their data investments, nearly 90% admitted that their spend on data is yielding some positives.
The biggest frustration appears to be the difference between the anticipated effectiveness and the actual effectiveness that the respondents’ vendors had.
To secure a sale, vendors may feel that they have to pitch clients on their ability to do everything under the sun. But once the client brings the vendor on and realizes a lot of the promises were hype, frustration builds. This helps explain why "salesy" tactics like touting vanity metrics spread doubt about digital marketing’s effectiveness.