Fixing Fragmented Marketing Data for Smarter Reporting

Summary

Marketing and RevOps leaders struggle with fragmented data across CRMs, MAPs, ABM platforms, and ad channels, making it difficult to track spend, ROI, and performance effectively. Without a unified reporting system, insights are delayed, inconsistent, and incomplete. By centralizing data in a warehouse, leveraging BI tools and automating reporting workflows, teams can gain real-time visibility into marketing performance. This blog explores how to break down data silos, improve ABM reporting, and future-proof analytics with AI and automation.

By Payal Parikh, Director of Client Engagement at Heinz Marketing

For CMOs and RevOps leaders, data fragmentation is a persistent challenge that slows decision-making and reduces marketing efficiency. There is a need to fix fragmented marketing data for smarter reporting. Your Customer Relationship Management (CRM) platform doesn’t integrate ad performance data. Marketing Automation Platforms (MAPs) collect some ad data, but often not from all channels. Account-Based Marketing (ABM) tools rarely sync real-time ad performance with other systems.

As a result, leaders must manually piece together information from multiple platforms to assess spend, ROI, and performance—leading to reporting inconsistencies, wasted ad budgets, and poor visibility into campaign effectiveness.

In a previous blog on the top ABM metrics to track, I discussed key metrics like account engagement, pipeline influence, and deal velocity. However, even the best metrics are meaningless if they’re based on incomplete or siloed data.

So, how can CMOs and RevOps teams fix fragmented data reporting and gain a unified, real-time view of marketing performance? The answer lies in data centralization, advanced reporting tools, and AI-driven automation.

The Cost of Disconnected Data

Disjointed reporting isn’t just an inconvenience—it directly impacts marketing effectiveness and revenue performance. Here’s how:

• Delayed insights – Teams spend excessive time exporting and merging spreadsheets instead of acting on real-time data.
• Inconsistent data – Different platforms calculate performance differently, leading to reporting discrepancies.
• Inaccurate ROI calculations – Without a single source of truth, CMOs struggle to determine which channels and campaigns drive the highest returns.
• Inefficient budget allocation – When ad spend is tracked separately across platforms, there’s no clear visibility into which investments are working.

These issues make it difficult to measure and optimize ABM campaigns, forcing marketing leaders to rely on incomplete insights when making budget and strategy decisions.

The Fix: Centralized Data and Reporting Integration

To break down silos, organizations need a structured approach to unifying marketing and sales data:

1. Consolidate Data Sources

Rather than manually pulling data from multiple platforms, organizations should invest in ETL (Extract, Transform, Load) tools like Fivetran, Supermetrics, or custom API integrations to pull data from:

• CRM (Salesforce, HubSpot)
• MAP (Marketo, HubSpot, Pardot)
• ABM Platforms (DemandBase, 6sense)
• Ad Platforms (Google Ads, LinkedIn, Meta, programmatic platforms)

2. Centralize Data in a Warehouse or Data Lake

Storing marketing data in a data warehouse (e.g., Snowflake, Google BigQuery, AWS Redshift) or a data lake ensures:

• All ad and marketing data lives in one place
• Custom reporting and analysis are possible without platform limitations
• Cross-platform attribution modeling is easier

3. Implement Advanced Reporting Tools for Unified Visibility

Once data is centralized, marketing leaders can use business intelligence (BI) tools like Power BI, Tableau, or Looker to create interactive, real-time dashboards that visualize performance across all platforms.

Bridging the Gap with Power BI, Tableau & Looker

Modern reporting tools are the key to turning fragmented data into actionable insights:

• Power BI – Connects to multiple data sources, enabling real-time dashboards for campaign performance, attribution, and ROI tracking.
• Tableau – Offers advanced data visualization, helping teams identify patterns in ad spend and customer engagement.
• Looker – Provides custom data modeling, enabling deeper segmentation and predictive analytics for ABM and revenue attribution.

By pulling CRM, MAP, ABM, and ad data into one of these tools, CMOs and RevOps leaders can eliminate reporting guesswork and gain a true 360-degree view of marketing impact.

Use Case: Improving ABM Performance with Unified Data

Let’s say your ABM campaign is targeting enterprise accounts, and you’re tracking:

• Engagement rates from LinkedIn and display ads
• Email interactions in your MAP
• Sales touches in your CRM
• Pipeline influence data in your ABM platform

If these insights are scattered across four different platforms, you have to manually combine reports, reconcile discrepancies, and estimate ROI—which is both time-consuming and error-prone.

With a centralized data approach, Power BI (or Tableau/Looker) can automatically:

• Aggregate engagement data from all channels
• Show pipeline influence in a single dashboard
• Provide real-time insights into which accounts are moving through the funnel

This enables marketing and RevOps teams to adjust ad spend, optimize messaging, and align sales efforts dynamically—without waiting weeks for manual reports.

Best Practices for CMOs & RevOps Leaders

To successfully implement a unified data reporting strategy, organizations should:

1. Align Stakeholders on Data Strategy

• Collaborate with marketing, sales, and RevOps teams to define key performance metrics.
• Standardize how attribution, engagement, and ROI are measured across all platforms.

2. Integrate Ad Data Early

• Avoid delayed exports and spreadsheets by setting up automated data flows into your reporting tools.
• Use APIs or ETL tools to sync real-time ad performance data across all systems.

3. Automate Reporting

• Build real-time dashboards in Power BI, Tableau, or Looker to ensure teams always have the latest performance insights.
• Schedule automated refreshes so reports stay up to date without manual effort.

4. Ensure Data Accuracy & Standardization

• Cleanse and standardize data across platforms to eliminate discrepancies in ad performance tracking.
• Use AI-powered anomaly detection to flag data inconsistencies.

Future-Proofing with AI & Automation

The next evolution of marketing reporting goes beyond dashboards—AI-driven analytics and automation can proactively surface insights and optimize campaigns in real time.

• AI-powered predictive analytics – Identify which accounts are most likely to convert and optimize spend accordingly.
• Automated data pipelines – Reduce manual work by syncing real-time performance data across platforms.
• Conversational analytics – Use AI-driven insights to surface key performance trends dynamically (e.g., “Why did ad performance drop last week?”).

The Bottom Line: Fixing Fragmented Reporting Unlocks Smarter Decisions

For marketing and revenue leaders, fixing fragmented reporting isn’t just about convenience—it’s about driving growth, optimizing budget allocation, and proving impact.

By integrating centralized data strategies, advanced BI tools, and AI-driven insights, CMOs and RevOps leaders can transform disjointed reporting into a seamless, real-time marketing intelligence system.

And for ABM practitioners having clean, unified data is the key to tracking and improving the right metrics—as outlined in my previous blog on Top ABM Metrics to Track.

Want to get started? Let us know how we can help you achieve your revenue goals, send us an email.

Image Credit: Photo by Stephen Dawson on Unsplash