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DemandScience, a global leader in B2B performance marketing solutions, published the “2026 State of Performance Marketing Report: Exposing the Marketing Data Mirage,” featuring insights from hundreds of marketing leaders, revealing the extent to which misleading marketing signals and underperforming campaigns are impacting business outcomes.
The research shows a clear pattern: marketing signals often look encouraging on the surface, but the systems behind them — intent data, content performance, martech tools, and multi-channel campaign execution — rarely produce the revenue impact leaders expect. This disconnect is what the report defines as the Marketing Data Mirage.
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Two-thirds of leaders say their dashboards sometimes, often, or very often show success that fails to translate into revenue.
While the term “performance marketing” is often associated with channel-by-channel efficiency analysis, this year’s report takes a broader and more urgent view. The findings show that the biggest performance gaps are not coming from media choices alone but from the upstream inputs that drive every channel: signal quality, AI-influenced content, tool fragmentation, and the reliability of the data marketers use to make investment decisions. These systemic issues shape the performance of every channel, regardless of spend allocation. Yet, when performance falters, organizations default to adding tools, producing more content, and increasing spend, actions that increase activity but reinforce the Mirage instead of fixing its foundation.
“Marketers are working harder than ever, yet their campaigns are dragged down by signals, AI-generated content, and metrics that look promising on the surface but fail to translate into real outcomes,” said Bill Hobbib, CMO at DemandScience. “Too often, marketers see dashboards glow green, impressions scale, and lead goals exceeded, yet these “qualified” leads convert to customers at a low rate. The Mirage makes tactical execution look successful while masking the very issues that prevent revenue.”
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The 2026 State of Performance Marketing Report includes an analysis of survey results from 750 senior marketing leaders at organizations with revenues from $100 million to $5 billion or more, spanning technology, financial services, manufacturing, healthcare, and professional services. The survey was conducted by independent research firm TrendCandy, with a focus on uncovering what causes a gap between encouraging signals from marketing campaigns not yielding results; quantifying how widespread marketing data mirage is; and understanding the business costs associated with marketing campaigns producing misleading “success” metrics that fail to convert to revenue.
Six key insights from the study include:
“While 25% of budget leaks away, respondents estimate they could unlock an additional 32% in annual revenue if their data, signals, content, and orchestration were more effective and connected,” said Derek Schoettle, CEO and chairman of DemandScience. “These potential gains are effectively hiding in plain sight. For organizations doing hundreds of millions or billions of dollars in revenue, the gains are extraordinary.”
