A Forrester Consulting Thought Leadership Paper
Commissioned by Siteimprove | April 2025
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The Costs of Complexity: Unify Marketing Performance to Enhance CX and ROI
If you’re a marketer and you struggle with multiple platforms that don’t play well together, you’re not alone: Sixty-two percent of marketers say that their tech stack is too complex.
This Forrester Consulting study, commissioned by Siteimprove, is the result of an online survey of hundreds of global marketing leaders across regions and disciplines within marketing.
Affirmation for marketers
The data is clear: Marketing leaders overwhelmingly point to technology as a top organizational challenge, with complexity, costs, and AI all contributing factors.
The risk of not simplifying boils down to one thing: the cost of inaction is higher than the investments required to solve these problems.
What you'll learn
The Costs of Complexity offers marketers concrete steps for moving past fractured martech, including guidance on:
- What to prioritize to maximize time to value, including investments in AI.
- What problems unified data solves.
- How to improve paid and earned media outcomes, as well as invest in accessibility, to propel sustainable growth.
Download the full study
Gain actionable insights on overcoming marketing complexity. Download the full Forrester paper now.
Expertise from guest Forrester
Nikhil Lai, Senior Analyst
Nikhil's research focuses on the evolution of performance marketing, including retail media, SEO, paid search, TV advertising, full-funnel advertising, AI-integrated advertising, and creative adtech. He helps clients with guidance sessions, inquiries, and advisories on the current and future states of performance marketing and channel-specific best practices.
Nikhil's passion for apprehending what "performance" means — now that nearly every channel parades as "performance" and contends with data deprecation — comes from his empathy for performance marketers. He was a performance marketer at GE when the company underwent frame-breaking digital transformation and then evangelized cross-channel TV advertising and multivariate creative testing for performance marketers.
Nikhil earned a BA in the College of Social Studies and Hispanic Literature from Wesleyan University and an MSc in history, law, and government from The London School of Economics.
Methodology: Forrester conducted an online survey of 609 global marketing leaders to evaluate marketing performance processes at organizations. Survey participants included decision-makers in CMO, digital marketing, content marketing, and demand generation leadership roles. The study began in December 2024 and was completed in January 2025.
Insights on tap
Explore the findings of this Forrester study and learn how to apply the insights in a live, interactive format.