7 questions every CMO should ask before choosing a marketing intelligence platform

What if you walked into your next C-suite meeting ready to answer the question, "What did we actually get out of spend?"

That confidence is what a great marketing intelligence platform delivers. Choosing the right one gives you a single source of truth to prove your impact and find new ways to grow. The wrong one just saddles you with hidden costs, a frustrated team and data you can't trust.

Too many leaders start with a feature checklist when evaluating platforms, but this approach misses the point. A marketing intelligence platform acts as the heart of your entire marketing strategy; it’s not just another software purchase. It pumps data from all your sources to all your destinations, helping to ensure metrics are uniform and insights are ready to power decision-making. An investment this pivotal requires a better evaluation, one that starts with asking a handful of strategic questions.

What is a marketing intelligence platform?

A marketing intelligence platform is what finally tames your scattered marketing data. It's a centralized platform where data from all your marketing sources is automatically gathered and transformed so it’s clean, normalized and analysis-ready.

The foundational goal of marketing intelligence is simple: create a single source of truth. This lets you stop wrestling with manual reports and disconnected data and start actioning decisions that impact business outcomes.

But the right platform offers far more than a central data hub. Unified marketing data powers predictive models and advanced measurement and gives marketing teams no-code access to analytics that help drive revenue growth, reduce wasted spend and enable a culture of experimentation. 

Why your marketing intelligence platform evaluation process matters

According to the 2025 Martech Map, the number of marketing tools has grown by over 7,258% since 2012, but this has only fueled a crisis of trust in marketing data. With data coming in from dozens or even hundreds of channels, naming convention mismatches, duplicate data, reporting gaps due to API updates and siloes make it nearly impossible to bring everything together into a consistent, cohesive, reliable picture. As a result, proving marketing effectiveness is a real challenge.

This isn't a new problem. The credibility gap has been a major issue for years. Back in 2017, a Harvard Business Review survey found that 80% of CEOs were unimpressed with their CMOs. And it’s only getting worse. A 2023 McKinsey report found that fewer CMOs even report directly to the CEO anymore.

This isn’t down to poor marketing leadership. It's happening because your team is dealing with a mess of real data challenges:

• Raw data is scattered across countless marketing tools, leaving it difficult to compare.
• Cookie depreciation and new privacy rules make it harder than ever to track customer behavior and prove marketing's value.
• AI-powered ad platforms have become black boxes, hiding the "why" behind performance for your marketing campaigns.

A marketing intelligence platform is the bridge across this gap. The right market intelligence software helps you dig deep into the why and what behind marketing performance to justify spend, plan smarter campaigns and turn marketing into a growth driver for the business.

It delivers trustworthy, transformed data so you’re always comparing apples to apples. This clean foundation lets you use advanced analytics to identify opportunities to optimize your funnel, validate your strategy and gain the confidence to test good ideas and evolve your marketing efforts.

Ultimately, a good intelligence platform turns data into actionable insights without making marketers dependent on data engineers. It helps you understand what’s driving performance and why, and streamlines reporting so you can focus on strategy, not spreadsheets.

But not all marketing intelligence solutions are created equal. Some are repurposed data integration tools, and others unify data but lack advanced measurement capabilities and essentials like conversion API connectors. A proper marketing intelligence software evaluation helps you find the technology that unlocks marketing’s potential and grows with you.

To find the right marketing intelligence platform, you need to ask the right questions. Here are seven that will set you on the right path:

1. Will this marketing intelligence software scale with us, or will we outgrow it in two years?

Your best quarter just broke your reports. The platform couldn't handle the spike in data volume, and now your tech is holding back your growth. Your team is stuck in spreadsheets, pulling numbers by hand. You now face a painful, unbudgeted migration that puts all your marketing efforts on hold.

How to evaluate a marketing intelligence platform’s scalability strategically

To get a real sense of a platform’s limits, you need to ask tough questions.

• Ask vendors about their historical data processing architecture and their performance guarantees for large datasets. This tells you if the system is built for real scale or just looks good in a demo.
• Inquire about their largest clients and the data they currently handle for enterprise platforms. If their top clients are much smaller than you, that’s a red flag.
• Review how their pricing strategies treat significant increases in data volume or sources. You need to know if your bill will explode when you succeed.

An architecture that scales

Your historical data shouldn't have an expiration date. Ad platforms have retention limits, but Funnel’s Data Guarantee means we act as your marketing data warehouse, keeping your history safe, forever. This gives you a permanent, reliable dataset for accurate forecasting and year-over-year reports.

Proof in action: Sparro saves 25,000 hours yearly

Sparro, an independent digital agency, ran all its reports on Google Sheets, and the system was close to breaking point. As their volumes grew, their team was stuck with failing downloads and authentication issues, which led to hours of tedious manual work. The frustration of unreliable reports trickled down to their clients. Sparros’ team knew they needed to scale, but a solution like BigQuery was too complex and carried the risk of massive, unpredictable computation costs.

They switched to Funnel to manage their data at scale, without needing a dev team or a risky pricing model. The new system saves them 25,000 hours a year in workflow automation alone. They've used that time to build innovative projects, which have already generated over $150,000 in new revenue.

2. Can my marketers use this marketing intelligence software themselves, or will they be stuck waiting on data teams?

Your marketing teams shouldn't have to file a ticket with IT just to understand how a campaign performs. When a platform requires deep technical skills, your marketers become dependent on data teams for every request. The wait creates a bottleneck that slows down optimization and innovation. Actionable insights get missed. Opportunities are lost, and frustration grows on both sides of the table.

How to see if your team will actually use the marketing intelligence platform

• Get a demo, but have your non-technical users from the marketing team run it.
• Ask them to connect a new data source and build a custom metric on the call. No coding allowed.
• Ask what onboarding looks like for marketing and sales teams, not just your data analysts.

Empower marketers with actionable insights and liberate engineers

Funnel’s no-code interface is built for non-technical users. It gives your marketing teams the power to manage their own data flows independently. This is a form of workflow automation. They can easily connect sources, create custom dimensions or build a simple Funnel Dashboard for quick analysis without waiting on anyone. This means your team gets the business intelligence they need, when they need it. The self-serve capability drastically reduces the burden on your technical teams.

Proof in action: Ria Money Transfer gets insights 10x faster

Before Funnel, the marketing team at Ria Money Transfer were often forced to operate on instinct because getting a complete, cross-channel performance view was too complex. They needed a way for their team to surface actionable insights in real time. After adopting Funnel, their cross-channel performance reporting is now 10x faster. As Eros Kannis, Head of Digital for APAC, explained, "For me to understand what’s happening now, it’s a two-second thing". Funnel became the centerpiece that enabled the company’s shift from "instincts to insight," proving what happens when you put powerful data directly into the hands of marketers.

3. Does this marketing intelligence platform cover every source we use today and might use tomorrow?

Every data source you can’t connect to creates a blind spot and makes you miss critical marketing intelligence. This leads to an incomplete view of your marketing efforts. And when you can't get the comprehensive data you need for a holistic strategy, you end up making budget decisions with a partial picture. That's how you miss your next big growth channel.

How to evaluate a marketing intelligence software’s data coverage strategically

• Don't just count connectors; verify the data quality and reliability of the ones you need.
• Ask about their process for building new connectors.
• Inquire how they handle other external data sources, like offline files.

Fully managed coverage for all your sources

APIs break. It’s a constant headache for your data team, but it shouldn't be your problem to solve. Funnel manages all 500+ of our connectors, covering everything from marketing analytics tools to CRM data. So when a connection breaks, we fix it. Your data keeps flowing, and your team keeps working. If you need a source that isn't on our list, we'll build it for you, and you can always upload a file for everything else.

Proof in action: trivago achieves 100% reporting coverage

The global travel brand trivago is a perfect example of an enterprise company competing for every click. Partial data points simply won't work for them. Before Funnel, they had a huge blind spot. They could only see performance from their largest platforms, which were just 30% of their total marketing efforts. The rest was a black hole of manual reports and missing customer insights.

Funnel helped them connect everything, even their niche, local search engine accounts. This change took their reporting coverage from 30% to 100%. Now, their team has the comprehensive data needed for their business intelligence tools. They can make informed decisions with confidence because they finally have the full picture. As Product Lead, Patrick Kool said, "I can trust the data without logging into the local platforms."

4. Can I finally move beyond basic attribution without adding another vendor?

Using separate analytics tools for data and measurement creates a huge headache. Each new tool in your stack adds cost and complexity, creating another place where things can break. Your team spends its time stitching raw data together instead of finding valuable insights. You get stuck with basic, last-click attribution, which gives you a biased view of your marketing campaigns. This makes it impossible to understand the full customer journey analytics or make smarter marketing decisions.

How to check a platform’s measurement capabilities

• Ask if the measurement key features are native to the platform.
• Find out which advanced analytics models they support, like MMM or MTA.
• Ask how it prepares your data for these models.

Funnel offers advanced measurement models and features fed by unified data

Funnel is a complete marketing intelligence platform with data integration, measurement and reporting. We built advanced marketing measurement tools directly on our data hub. This lets you prove marketing’s value within one unified system.

You can use sophisticated models like marketing mix modeling (MMM) and incrementality testing for media planning and budget justification, and data-driven multi-touch attribution to track performance. We also help you use measurement triangulation, which combines different models (MMM, MTA and incrementality testing) to give you a more complete view of what's driving revenue growth. This foundation of clean, harmonized marketing data also sets you up for future steps into predictive analytics.

We also help you close the loop with data activation. Our seven Conversion API (CAPI) connectors are built for this. A Conversion API is a direct pipeline that sends your clean, first-party data back to the ad platforms. This process combats the signal loss from privacy changes and AI black boxes. It's a powerful way to help ad platforms like Meta and TikTok better optimize your marketing campaigns with reliable data you control.

Proof in action: awork scaled their media spend 4x

The team at awork was scaling up their marketing. But they couldn't answer basic questions about what was working. Last-click attribution in Google Analytics was undervaluing their top-of-funnel channels. They needed a better way to measure.

Funnel’s attribution models showed them the real story. They quickly saw that paid social media, which seemed unprofitable before, was having a major positive impact on their branded search and direct traffic. This insight gave awork the confidence to shift 30% of their budget to paid social. With a clear view of their acquisition costs, they scaled their total marketing investments fourfold in two years.

5. How long will this take to implement, and when will we actually see value?

A long setup is a huge business risk because it kills your team's momentum. Big projects that drag on for months drain your team's time and energy, and your stakeholders start to doubt the whole project. By the time a platform like Adverity or Salesforce is finally "done," especially for large enterprise companies, the market has already changed. You've spent a year just trying to get started, while your competitors used that time to gain a competitive advantage.

How to check a platform's time-to-value

• Ask for a clear timeline that's based on your team and your data sources.
• Talk to current customers who are a similar size to your company.
• Know what your team needs to provide, and ask what resources are required for a smooth setup.

Funnel helps you get value in weeks

You should see a return on your investment this quarter, not next year. That’s why we designed our onboarding process for speed. From day one, our data scientists partner directly with your team on most plans. They work with you to build your data model correctly from the start. This hands-on partnership helps you avoid the common delays that stall most projects. We also have a Starter and a free plan for teams that don’t require advanced measurement but want to start connecting their data right away. With any plan, you get reliable reports and actionable insights much faster, so your team can start making smarter marketing decisions today.

Proof in action: Witt-Gruppe cut reporting time by 90%

For the European fashion retailer Witt-Gruppe, speed is everything. They couldn't afford a long, drawn-out implementation. With Funnel, their team immediately cut the time they spent preparing marketing reports by 90%. That huge efficiency gain gave them back hundreds of hours, which they reinvested into strategy — exactly where that time belongs.

6. Will our bill explode if we have a successful quarter?

Volatile pricing strategies are risky for a growing business. Some marketing intelligence tools, like Adverity or Fivetran, charge you based on data volume or rows processed. This model directly punishes your success. When your marketing campaigns perform well and you generate more market data, your bill goes up. A surprise invoice can wreck your budget for the quarter. You can't make informed spending decisions when you don't know what your data will cost from month to month.

How to check a marketing intelligence platform's pricing strategies

• Ask for a full cost breakdown, including any fees for users or support.
• Request a sample of custom pricing based on your projected growth for the next two years.
• Clarify exactly what actions or key features will trigger higher costs.

Funnel provides a predictable and transparent pricing model

Our plans use a system called flexpoints, which you use for the connectors and destinations you need. Your cost is tied to your active connections, not the data volume that flows through them. This approach gives you financial predictability. Your bill won’t fluctuate wildly, so you can scale your marketing efforts with confidence.

Proof in action: Sephora cut data warehouse costs by 75%

The global retailer Sephora operates over 2,700 stores in 35 countries. The company struggled with scattered CRM data across 18 teams in Europe, which created a significant efficiency problem. Their central data team spent a whole day every week just collecting reports. Their data partner, Hanalytics, chose Funnel to fix this process. Funnel prepared one clean, consolidated table of comprehensive data before sending anything to their data warehouse. This step helped them avoid massive processing jobs in BigQuery and cut their data processing costs by an incredible 75%.

7. Are we investing for the future, or buying a tool that's already obsolete?

Your tech stack is probably full of point solutions. They solve one small problem today, but they can't grow with your strategic needs, so you'll eventually outgrow them. An even bigger risk, though, comes from tools owned by large vendors. They often face "sunset risks" when priorities change. You only have to look at the industry rumors around Salesforce and Datorama to see the danger. Choosing the wrong intelligence tool could force you into a painful migration in just a few years.

How to check a vendor's long-term vision

• Ask to see their product roadmap for the next 12 to 18 months.
• Inquire about their R&D and how they address big industry trends.
• Ask how they are different from a simple point solution.

Funnel is defining the future of marketing intelligence

Our whole focus at Funnel is on defining the marketing intelligence category. That means we're always building what's next to help you spot emerging trends. We’re currently releasing a new data-driven multi-touch attribution tool for the mid-market audience. Our Funnel artificial intelligence capabilities help you with scenario planning to see potential outcomes from channel mix changes. We also know we're part of your larger data stack, so we make it easy to export your clean data to any destination you need, like your BI tools or a data warehouse.

Proof in action: Digicel gains critical foresight

For a global operator like Digicel, with 12 brands across 26 markets, messy reporting was a huge problem. The process was slow and unreliable, and manual reports were often full of errors. The data was usually outdated by the time it finally arrived, and their end-of-month reconciliation alone took four to five days, leaving the team constantly stuck looking in the past. Funnel automated their entire process, cutting reconciliation time to under 48 hours. This change did more than just save time; it allowed the team to start focusing on performance improvements.

As Director Nick Cudahy puts it, "Before Funnel, we were 100% looking in the rear-view mirror. Now we’re looking out the front window to see what’s coming."

Unlock the power of your marketing intelligence with Funnel

Choosing between marketing intelligence tools is a huge decision. These seven questions give you a better way to evaluate your options. They help you look past the sales pitch and find a true partner for growth.

Funnel offers a powerful unified data hub, with no-code dashboards, custom reporting and advanced measurement capabilities built on, so you always have insights you can trust, whether you’re tracking the effectiveness of your campaigns or creating a report for the CFO. Funnel was built to help marketers turn data into business growth, and we continue growing our capabilities to empower yours. 

Ready to see what that looks like? Book a demo, and let’s start the conversation.