My guess is that if you sat down with your CMO, 1:1, they would tell you that they simply don’t care about impressions or CTR in isolation.
They really care about the three operational questions that dashboards consistently fail to answer.
- "Why did our cost per pipeline opportunity (or whatever metric is important) spike (or crash) this week?"
- Dashboards fail marketers because they show you that the number went up (or down), but don’t ask why. This becomes a guessing game.
- A great system will tell you something like "LinkedIn CPL jumped 38% because two competitors launched campaigns targeting the same ICP on Monday, and your audience fatigued on creative set #3"
- "Which campaigns are quietly wasting money right now?"
- Dashboards fail in this regard simply due to the work involved. It’s 2026 and you literally have to manually dig through every campaign to find under-performers and figure out why.
- Your ideal system will tell you that "These 4 audiences are below benchmark, costing you $12K/week with no pipeline—turn them off before Tuesday".
- "What are our competitors doing that we're not?"
- Dashboards simply don’t tell you what competitors are doing. There is no before scenario here.
- The system you need for this is going to show you: "Competitor X is testing messaging around [theme] to [persona]—and it's working. Here's the gap in your strategy"
The good news is that none of these are really analytics problems. They're explanation problems.
As a demand gen leader, you need to constantly be thinking about "What question does your CMO keep asking that your current tools can't answer?”
Drop it in the comments or DM me—I'm collecting these for a future paper.
And if you like what this ideal scenario looks like, this is what we are building at Yirla. Reach out to give it a shot.
