The measurement gap has not closed in six years
Sprout Social surveys social marketers every year — a thousand or more each time. One question asks what they actually do with the data their own campaigns produce. The answer has barely moved.
| Sprout Social Index | Use social data to measure return |
|---|---|
| 2020 | 23% |
| 2021 | 15% |
| 2023 | 23% |
Three measurement cycles across six years, and the share never rises above a quarter. One year could be a bad sample. A flat line is structural.
The same surveys found 56% using social data to understand their audience. So the data is being collected, and it is being read. It stops just before the question of what came back.
Why it persists
The more recent research names the obstacle plainly. More than half of marketing leaders say poor integration between their social tools and the rest of their systems is the single biggest reason they cannot see what social contributes to the business. Around one organization in ten can turn an insight into action inside a few hours.
That is not a discipline problem, and it is not a talent problem. It is a plumbing problem — which is the encouraging part, because plumbing can be fixed.
What it looks like from the outside
The pattern shows up in ordinary technical detail long before anyone opens an analytics account. Two tag-manager containers loading on the same page, so every session is counted twice. Links shared from a site with no tracking parameters on them, so the traffic arrives labeled “direct” and the credit disappears. A tracking token still loading years after the service behind it shut down. None of it is exotic, and all of it is visible from the public page source.
Sprout Social Index 2020, 2021 and 2023, each surveying more than 1,000 social marketers; Sprout Social return-on-investment research, 2026.
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