How Much Should You Spend on Marketing in 2026?

Gartner puts the average marketing budget at 7.8 percent of revenue, but ecommerce brands often run far higher. How to set your number from what growth costs.

By Yannis Spanenburg · 2026-09-01 · 7 min read

Everyone wants a single percentage for the marketing budget question. There isn't one, and the surveys that get quoted most often are measuring the wrong businesses for the decision you're trying to make.

What percentage of revenue should you spend on marketing?

The right percentage depends on your business model, growth stage, and category economics. Established B2B firms run 6 to 9 percent of revenue. Public DTC ecommerce companies have a median of 13.3 percent. Early-stage consumer brands often spend well above that to buy awareness before organic and retention channels can carry weight.

Why do the big benchmark surveys say under 10 percent?

Gartner's 2026 CMO Spend Survey puts the average marketing budget at 7.8 percent of company revenue, barely moved from 7.7 percent the year before and roughly 18 percent lower than the mean four years ago. The CMO Survey, run by Duke's Fuqua School with Deloitte and the AMA, found budgets at 9.0 percent of revenue, the lowest share since 2021, with spending growth slowing to 1.7 percent. Both surveys skew toward large, established companies with a mature revenue base. Companies like that spend to defend share and support a sales team, which costs less than building a brand and buying awareness from zero.

Why do ecommerce brands run so much higher?

Ecommerce brands pay for acquisition directly, out of the marketing budget. An analysis of public DTC company filings puts median marketing spend at 13.3 percent of revenue, with the middle half of companies between 9.0 and 19.3 percent. Every new customer in ecommerce comes through a channel with a real, trackable cost: Meta, TikTok, Google, affiliates, email acquisition. There is no sales rep absorbing part of that cost inside a base salary. The spend shows up in the P&L the month it happens, which is exactly why ecommerce operators feel more budget pressure than a services CMO reading a Gartner report. If your ad platform and your store are reporting different sales, that pressure gets worse.

How does your growth stage change the right number?

Stage matters more than category. A brand under two years old is still buying its first cohort of repeat customers and has no retention or referral engine yet, so nearly every dollar has to go toward paid acquisition and content that builds first-time trust. A brand with three or more years of order history can shift real weight onto email, SMS, loyalty and organic search, channels that cost a fraction of paid media per order once the audience already exists. If your spend as a percentage of revenue hasn't dropped as your repeat purchase rate climbed, fix that before you compare yourself to any headline benchmark.

What should count inside your marketing budget?

Media spend, martech subscriptions, content production, and marketing headcount, plus any agency retainer. Most owners only track media spend and then wonder why the number never matches what the CFO reports. If you're comparing yourself to Gartner or the CMO Survey, use their definition or the comparison is meaningless. Whether that headcount sits in-house or with an agency changes what you're comparing, but the dollars are equally real either way.

The three costs people forget

Software you already pay for and never review, the orphaned tools stacking up inside the martech stack. Freelance and contractor spend that gets coded to a different budget line entirely. And the internal hours a founder or ops person spends on marketing tasks, which count as labor cost even when no invoice ever gets cut for them.

How much of that should go to AI tools in 2026?

Gartner's same 2026 survey found marketing organizations now allocate 15.3 percent of their budget to AI on average, climbing to 21.3 percent among teams that consider themselves AI-ready. Only 30 percent of respondents said they were ready to scale what they had built. That gap matters more than the percentage itself. An AI tool bought without a workflow to run it through adds a monthly cost and no working capability. Before adding a new AI line item, ask which specific task it replaces and who owns checking that it did.

What is the actual math for setting your own number?

Work backward from what growth needs to cost, and bring in the industry average at the end as a check. Take your target revenue growth, translate it into the number of new customers required, multiply by your real blended cost to acquire one across every channel, then check what percentage of projected revenue that spend represents. If the number sits far outside your category's range, the growth target is probably unrealistic before the budget is.

1. Pull your actual blended customer acquisition cost for the last two quarters, across every channel.
2. Translate your target revenue growth into the number of new customers it requires.
3. Multiply that number of customers by your blended acquisition cost to get the spend your growth target needs.
4. Add martech subscriptions, content production, marketing headcount and any agency retainer, so the total matches what your CFO reports.
5. Divide the total by projected revenue and compare the percentage with your category's range.
6. Revisit the growth target first if the percentage sits far outside that range.

Proof of Pixel is a marketing and consulting agency for businesses that live on enquiries and orders, building the website, the tracking and the follow-up as one system, with offices in Dubai, New York, London, Antwerp and Malaysia.

Proof of Pixel's position: derive your marketing budget from your own customer acquisition cost and growth target, and use benchmark surveys only as a range check.

Set the number before the agency pitch does it for you

Before you lock next year's number, pull your actual blended customer acquisition cost for the last two quarters and weigh it against the incrementality of your paid channels alongside what each platform reports. If you haven't run an incrementality test on your biggest ad channel, you don't know what part of your current spend is working, which makes any percentage you pick a guess wearing a decimal point. We run this diagnostic for ecommerce brands as part of a Strategy engagement, or you can start with a free audit.