Our newsletterIndustry surveyGartner, 2025
Search advertising takes 13.9% of the digital budget, more than any other digital channel
Channel mix & planning
2025 digital channel investment allocations (paid vs owned/earned media)
2025 digital channel investment allocations (paid vs owned/earned media)| Channel | Mean percentage of digital channel budget |
|---|---|
| Search advertising (paid media) | 13.9 |
| Digital display advertising (paid media) | 12.5 |
| Social advertising (paid media) | 12.2 |
| Video and streaming (paid media) | 10.7 |
| Audio and podcast (paid media) | 7.5 |
| Retail media networks (paid media) | 6.4 |
| Digital OOH (paid media) | 5.4 |
| SEO (owned/earned media) | 8.9 |
| Email marketing (owned/earned media) | 7.4 |
| Influencer marketing (owned/earned media) | 5.9 |
| Sponsored content (owned/earned media) | 5.5 |
| SMS/push notifications (owned/earned media) | 3.5 |
- Reader Note:
- Shares of the digital budget, which is itself 61% of the total. Paid media takes 68.6% of digital and owned or earned media 31.2%. SEO at 8.9% is the largest owned or earned channel, ahead of email at 7.4%.
- Evidence:
- Self-reported behaviour
- Vendor interest:
- Low
- Sample:
- Gartner CMO Spend Survey respondents across 11 countries and 10 major industries; mix of 42% B2B, 23% B2C, and 35% even mix B2B/B2C; mean annual revenue $5.7B. Some breakout charts show industry sample sizes such as consumer products (n=43), manufacturing (n=52), pharma (n=32), financial services (n=50), retail (n=36), insurance (n=43), media (n=31), healthcare (n=42), travel and hospitality (n=37), and IT/business services (n=36).
Reader Note:
Evidence:
Vendor interest:
Sample:Good for
A rough sense of size and direction, and deciding what to look at first.
Not for
- Exact numbers, or saying that one thing caused another.
- This is an aggregated or average number that covers very different cases. Real results in a particular segment may differ.
- The source never says how this number was measured.
- The source says how much it looked at, but not how any of it was chosen.
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