Our Take
Awareness and conversion still command nearly two-thirds of media spend, which tells you that attribution and mid-funnel optimization remain unsolved problems in most marketing organizations.
Why it matters
Marketing teams are still spending like the funnel is linear and measurable at the top and bottom, which suggests either that retention and consideration work is genuinely less valuable or that it's too hard to measure and optimize. Knowing which is true changes your budget allocation strategy.
Do this week
Marketing leaders: audit your current media spend by funnel stage this week so you can identify whether your allocation matches Gartner's benchmark or whether you are an outlier.
Gartner's breakdown of marketing media spend
Gartner surveyed marketing teams and found that awareness and conversion activities account for 62.6% of total media spend (per Gartner). The survey does not break out the remaining 37.4%, so the allocation across consideration, retention, and other mid-funnel activities remains opaque from this data.
This is a vendor-published finding with no disclosed sample size, geographic scope, or industry breakdown in the available excerpt.
What this concentration tells you about marketing infrastructure
Two-thirds of spend clustering at the top and bottom of the funnel is a symptom, not a cause. It signals that most organizations either cannot measure mid-funnel activity with confidence or have decided those tactics do not move the needle.
The alternative reading: awareness and conversion are genuinely the highest-ROI activities and everything else is optimization at the margin. Without segment data, channel breakdowns, or performance outcomes, Gartner's aggregate number does not settle that debate.
What matters more than the 62.6% figure itself is the implication: if your team is spending significantly outside this range, you should ask whether you have evidence that contradicts the market consensus or whether you are simply funding activities you cannot measure.
Questions to ask your marketing operations team
First: what does your current spend distribution look like by funnel stage? If you do not have that answer, you cannot assess whether Gartner's benchmark applies to your business.
Second: does your awareness spending correlate with downstream conversion? If you are in the 62.6% camp but your cost per acquisition is climbing, the problem is not the benchmark—it is your unit economics. You need to reweight toward consideration or retention.
Third: does your team have reliable attribution across channels and stages? If mid-funnel spend is underfunded relative to what the data supports, the blocker is usually not strategy—it is measurement. Fix the tracking layer before you rebalance the budget.