Free – Two-Minute Benchmarking – No Score, Two Facts
Underspending or overspending across ad channels for your industry?
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Across roughly 150,000 measured marketing-ROI observations, half of planned channel investments turned out to be too low to pay back fully.3 While this tool can’t tell you how to adjust your spend, it can tell you two things: how your budget sits against the market average and how your cost benchmarks against your industry average.
- US market measured
- $298bn
- Industries
- 7
- Independent sources
- 7
Every figure is independently published and referenced below. AdRoll does not own this data. See the method.
Cross-channel Ad Budget Benchmarking
FreeWe don't have a defensible benchmark for that industry. The free sources this tool runs on cover seven categories; yours isn't one of them, and borrowing the nearest neighbour would give you a number that looks precise and isn't.
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Mix overlap
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of your budget sits where the US market average puts it
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Your cost is
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the median for your industry
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Lower is better. Bars scaled to the larger of the two.
Two separate measurements, deliberately not combined into one score. The report says what each can and can't tell you.
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Your Cross-channel Ad Budget Benchmark
1 · What we measured
Mix overlap
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Cost position
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These are not combined into a single score, and no dollar figure is put on them. Doing that would need weights nobody has published, and a spend multiplier built from invented weights is a guess wearing a decimal point. What each one is worth to you depends on your margins and your attribution, which is the conversation at the end of this report.
2 · Your cost against your industry 4
3 · Your mix against the US market 1,2
Share of monthly budget, as you set it above, against the US market average.
| Format | Your mix | US market | Change |
|---|
4 · Underinvestment risk 3
5 · Brand versus activation 5
6 · Your next 90 days
7 · What this can't see
Four inputs buy a direction, not an audit.
Get the version that answers these
Every gap above closes with your actual per-format spend and your attribution model — the difference between an estimate and a figure you can take to a budget meeting.
8 · References
No AdRoll data is used anywhere in this report.
FAQ
Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs)
Where to find cross channel advertising benchmarks by industry?
This tool is a great resource for many industry benchmarking averages. Input your data above to get your free report.
I see my benchmark. How do I know if I’m underinvesting for my brand?
Underinvestment shows up as a channel that looks efficient but is too small to matter. Good ROI on a budget too low to break through. Across roughly 150,000 measured marketing-ROI observations, 50% of planned channel investments were too low for maximum payback, with a median shortfall of 52%; brands that closed the gap improved ROI by a median of 50% (Nielsen, 2022).
- Digital video — 66% of plans underinvested
- Display — 60% of plans underinvested
- Social — 43% of plans underinvested
I found where my ad spend is most ineffective. Should I cut it entirely or move it between channels?
Move it. In the same dataset, about 25% of channel investments were too high, by a median of 32% but trimming that excess improved channel ROI by only about 4% while losing sales volume, against roughly 50% ROI upside from fixing underinvestment. The asymmetry is the whole argument: reallocation pays several times what cutting does, so optimize the mix before you cut the total.
Does last-click attribution overstate my best-performing channel?
Almost certainly, and the size of it has been measured by the industries that benefit from it. Affiliate incrementality testing finds 18–24% of conversions attributed to affiliate would have happened anyway. Broadening attribution to include offline sales has been shown to raise average ROAS by 42% across 44,000+ campaigns. And 30% of paid search clicks are driven by other advertising, most of it video. A model that credits the last touch will always over-reward the channel closest to the sale.
Is this benchmarked against the best advertisers or the average?
The average, and deliberately so. No public source segments channel allocation by performance — that requires advertiser-level spend joined to outcomes, which only a platform holds. So this compares you to how the US market as a whole allocates, not to a top quartile. It’s the weaker claim and the only sourceable one. Worth knowing too that the top 10 companies account for 84.1% of the revenue that mix is built from, so it describes where money goes at platform scale rather than prescribing for a mid-market advertiser.
How this is calculated. Two comparisons, reported separately and never blended. Mix overlap is the share of your budget that sits where the US market average puts it. Cost position is your implied cost per acquisition as a multiple of the median cost per lead for your industry. There is no composite score, no estimated dollar figure and no confidence band, because there is no published distribution behind these figures to build one from. No AdRoll data is used. Figures are third-party benchmarks and are not guarantees of performance. Sources: IAB/PwC Internet Advertising Revenue Report, full-year 2025 · OAAA full-year 2025 results · Nielsen, The 2022 ROI Report · WordStream/LocaliQ Google Ads Benchmarks 2026 · Binet & Field, The Long and the Short of It (IPA). Each is cited in full in the report's references.