Marketing & SEO

US internet advertising revenue reached $294.6 billion in 2025, up 13.9%, according to the IAB/PwC report, with social media ads up 32.6% to $117.7 billion and search up 11% to $114.2 billion. WPP Media expects global ad revenue to grow 8.9% to $1.3 trillion in 2026, and Alphabet, Meta and Amazon control 57.6% of the market outside China. Prices are rising too: Meta's average price per ad was up 14% in Q3 2026 and Google's cost per click up 4%.

Search is still the core of online marketing spend: US search ads earned $114.2 billion in 2025 according to IAB and PwC, and Google Search brought Alphabet $63.35 billion in Q3 2026 alone. Hiring help cost about $2,917 a month on average, or $111 an hour, in Ahrefs's poll of 439 SEO providers, last updated in 2024. AI answers are cutting clicks: Pew Research Center found users clicked a result on 8% of Google visits with an AI summary against 15% without one.

In Litmus's 2025 State of Email survey, 35% of companies earned $10 to $36 for every $1 spent on email and another 35% earned more than $36, while 21% did not measure ROI at all. Omnisend's 2026 report shows automated emails were 2% of sends but 30% of email revenue in 2025, and Brevo found automated emails averaged a 7.39% click-through rate against 2.27% for standard campaigns. Gartner puts total marketing budgets at 7.8% of company revenue in 2026.