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Marketing budgets rose 18% in H1 2026 as click costs fell and spending moved beyond Google and Meta

New data from marketing intelligence platform Billy Grace shows marketing budgets grew by nearly a fifth in the first half of 2026, even as the cost of a click fell by more than a tenth, defying assumptions that online advertising has become more expensive.

Tracking a matched cohort of hundreds of advertisers across the UK, Europe and the US, each active in both H1 2025 and H1 2026, Billy Grace found the typical business increased paid media investment by 17.5% year on year, while paying 10.8% less per click and seeing click-through rates rise 13%. Two in three advertisers in the group spent more than the year before, and despite the extra spending, the cost of reaching 1,000 people barely moved, rising just 1.3%.

The surprising shift away from Google and Meta

The data points to a shift away from the two platforms that have anchored most media plans for the past decade. Google's share of the typical advertiser's budget fell from 62% to 57% year on year, with the balance moving first to Meta and increasingly into smaller platforms. TikTok investment across the group grew 65%, Reddit's grew 650% from a small base, and Bing, Pinterest and YouTube all posted double-digit growth. On every one of those channels, more advertisers adopted it than dropped it.

Lead generation advertising scaled the most

Results varied by objective and sector. Lead-generation advertisers scaled hardest, raising budgets by 26% and winning almost 50% more clicks at a cost per click down 21%, the cheapest in the market. Ecommerce advertisers grew orders by around 10% while holding cost per acquisition flat. Travel, transport and hospitality businesses posted the sharpest rebound in spending, up 63%, while industrial and energy was the only sector to cut budgets.

"When budgets are rising and costs are falling in the same market, standing still is the one thing advertisers can't afford," said Mitch Voskuilen, co-founder and CEO of Billy Grace. "The businesses that got ahead this year weren't necessarily the ones who spent the most. They were the ones who treated a flat budget as a real cut, tested new channels while they were still cheap, and judged results on the full picture rather than whichever number a platform hands back."

The figures come from Billy Grace's H1 2026 benchmark report, which measures advertiser performance through the company's Unified Marketing Measurement model, combining marketing-mix modelling with multi-touch attribution to capture the impact of channels that last-click reporting misses. Billy Grace is an Amsterdam-founded marketing intelligence platform used by agencies and brands across Europe, the UK and the US. The full report is available at billygrace.com.

This was posted in Bdaily's Members' News section by Rob McDonald .