Funnel survey: 36% of marketers keep funding channels they doubt.

More than a third of in-house marketers say they have kept paying for a channel they believed wasn't working because its numbers looked too good to cut. The finding comes from Playing defense, published on 29 October by Funnel and Ravn Research.

Funnel surveyed 233 marketers, mostly in-house, and interviewed five agency leaders in the US and Europe. Over the past two years, 60% said they had chosen a safer, more provable strategy over a riskier one they thought would work better, 59% had prioritised activity because it was easier to measure, and 58% had rejected an idea because they couldn't estimate its impact in advance. Some 61% admitted picking a metric because it told a better story. Eighty per cent feel at least moderate pressure to justify their value, and 84% rarely or never put real budget behind unproven ideas.

Costs are part of the squeeze. Customer acquisition costs rose for 56% over the past year, while return on ad spend was flat for 41% and fell for 24%. Paid media takes 41% of marketing budgets on average, and Google and Meta together get 47% of that. Organic search was the channel most often named as underperforming, at 42%. Respondents estimate they have lost 22% of organic traffic to zero-click search, though 68% have not tried to measure it.

The survey has gaps that PPC Land flags. Funnel gives no fieldwork dates, no country breakdown and no split between in-house and agency answers, and it sells measurement tools, so it has a stake in the conclusion. Only 9% of in-house teams combine marketing mix modelling, incrementality testing and attribution.

The pattern will be familiar in the Gulf, where many brands lean heavily on platform-reported results. Teams that can show incremental effect, even with simple holdout tests, are better placed to defend a brave idea when budgets tighten.