You pay for eleven tools. You open four of them. One of the remaining seven renews in March and you have not logged into it since the person who bought it left the company.

That is the median experience, and there is now enough public research to say so with numbers attached.

The number

Gartner’s 2025 Marketing Technology Survey found that marketers actively use 49% of their martech stack’s capabilities, and that only 15% of organizations qualify as high performers, meaning they hit strategic goals and show positive ROI.

Half. You are buying two of everything and using one.

The trajectory is stranger than the number. Utilization sat at 58% in 2020, fell to 42% in 2022, bottomed at 33% in 2023, and recovered to 49% in 2025. Spending did not follow that curve downward. Martech still accounted for roughly 22% of the average marketing budget in 2025.

The money kept flowing while the usage fell through the floor. Somebody absorbs the difference between what got bought and what gets used, and on a small team, that somebody is you.

Why this lands hardest on small teams

Think of your stack like a gym membership that renews whether or not you show up, except there are eleven of them and three were bought by someone else.

The martech landscape reached 15,505 products in 2026, up less than 1% from the year before, with 1,488 products added and 1,367 removed. The category has stopped growing and started churning. In 2025, 77% of newly added solutions were AI-native.

That churn is why your stack accumulates. Every quarter brings a new AI tool that solves one narrow slice of your Instagram or Facebook workflow. Each one is cheap enough to expense without a conversation. None of them talk to the others. Large teams have a procurement function that catches this. You have a corporate card and a deadline.

Gartner has pointed to overlap among marketing technology solutions as a leading impediment to utilization, cited by 30% of respondents. Overlap is what happens when nobody is auditing, and auditing is the first thing cut when one person runs six channels.

Score your own stack

Answer these six honestly. Give yourself the number in brackets.

1. How many marketing tools do you personally log into in a typical month?

Under 3 [0]   ·   3 to 5 [1]   ·   6 to 8 [2]   ·   9 or more [3]

2. How many hours a week do you spend moving data between tools or reconciling numbers that disagree?

Under 1 [0]   ·   1 to 3 [1]   ·   4 to 7 [2]   ·   8 or more [3]

3. In the last year, has a decision been delayed or made wrong because two tools reported different numbers?

No [0]   ·   Not sure [1]   ·   Yes [3]

4. What share of your Instagram and Facebook creative gets tested in a structured way before you put spend behind it?

Most of it [0]   ·   About half [1]   ·   Under a quarter [2]   ·   None [3]

5. How long from creative concept to live campaign?

Under a day [0]   ·   1 to 3 days [1]   ·   4 to 7 days [2]   ·   Two weeks or more [3]

6. Were you involved in the decision to buy the tools you use every day?

I chose them [0]   ·   I was consulted [1]   ·   They arrived and I was told to use them [3]
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0 to 4. Your stack is working. Skip the audit and go do something useful.

5 to 10. Coordination cost is building quietly. One or two tools are probably redundant. For each tool, ask what it does that nothing else does, where data moves by hand, and what would break if you cancelled it tomorrow. Cut what fails all three.

11 to 18. Your tools consume a meaningful share of your working week, and the numbers you report to leadership are ones you do not fully trust. That is a structural problem, and adding a twelfth tool will make it worse.

Question 4 is the one to sit with. Creative that ships untested is the most expensive habit on this list, because you find out it did not work by watching the spend.

Where Clarvos lands on this

The 49% number exists because tools get bought one at a time and never get connected.

Clarvos runs Discover, Create, Test, Launch in one place. Discover draws on 5,000+ cultural topics tracked daily, so creative starts from what people are paying attention to this week. Create builds the Instagram and Facebook assets. The Customer Simulator tests them against 500 proprietary customer segments before spend goes behind them, which is the step question 4 asks about and the step small teams skip.

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One ask

We are running our own research into what tool sprawl costs practitioners specifically, because the published numbers all survey CMOs. If you scored yourself above, you have already answered most of it. The full survey takes four minutes, and we will send you the benchmark when it publishes.

_{Sources. Utilization, high-performer share, and overlap figures: Gartner Marketing Technology Survey (2025) and prior years. Martech budget share: Gartner CMO Spend Survey (2025). Landscape counts and AI-native share: Marketing Technology Landscape and State of Martech, Scott Brinker and Frans Riemersma (2025 and 2026).}

Part of an ongoing Clarvos series on evaluating AI vendors and building a smarter ad tech stack.