The State of Digital Advertising 2019 report released by analysts at SEM platform providers Marin Software finds that 2019 digital ad spend across industries was allocated like this:
- Paid search 39%
- Paid social 19%
- Display 15%
- YouTube 11%
- eCommerce 10%
- Mobile/In App 9%
Top strategic goals reported were:
- Increase brand awareness 25%
- Enhance CX 22%
- Embrace omnichannel marketing 20%
Top tactical goals were:
- Deliver personalization 20%
- Embrace social media 19%
- Optimize paid search 19%
- Manage campaigns better 19%
Top challenges in search:
- Hitting volume targets 29%
- Hitting ROI or ROAS targets 28%
- Integrating product feeds 27%
Top challenges in social:
- Attribution 28%
- Producing quality creative 26%
- Brand safety 26%
Google was rated "most trusted publisher" with a score of 4.5/5, followed by YouTube with 4.3/5.
Top 3 industry challenges most impacting business:
- Data privacy/Tracking restrictions/Ad blocking 22%
- Video advertising 22%
- Visual search 21%
Top trend: 84% said they use or plan to use Google Responsive Search Ads because they produce more clicks and conversions vs. Expanded Text Ads.
Most effective social ad format:
- Video 32%
- Image 26%
- Stories 23%
- Carousel ads 19%
Results are based on a survey of 460 digital marketing managers reporting $1M-$49M in annual digital ad spend across most major industries, B2B and B2C about equally.
Comment:
Marin being in the "SEM platform" business could skew the results in favor of paid search, but probably not enough to change the rank-ordering of media they found. And their sample is of pretty good size measured by both numbers of respondents and aggregated spend. It bothers me though that top 3 strategic goals don't include "sell more stuff" or "add to bottom line". Are these marketers too far from the top? I have to wonder how owners and CEOs of these companies would have answered that question.
- David
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