Survey Proves Online Advertising Will Be Less Hurt Than Other Mediums

SearchEngineWatch has reporting on the results of quite an interesting survey about how the economic downturn is supposed to affect marketing budgets for various businesses. Quite understandably this is the question that bothers the entire internet industry now as we are trying to figure out if anything ad-supported (both blogs and startups) will be able to survive the recession or if we should start packing our possessions and moving to some other businesses.

The survey has been carried out by eMetrics (organizer of the Marketing Optimization Summit) to see how marketing budgets will be affected – if they will remain the same, will be affected negatively or positively instead – and which advertising channels will be affected the most.

The most reassuring part of the survey results is that 60.3% of budgets will remain unchanged – which gives us some more reasons to hope for the best. But unfortunately much more budgets will shrink (34.5%) compared to the budgets that will grow (5.1%). Of course this means that the overall amount of money spent on marketing will shrink – but at least the situation does not seem to be as bad as our worst expectations are.

Also it is important to note that different advertising channels will be affected in different ways with some of them to suffer more than the others. From the chart below you can see that social media advertising will see the highest decrease in budgets but it is still only at 14.5% of budgets to decrease:

But as you can see from the two graphs above, while a total of 34.5% of budgets will be reduced overall, only 10-15% of budgets for various online channels will be cut as well. This must mean that advertising spend will be cut more in the traditional advertising mediums like TV or outdoors while online advertising will be relatively less damaged.

It is also important that the mantra of CPC having better chances to stay healthy compared to CPM in the sluggish economy seems to be finding yet another proof here. We seem to constantly repeat these days that marketing and advertising will be important during any crisis period (and often more important than during a regular time) but advertisers will be more willing to pay for what they can see efficiency of – and the number of clicks throughs to your site is easier to grasp than some abstract number of eyeballs that your banner was pushed to.

The confirmation from the survey is that as many as 80.4% of all marketers interrogated said that the senior managers of their companies started to pay more attention to web analytics during the past 6 months – obviously trying to figure out how efficient their marketing efforts are.

In general I think the survey definitely proves our predictions and means that while we should definitely expect some bad affect of the economy on ad-supported online businesses, we definitely should not expect to see a complete collapse.

The full report is available for anyone to read here in pdf.

Photo by ceris42 used under Creative Commons.