#2. 2006 budgets – where’s the money going?

While the ranking of tactics by budget investment didn’t change a great deal from 2005, the number of marketers planning ‘substantial investments’ did. Search jumped from 24% up to 38%, and online ads saw the largest increase of marketers projecting substantial increases – from only 16% in 2005 to 36% for 2006.

Here’s how all the tactics fared:

With search on everyone’s mind in 2006, we asked about the percentages of marketers online budgets devoted to that tactic. The ‘average’ online marketing budget sees 34.4% going to search. However, it’s worth noting that the most common percentage spent on search (the mode) was 20%. At the high end, 1 in 4 markets in the survey predicted that they’d spent 65% or more for search in 2006.

The importance of search is also evident in where marketers are planning on spending for measurement and analysis. The top four categories all reflect the increasing importance of search, and its requirements for better analytics of where visitors come from, who they are, and the best methods for converting them.

The chart in full:

#3. RSS, blogs and video will see significant action in 2006

This year for the first time, we asked marketers about their interest in a number of the newer, ‘emerging’ tactics. We asked them which tactics they were spending on, and which they felt were still maturing. Many of these tactics, like podcasting and ad placement in video games, are still in the early adopter phase. Others, like blogging and video ads, seem to be moving into the mainstream of marketing.

Emerging tactics, by the numbers:

We also asked marketers how they’d experiment if given 100k for that purpose. There was a tie at the top between mobile and video. Looking at the charts in concert, it appears that mobile will be the next tactic to make the jump to the mainstream, following video, RSS feeds and blogging.

How would spend 100k on experimenting with new tactics: