PPC & SMO spending expected to rise in 2010

In 2010, Interactive Advertising will Cannibalize Traditional Media & redefine your Business, both on-line and off-line. From 2010 onwards, old sites with good rank will earn solid traffic, and it going to be even harder for start-ups and upstarts to beat the established web sites. Interactive marketing can represent 20% of all internet marketing spend in 2014 as on-line marketers shift money away from traditional media towards search marketing, display advertising, email marketing, social media and mobile marketing. This cannibalization of traditional media will bring about a decline in overall advertising budgets, death to obsolete agencies, a publisher awakening, and a new identity for agencies and search engines.

SEO trails only social media and online video as places where marketers will be shifting with special focus on conversion rate optimization. Currently, SEO outpace PPC in terms of CAGR but it is hard to get a balance between the share of clicks SEO commands and the fraction of spend it receives. In fact, SEO as a percentage of total search marketing spend is going to drop as it gets higher risk of negative or neutral ROI, especially as compared to PPC and Google's CPA offerings.

Google also seems to be suppressing the organic results & displaying local ads above the local listings and it continues to try and drive more users to their ads and make it harder for SEOs to manipulate organic rankings. Organic rankings may end up below the fold on the majority of SERPs. The next big idea for Google could be language search, buying the micro-blogging service Twitter, watch Bing and Yahoo merge. What is your idea?