There’s nothing like a good stat to get a marketer’s heart pounding. Whether you use them as information, inspiration, or benchmarks, it’s always good to have some industry-specific numbers at your fingertips as you adjust and optimize your 2019 strategy and campaigns. Here are just a few of the stats and trends we’ve come across this year that have given us more than food for thought.

Stats

SEO Tribunal is on the ball with numbers for 2019. Including:

40% of brands planned to increase their PPC budget for 2019. And what’s the easiest way to get more budget allocated to marketing altogether? Prove your worth by showing your direct contribution to ROI, which we wrote about in Why you need to align marketing and sales right now .

SEO Tribunal also shared this strategy-shaping stat: “Approximately 36% of mobile searches are local. This stat proves that PPC campaigns that are optimized for local will bring you an impressive ROI. Use Google’s geographical bid modifiers and focus on high-performing areas. You can also use city-specific landing pages.”

SEO consulting firm Sativant says PPC marketing is alive and thriving (yes, we know!). “Roughly 52 percent of people shopping online prefer to click on paid advertisements atop Google’s search engine results pages.”

Sativant also says content marketers are about to get really busy. “From 2018 to 2019, the total number of devices around the world with ad blockers rose from 142 million to upwards of 615 million.” Marketers will have to look for new ways to reach customers, like a solid content strategy.

Performance marketing agency Valve and Meter rounded up some great stats focused on our favorite – ROI:

• For every $1 spent on Google Adwords, businesses earn an average revenue of $2 (Google).

• Ad spending is increasing. According to SocialMediaToday, 72 percent of marketers are spending more on social ads in 2018 and 60 percent of marketers are spending more on text ads and mobile ads in 2018.

• According to Formstack , PPC ads are one of the top three generators of on-page conversions.

• 65 percent of all clicks made by users who intend to make a purchase go to paid ads (Wordstream).

Trends

If you haven’t already reviewed our Benchmark Report , we rounded up the most important PPC trends in 2018 that will affect your 2019 strategy.

Smart Insights shares a great point that marketers should start thinking beyond traditional “Google it” search. The post quotes Head of Marketing at Ahrefs , Tim Soulo, who says, "The year 2019 is the perfect time to realize that 'search presence' doesn't imply Google alone. You should start expanding your efforts towards every big platform that have search functionality.

• Can people find you on YouTube?

• Can they find you on SlideShare?

• What about Apple App Store or Google Play Store?

• What about eBay and Amazon?

• What will they hear when they ask questions to Alexa, Google Assistant, and Siri?

• What about Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram? Those platforms have search functionality too.”

Disruptive Advertising suggests marketers get to know your whole marketing funnel (and we so agree). The agency writes, “Given the challenges of creating an effective attribution model, many businesses tend to look at marketing channels in silos. This, however, is a mistake.

Without a good multi-touch attribution model, only low-funnel marketing channels like paid search will ultimately deliver a good return-on-ad-spend. However, if you only run paid search ads, you’ll end up conceding a lot of important business to competitors who are targeting their customers at all phases of the buying cycle. The good news is, while creating and maintaining a useful multi-touch attribution model takes work, most of your competitors probably aren’t doing it, either.”

Wordstream , in a roundup of predictions shared by PPC experts, pinpointed video as an ever-increasing important piece of the marketing mix pie. Navah Hopkins, Services Innovation Strategist at Wordstream says marketers should emphasize social video in their 2019 marketing strategies since they’re gaining increasing placement on results pages. “Even if you don’t want to put ad spend into video (average cost per view is $0.02), you can still leverage YouTube as an audience target for your search campaigns,” she said.

Campaign management company Aori calls out the premiere of Google Responsive Search Ads as a major deal for 2019. The feature makes creating a host of ads incredibly easy. If you haven’t already tried them out, check out our post How to Use Google's New Responsive Display Ads Features in Your Next Campaign for help on getting started.

Search Engine Journal talked to 28 experts and turned up some great insights in their ebook, like:

Aaron Levy of Elite SEM says this is the year the keyword dies, as marketers focus more on context and people. “It’s been a long time coming; search engines have given us too many additional levers to handle along with keywords. I believe next year will the beginning of the end for keywords as a primary search lever.”

And when it comes to PPC spend, Wesley MacLaggan, SVP of Marketing at Marin Software urges marketers to diversify. “We expect Amazon to continue its hot streak in 2019, with Sponsored Product Ads and other formats being a key aspect to a successful PPC strategy, especially for CPG and retail brands.”

Social Media Explorer believes more and more tasks will be offloaded to automation, like bidding. “Bidding is a very time-intensive task for people. If account managers can offload this task to some highly efficient bidding tools, then they can focus more of their efforts on areas that can help with growth and overall performance.” Check out AdStage’s Automate product , which can take over repetitive tasks so you can focus on what really matters, like strategy.

So much changed in digital marketing in just the last year, we’re interested to see how things are shaping up 6 months, and even a year from now.