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.