• ClickZ , Thursday, December 20, 2007 12:02 PM

Kevin Lee serves up ammunition for all you search pros that want a bigger chunk of the marketing budget for 2008. At the year-end planning, forecasting or "ways we made you more money in 2007" meeting, sprinkle some of these stats into your presentation as a justification for why you need more dollars for search.

Seasonal spikes in queries and search traffic driven by offline marketing efforts will warrant having an extra "slush fund" for paid search -- because you can't forecast every time that clicks will ramp up.

As the engines constantly improve relevancy, average CTRs will increase -- and if you've done your work, so will conversions. Average CPCs may also rise as more competitors get into the market and test their overall PPC strategy (including landing pages and ad copy), and drive up the max bids for everyone involved.

Lastly, mobile, video and social media ads will become more widespread within paid search, and those formats naturally cost more than text ads.

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