Just where will the savvy marketer be allocating budget this year? Could 2008 present an opportunity to take advantage of an increasing trend for your audience to make the internet their first port of call when looking for the goods and services you sell without the need to increase your overall budget?

January is always a long, cold month, but from a business point of view 2008 looks about as inviting as a return trip on a Virgin train.

Retailers are already slashing costs after a dismal Christmas and projections are looking bleak all round due in part to a looming credit crunch that makes budget allocation and achieving bang for buck on that nigh on impossible to decide on.

And so it is reassuring that WPP's GroupM predicts that internet search is expected to contribute up to three quarters of all advertising revenue growth this year. Overall advertising will grow by 6% in 2008, but without the contribution of Google and other search engines, the rate of improvement across other media would be just 1.5%.

Spending online already trounces outdoor media and radio, but this year it will come close to overtaking TV advertising, hitting £3.4 billion with TV revenues forecasted at £3.57 billion.

Still, even as such obvious changes in consumers' habits away from printed media and TV, resulting in soaring online revenues, it's not all a bed of roses for the marketer thinking of scaling down press advertising for instance, and re-allocating budget - perhaps for the first time - to an online campaign.

Part of the reason behind the increase in revenues is Pay-Per-Click "keyword inflation" which for some competitive phrases has resulted in price increases of between 40-60% per click over the past 12 months rather taking the sparkle out of potential financial returns.

And of course, whatever trends individual tracking appears to reveal, on and offline awareness is often intertwined with an eventual response often being originated by another medium in your marketing stable altogether.

Whatever happens this year, it's pretty obvious that internet advertising will get a good deal more competitive and expensive in an increasingly crowded market - unless you avoid the pitfalls with considered, reasoned and experienced guidance of course.

Our advice? It's definitely worth allocating a proportion of your budget online to an organic search engine optimisation and / or pay-per-click campaign - preferably both, but make sure you appoint an agency that can build and manage you a campaign that spreads it across sufficient keywords and phrases so that not only is the campaign continually evolving to improve results, you are achieving sufficient margins on your online advertising in the first place.

And lastly? Re-negotiate your press advertising rates and sizes to help pay for it.