The Week in Review

Mobile Ad Spending Up Nearly 80% in 2010

According to eMarketer, mobile ad spending in the U.S. will reach $743.1 million, up 79 percent from the $416 million spent on mobile ads in 2009. Mobile video ads are expected to grow 124 percent, followed by display with 122 percent growth, search with 122 percent growth and messaging with 79 percent growth. In 2011, mobile ad spending in the U.S. will reach $1.1 billion. (eMarketer)

5 Promotional Tips for Halloween

Halloween is overshadowed by Thanksgiving and Christmas, but that doesn’t mean you should forget to take advantage of the opportunity it presents. Launch promotions early, provide special deals/offers, create a sense of urgency, leverage social media to promote your campaigns and remove expired links. (MailerMailer)

Facebook is No Google

There’s a lot of talk about Facebook overtaking Google as the bigger cash cow. The reasons people give are fairly vague. The truth of the matter is that Google is still far and away the best at turning viewers into revenue, thanks to its closeness to users’ primary activity. (SEO Book)

4 Tips for Avoiding Spam Filters

Marketers should focus on how many e-mails are reaching consumers and being read, not how many didn’t bounce. They should target customers with relevant e-mails, give consumers a way to opt out, use win-back campaigns and clean up sender lists. (Econsultancy)

21 Sure-Fire SEO Strategies

Stop focusing so much on where people mess up and expend yourself on things that work. Among the 21 strategies for generating irresistible SEO benefits are being linkable, creative, memorable, focused, wrong and aggressive. (socalTECH.com)

Google AdWords Offers Dynamic Destination URLs

Google just unveiled an update to ValueTrack, making it easier to track search and content campaigns separately by adding special parameters to destination URLs. (Inside AdWords)

Online Ads Will Rise 12 Percent to End 2010

According to Magna Global, Web ad dollars will reach $25.6 billion by the end of 2010, up by 12.1 percent from 2009. Search will remain the leading recipient of spending, but its share will be on the decline. (paidContent.org)

LiveIntent Adjusts E-mail Messages to Location and Time

LiveIntent, a New York City-based startup, has unveiled a service that allows e-mail marketing messages to deliver customized advertising creative that adjusts to when or where it’s opened, on the fly. This ability to target e-mail creative from advertisers to readers in real time is “very much a distinguishing factor.” (ClickZ)

RadiumOne Uses Social Data for Targeting Ads

RadiumOne is a new ad network that analyzes users’ shared links via URL shorteners, photos, status updates, etc., to serve highly targeted brand ads. It has dubbed its approach “social retargeting.” (Mashable)

iPad, iPhone Have Higher CTRs Than Android

According to new data from Rhythm NewMedia, Apple devices lead Google devices in click-through rates. The iPad received an average CTR of 2.5 percent for interactive pre-roll ads during the third quarter, followed by 1.5 percent for the iPod Touch, 1 percent for the iPhone and 0.75 for Android. (MediaPost)

Brand Campaigns Drive Social Media Following

Numbers from DDB Worldwide and Opinionway Research reveal that 75 percent of fans of brands on Facebook said the impetus that spurred them to join the brand’s page was an invitation or ad from the brand, followed by 59 percent who cited a friend’s invitation and 49 percent who cited personal research. The research also showed that waning interest in the brand, information that was published too frequently and uninteresting information were all major reasons for unsubscribing from brands’ Facebook pages. (eMarketer)

Google Analytics Gets More Visual

Google Analytics just got more friendly for those who don’t like looking at numbers and charts. Its new “In-Page Analytics” view shows a site’s analytics data overlaid on the site. Other analytics providers like ClickTale and Crazy Egg offer similar visual analytics tools, though Google Analytics offers their stuff for free. (ReadWriteWeb)

5 Unique Calls to Action

Here are five unique calls to action that will result in plenty of subscribers and sales: 1) address customer reluctance upfront, 2) think outside the rectangle, 3) an alluring button, 4) interesting copy and 5) continuity. (KISSmetrics)

Facebook Allows You to ‘Like’ Banner Ads

“Like” buttons have been appearing on Facebook’s banner ads. This was a logical, unsurprising move from the social networking giant and its first step toward building out its own ad network. While others have extended social plugins into advertising, (Inside Facebook)

Optimizing PPC Campaigns for Quality Score is Important

PPC discussions don’t revolve around quality score they way they used to, but that doesn’t mean it’s not still important. Don’t disregard quality score, improve it, create tightly themed ad groups, put your keywords in your ads, and test ads to improve your CTR. (Search Engine Watch)

Virtual Goods Are Overtaking Ads

According to Flurry, while the majority of revenue generated from advertising happened during the 2009 holiday periods, during 2010 there’s a noticeable shift toward virtual goods sales. This may reflect advertising agencies’ lukewarm view of the mobile media platform. (Flurry)

Categories as Search-Ranking Factors

Is Google using categories for pages and queries to rank pages in search results? It’s possible that the search engine once did, or currently is. It boils down to a desire to determine relevance, which can also be established via direct matching of keywords, figuring out the intent behind queries and fulfilling situational needs. (SEO by the Sea)

Link Building for SEO Beginners

If you’re just starting to think about how to generate “elusive link juice for your site,” consider these tips: 1) forget about link farms, 2) generate valuable pages with useful content, 3) be interesting, 4) make friends in the industry, 5) use the right anchor text, and 6) make the most of your position. (Econsultancy)

Google News SEO Tips and Ranking Factors

As expected, Google doesn’t make it easy to figure out how they rank things on Google News. Nevertheless, here are some insights. Among them are to submit your articles ASAP, submit your News Sitemap to Google, include your company website when applying to the YouTube partner program, and format your images properly. (Local SEO Guide)

Facebook Event-Sharing is More Valuable than Twitter Sharing

Social commerce is a tricky beast to understand, but Eventbrite is taking a stab at it. The company’s analysis has concluded that when someone shares an event with friends via social media, real dollars are at stake. “Our most recent data shows that over the past 12 weeks, one share on Facebook equals $2.52, a share on Twitter equals $0.43, a share on LinkedIn equals $0.90, and a share through our ‘email friends’ application equals $2.34,” according to the blog post. (Eventbrite)

Barcode Scanning in Amazon’s Sights?

While barcode scanners aren’t yet common, they’re becoming more and more familiar. Amazon knows this and has just added its scanning capability to its iPhone app. Barcode scanning is a way shoppers compare prices, find product reviews and create wish lists. Price comparison in particular is driving the trend. Amazon’s new scanning function is the answer to the question, “Is this cheaper on Amazon?” Barcode scanning figures to be a key component of the mobile realm. (eMarketer)

Google Sees Healthy Mobile and Display Businesses

Google’s quarterly earnings calls rival the importance of industry stats, and their most recent numbers show that its display ad business generated $2.5 billion in revenues in the third quarter, while its mobile ad business generated $1 billion in revenues, both on an annualized basis. Still, search remains “the most monetizable side of the Internet.” (ClickZ)

4 Common Social Media Questions Answered

Will companies go in-house with their social media? What are the disadvantages to using social media? Are companies diving in with a strategy, or are they learning on the fly? Are content curators or creators more valuable? Find the answers here. (ClickZ)

Ranking for Keyword + Cityname

Ranking for keyword + cityname combinations is one of the most difficult tasks in SEO because maps results have a bias against multi-city domains, Web results are getting more geo-sensitive, exact/partial keyword match domains dominate and earning “local” links is harder for multi-city sites. There are solutions, of course, including building the right content, keyword targeting and learning from successful sites. (SEOmoz)

4 Questions to Ask Before Getting Started with PPC Remarketing

If you’re a B2B marketer, ask yourselves these four questions before remarketing via PPC: 1) What are the key performance indicators (KPIs) for this campaign? 2) What is the lead time for your conversion metrics? 3) Can you meet the tracking requirements to make remarketing work? 4) What messaging will your remarketing campaign use? (Search Engine Land)

E-mail Still Preferred Method of Sharing Content

According to a recent study, 86 percent of respondent said they used e-mail to share content, while just 49 percent used Facebook to share content. Users between 18-24 were more likely to use Facebook to share content, but older users preferred e-mail. Meanwhile, 45 percent shared content because they found it interesting/entertaining, and 30 percent shared because they thought it might help the recipients. (eMarketer)

Nearly 70% of Searches ‘Powered By’ Google in September

“Powered By” stats were unveiled by comScore this month, as the company reports that 69.1 percent of searches in the U.S. in September carried organic results from Google, while 23.5 percent were powered by Bing organic results. (comScore)