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You click. You buy. An advertiser pays. In an over-simplified sense, that’s how desktop digital advertising works. That system doesn’t work as well on mobile, however, where an estimated 40% of clicks are accidents (or fraudulent) and advertisers are still wary of their value. Research firm eMarketer projects that advertisers will dedicate just 2% of their budgets to mobile advertising this year--even though customers are increasingly logging in through their mobile devices.

At Google and other companies that sell advertising, the golden question has become not how to get consumers to simply click more mobile ads, but how to measure effectiveness beyond the click--even if that means tracking offline actions or purchases made on another screen.

“There’s this incredibly new, incremental engagement point called ‘out and about’ or called ‘sitting on public transportation’ or called ‘at home on the couch in front of the TV' and these are places where we didn’t used to be connected,” Jason Spero, Google's head of mobile ads for the Americas, tells Fast Company.

paid social media advertising will increase from $4.6 billion this year to $9.2 billion in 2016

"native" ads running on social media sites—contextual promotions that are baked into sites in a customized fashion—will total $1.53 billion this year while growing to $3.85 billion in 2016

During that time, BIA/Kelsey prognosticates, social display ads will grow slightly slower, lifting from $3 billion to $5.4 billion. It's the first time the 25-year-old company has broken out social native versus social display spend.

Unwelcome news for marketers in France who aim to appeal to people on social networks: A majority of those consumers find such ads unpleasant, useless and poorly targeted.

Sixty-eight percent of web users polled said they found advertising on social sites “intolerable, “ and 59% said it was pointless because it did not reflect their interests or buying habits.

Moreover, ads on these sites seemed to be less effective than most other kinds of online advertising. Only 19% of web users polled by IFOP and Generix said they had ever bought a product or service as a result of seeing an ad on social media, compared to 60% who had made a purchase prompted by an email.

A new study by Facebook brings some big news that, curiously, at first blush might not seem like much news at all. It's this: If you want to create successful ads for the social network, just do the same thing you would do if you were advertising on TV. Or in magazines. Or on the radio.

"Marketers were asking us, 'Are the fundamentals of advertising on Facebook the same as the fundamentals elsewhere?'" Bruich says. The results of the study point to yes, he says, and that means "the experience they've built up over the years and the instincts they've had can be applied to making more successful ads on Facebook."

Bruich is presenting the results of the study in a paper called "What Traditional Principles Matter When Designing Social" at the Advertising Research Foundation's Audience Measurement 7.0

Tumblr blogs tend to lack the glossy, professional, high-minded design of other social networking sites, including the behemoth that is Facebook and the SMS-inspired Twitter. If anything, these teenaged Tumblrs harken back to earlier web days where users built their own pages on AngelFire and Geocities, with atrocious backgrounds, upgraded cursors, and dancing GIF images galore. GIFs, in fact, are so hugely popular on Tumblr that the company even began experimenting with GIF-based ads.

According to Pew Internet’s study from earlier this year, 13 percent of Internet users ages 18-29 use Tumblr, while only 5 percent of those 30-49 do, 3 percent of those 50-64

Demographic data from Quantcast further drives home just how youthful a site Tumblr has become. 21 percent of its audience is under 18, 30 percent is 18 to 24, and 22 percent is 25 to 34

According to a new poll of U.S. marketers conducted by Gartner, corporate websites are ranked as the top digital activity for marketing “success” — beating marketing on social networks such as Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn. Social media marketing, however, ranked as the next most important activity, equal in importance to online advertising.

The survey, conducted in November and December of 2012, polled a relatively small sample of 250+ marketers from U.S.-based companies with more than $500 million in annual revenue

Design, development and maintenance of the corporate website was cited by 45% of survey respondents as contributing to marketing success, with marketing on social networks such as Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter cited by 43%. Digital/online advertising was also cited by 43%

say ads that are disguised as content have higher click-through and engagement rates than intrusive banners because they’re contextual and have quality conte

a new survey due out today by Harris Interactive for MediaBrix, a social and mobile ad firm, says otherwise. Harris asked online adults what they thought about three native ad formats—Twitter’s promoted tweets, "Sponsored Stories" on Facebook, and video ads that appear to be content. According to the survey, a majority found the ads negatively impacted or had no impact on their perception of the brand being advertised.

45 percent found promoted tweets misleading, while 57 percent and 86 percent said the same about sponsored stories and video ads, respectively.

traditional advertisers have treated Facebook and other social networks as traditional media: Something where a click should have a measurable return on investment. Advertisers who “get” social media understand that it's about strengthening relationships with their biggest fans, and hoping those fans can turn their friends onto the product as well.

The ComScore report is littered with the phrase “Fans and Friends of Fans,” signaling the strong emphasis successful brands are taking to cater to the people who can implicitly endorse them to others. If one of your friends is a fan of Starbucks, you’re more likely to be exposed to a Starbucks message on Facebook. And if you’re exposed to a Starbucks message on Facebook, you’re 38% more likely to make a purchase in the next four weeks.

too many brands, the report argues, still focus on accumulating the most number of likes instead of figuring out how best to engage those fans. It’s not to say that fan accumulation isn’t important; it is the crucial starting point. But too many brands treat it like an end game instead of a first step in getting to the real end game - the return on investment of time and money in building a social media presence.

Whoever invented the term "social media" didn't do the world a favor because, while that's the accepted term now, it's completely wrong, and I believe it's part of what drives this disconnect. Social media is not really media. I think of it as a channel, more like a telephone than a TV commercial. And when's the last time a CEO asked, "How are we monetizing the telephone?" And has a CEO ever threatened to not invest in phones because the company can't make money off of them?

Truth is, companies monetize the telephone quite well, and if you don't think so, take away your company's phones and see what happens to your top and bottom lines. Likewise, companies can monetize social media, but they have to stop thinking about it as a way to market products and start thinking about it as a way to communicate and build a brand.

Formal research typically takes months and requires healthy investment and long planning cycles. Smart companies are trading in highly rigorous research for quick, nearly scientific data collected through social media platforms.

Twitter has confirmed our scoop with the announcement of Tailored Audiences - its name for retargeted ads. Available globally to all advertisers via a slew of adtech startup partners, advertisers will be able to target recent visitors to their websites with retargeted Promoted Tweets and Promoted Accounts.

Twitter’s users are on mobile. Seventy percent of its ad revenue already comes from the small screens, and it likely follows that a majority of engagement is on mobile, too.

retargeting happens like this. You visit a website, say a travel booking site, and look at a page for buying a flight to Hawaii. You chicken out at the last minute, don’t buy, and navigate away, but the site has dropped a cookie for that Hawaii flight page on your browser. Then, when you visit other sites or social networks that run retargeted ads, they detect that cookie, and the travel site can show you an ad saying “It’s cold in SF. Wouldn’t a vacation to Hawaii be nice?” to try to get you to pull the trigger and buy the flight it knows you were already interested in. But without cookies on mobile, you can’t retarget there… …unless you can tie the identity of a mobile user to what they do on the computer. And Twitter can. It’s one of the few hugely popular services that individuals access from multiple types of devices.

Facebook has created a new way for businesses and developers to target ads to users who have taken an action on Facebook or in an app within a more specific time range. Using the “action spec” targeting capability, which allows advertisers to reach users by the actions they take in Open Graph apps and on Facebook directly, an advertiser could designate a time range shorter than 14 days

a local business might want to reach users who checked into their store within the past week. A developer might want to target users who installed their app in the past three days. A page owner might want to retarget users who viewed one of their page tabs the day before.

Action spec targeting is still a beta feature limited to advertisers working with Preferred Marketing Developers

Facebook users will sit still for ads that, per current reports, will take over your desktop screen and run for 15 seconds, up to three times a day per user. What are the odds of that? 

Initially, the 15-second autoplay ads will appear on Facebook's desktop site; the social network is still working to bring them to its mobile app as well.

Facebook is expected to offer four daily "slots" for its video ads, each targeting a very large demographic: Women over 30 Women under 30 Men over 30 Men under 30

TBG Digital’s CEO Simon Mansell tells me “this is huge news that show mobile is potentially going to be the big revenue driver that Facebook needs, especially because the usage in there.”

According to a new study by TBG Digital on 278,389,453 Sponsored Story ad impressions across 17 clients, mobile news feed Sponsored Stories (the only ads Facebook shows on mobile) have a stunning click-through rate of 1.14% at a $0.86 CPC. That means Facebook earns $9.86 per 1000 impressions (eCPM), and that could actually rise as more advertisers realize the power of mobile Sponsored Stories and compete for impressions there.

Compare those numbers to the desktop news feed Sponsored Stories that get a 0.588% CTR at $0.63 CPC and earn Facebook an eCPM of $3.72, and Facebook is getting 1.93x the CTR and earning 2.65x as much on mobile sponsored stories compared to what it makes on the web.

now brands can serve up ads to users based on the content they're actually tweeting.

keyword-based advertising

advertisers can buy specific keywords to target certain users. "For example: let’s say a user tweets about enjoying the latest album from their favorite band, and it so happens that band is due to play a concert at a local venue," Malhotra explained. "That venue could now run a geotargeted campaign using keywords for that band with a tweet containing a link to buy the tickets. That way, the user who tweeted about the new album may soon see that Promoted Tweet in their timeline letting them know tickets are for sale in their area."

There were 2.4 billion people on the internet at the end of 2012, up 8% from 2011.

While many Facebook advertisers justly focus on the US, UK and Western Europe, a lot can be said about considering other countries.  India, Indonesia and Brazil and Mexico are among the top 5 countries on Facebook according to Socialbakers.

Compared to TV, there is a significant discrepancy in the amount of time consumers spend on mobile devices relative to advertising spend.  While we spend 12 percent of our time on mobile devices, mobile advertising dollars only account for 3 percent of total spending.

social media isn’t only about ROI. And it isn’t only about sales. Social media is about branding, opening channels of communication with customers, building loyalty, being transparent and establishing good will. And if you cover all of those bases, then guess what? If your product or service is worthy, you will most definitely see a return on your investment.

Plenty of companies use social media as an advertising vehicle for their product or service, just as they would with “old” media. But it just doesn’t work that way.

While the finding that trust in ‘traditional’ push marketing techniques (such as banner ads) is at rock bottom in the online world isn’t a surprise, the chart doesn’t make hugely encouraging reading for proponents of social marketing which also languishes near the bottom of the trust index, just above the mobile apps channel. Text message communications were the least trusted, while online banner ads barely rated above spammy SMS in the trust stakes.

The relatively low trust in social marketing tallies with a recent Gartner report that found U.S. marketers ranked spending on the corporate website as more likely to result in “marketing success” than spending on social media sites such as Facebook.

“professionally written online reviews” still carry a huge cachet — at least with U.S. consumers. European consumers are far less trusting of the publishing industry, however (55% vs 33% split on that category).

People who are active on social media are there because it’s a way that they can engage with their friends, family and favorite brands. As a marketer, you have to think about how you use Social Media personally, and then adapt your marketing strategy so that it fits in. When you go from looking at pics of your friend’s kid, to responding to another friend’s event invitation, a post screaming “SALE! SALE!” will stick out like a sore thumb.

Instead, post things that are conversational, or things that are just fun or lighthearted. Remember, this is a platform to build your brand’s identity and personality. People should want to do business with your company because they respect your values, admire your culture or appreciate the hard work you do to create your products and services.

What are Ways You Can Use Social Media to Market?Show images of creative uses/applications of your product. It’s still featuring your product, you just aren’t saying “LOOK AT MY PRODUCT!!!”Ask questions about things relevant to your product or service. If you sell real estate, start a dialogue about your worst moving experience or simply ask: “What does your dream house look like?”Post free advice. Position yourself as an expert. If you clean carpets, maybe you could post about how to get pet stains out of your conference room carpet. You’re not killing business for yourself, because people will still come to you when they don’t want to do it or they will refer you to friends. DIY people will find the tips anyway so they might as well be from you.

advertising technology called remarketing has proven alienating to online consumers. Remarketing, which lets advertisers follow someone around the Internet with a display ad, based on a previous search engine query, specific site visit, or other online action by the user, has increased in popularity in recent years.

The rapid spread of SnapChat--the picture sharing app that auto-deletes photos after ten seconds--shows that young people increasingly understand the need to keep some things secret, or at least to control the visibility and content of their communications. The migration of Millennials away from Facebook to the more anonymous Tumblr may be another sign. And the outcry raised by young Tumblr users in the wake of news that Yahoo! was purchasing the platform--driven by fears of more corporate control and increased advertising--only underscores the point.

Millennials are in the vanguard of mainstream online behavior: they were first on Facebook (after college students invited to the join in its earliest days), followed by their parents. A Millennial move towards greater online secrecy could represent the beginning of a larger shift that warrants additional research.

thousands of so-called virtual assistants - essentially freelance social marketers - who typically offer clients 1,000 likes for about $25. 

"One thing all of these virtual assistants have in common is a large number of fake profiles that they use,” he said. “The average virtual assistant I've seen who does Facebook marketing has at least five Facebook accounts.”

Such deals have proven irresistible to marketers. “Business owners jump on the chance" to get hundreds of likes, said Jayme Pretzloff, online marketing director for Minneapolis-based Wixon Jewelers, "but they don't realize the repercussions of doing this. Facebook has already cracked down on this by changing its Newsfeed rankings based on engagement." Companies' strong engagement with their fans will appear more often in their fans' feeds, he adds.