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In these new mobile settings, maybe success for an ad doesn’t mean lots of clicks or even lots of online purchases. Maybe it means phone calls, or foot traffic to stores. Maybe it means someone searches for something now and later follows up on a desktop computer. Google has been exploring ways to measure all of these possibilities.

aims to turn foot traffic into a measurable outcome of mobile ads, something that it has already done with phone calls. With a click-to-call ad offering, users can click a phone number within their search results to call an advertiser who has sponsored the term.

A Google spokesperson says that on average, campaigns see on average a 6% to 8% increase in average click-through rate when brands include a click-to-call phone number in an ad.

About 30% of restaurant searches and 25% of movie searches take place on mobile devices. About 25% of YouTube traffic is mobile. But according to earnings reports the company filed with the SEC, its cost-per-click fees and profit margins are smaller for mobile advertising products than for similar advertising on its websites.

He argues that it makes more sense to measure effectiveness of mobile advertising by metrics such as reach, frequency, and recall--like TV--than by the same click-through metric on which desktop digital advertising relies.

Facebook's Head of Measurement and Insights, Brad Smallwood, recently made a similar argument for all digital advertising, desktop included. He wrote in a blog post that when brands focus on reach rather than clicks on Facebook, they have 70% higher return on investment from their campaigns. T

Advertising spending in emerging markets is increasing faster than in the worldwide market

Ad budgets in North America grew by 2.1 percent, and recession-hit Europe dropped 1.4 percent — the only region to see a decline.

In terms of total dollars spent, TV is still king with the most spending. The growth in TV market ad spend, like the growth in overall spending, was region-dependent. In the emerging markets of the Middle and Africa, for instance, TV soared 33.8 percent, while it grew only 4 percent in North America.

The evolution of print advertising is also heavily region-dependent, meaning that any predictions about the demise of print might best specify a location. Magazine ad spending actually increased by 7.6 percent in Latin America, for instance, but dropped by 5 percent in the U.S. Newspapers showed a similar difference, increasing by 10.3 percent in Latin America and dropping by 2.1 percent in the U.S.

However, the growth in online advertising was consistently strong around the planet. The Middle East and Africa again led, with 35.2 percent, followed by Latin America at 31.8 percent and Europe at 12.1 percent. Radio also saw growth in every region.

The more you delve into it, the more "native" seems to be a synonym for "good" with regard to advertising.

22 percent of ad clicks are “misclicks,” or accidental clicks, and 18 percent were fraudulent. Those accidental and fraudulent clicks had a conversion rate of less than 0.1%.

A similar study conducted a year ago said 47% of clicks on mobile ads were worthless

Essentially, when you log into your account on your full-size computer, Twitter will analyze the cookies in your browser to see where you’ve been on the non-mobile web. Then, when you log in to that same account on mobile, it can still use your web cookies to hit you with retargeted ads.

mobile phones don’t have the ability to set cookies so you can’t do retargeting.

Facebook only recently began allowing retargeted ads on mobile, and only through a “custom audiences” targeting program separate from FBX.

Lucky for Twitter, most of what people do on it is public, so it doesn’t spark the same privacy concerns as Facebook. Twitter also offers an opt-out of retargeting under Promoted Content on its Security And Privacy settings page. Plus it honors Do Not Track for users that enable it in their browsers.

It’s also recently opened up keyword targeting so advertisers can reach people who’ve tweeted certain words. Between keyword targeting and cookie retargeting, Twitter is breaking out of the demand generation and into the lucrative demand fulfillment part of the advertising funnel where Google’s search ad business lives. Advertisers are willing to pay top dollar if you can deliver them someone ready to buy their product. And there’s no better sign of someone’s intent to buy than having recently visited a site and almost made the purchase already. Cookies could be very tasty for Twitter.

Nearly all the advertisers polled (92%) said they aimed content marketing at their customers, and 54% targeted prospects. Six in 10 also created content designed for journalists or others in the media. The most popular approach—mentioned by 65%— involved placing content on both print and digital platforms, while 43% used only digital channels.

Facebook was the runaway winner when it came to distributing branded content; 84% of advertisers said they had used it, and a further 11% planned to do so in the future.

More than three-quarters (78%) of those polled said they had produced newsletters, and 12% intended to do so, while 74% had posted content on properties such as partner websites. Pinterest was one of the least compelling propositions for these advertisers. Just 8% said they had used it to post content, and 3% planned to do so; 73% said they weren’t even considering it at the moment. Despite the growing enthusiasm for content marketing, content-related budgets remain rather low, judging by this research. More than two in five respondents (42%) reported that their company spent less than SEK1 million ($147,711) on these initiatives, and 24% spent between SEK1 million and SEK5 million ($738,552). Yet only 6% said they had no funds at all for content marketing. In another vote of confidence for content, 53% of advertisers said their content budgets would increase in 2014.

Site users don’t tend to have kids of their own, make somewhere between $0 and $50,000 (66 percent do), have either no college (41 percent) or college backgrounds (48 percent), and tend to reflect a more ethnically diverse makeup.

Ten out of the ten top Hollywood studios advertise on Tumblr now

the U.S. is Tumblr’s top traffic source.

Tumblr’s future, for now, seems to be closely tied to its young adult demographic, their whims, and perhaps even their historical aversion to online ads. This audience has grown up connected, is often skeptical and cynical when it comes to brand advertising

It’s not an easy group to reach, which makes Tumblr’s revenue potential tricky to pin down. Too much or the wrong kind of advertising, and a fickle teen audience may find a new home elsewhere. Though Tumblr is now home to over 100 million blogs, if a good chunk belong to teens, it’s difficult to count that as serious traction –  today’s teens are less committed to their digital creations than adults, having already invented methods like “whitewalling” and “super-logoff” to erase and hide their Facebook pages, and are now turning to “ephemeral” messaging apps like Snapchat, which delete their communications upon viewing.

Tumblr will need to be careful with the results of those advertisers’ efforts. Overdone marketing messages could sour Tumblr’s most engaged users on their online hangout. Done well, however, Tumblr could endear itself to its reblog-happy user base even more, connecting aspirational imagery and content with those who are still young enough to dream they can spend their way into new feelings.

To set up a campaign, advertisers can choose the keywords or phrase they want to target. Next, they can set more specifics, such as the location or gender of a user, or what device he or she is using. Twitter says early tests of this new ad product yielded higher engagement rates. GoPro, for example, saw "engagement rates as high as 11%" when using keywords to target users on Twitter.

Digital video, a component of display-related advertising, brought in $2.3 billion, marking a significant year-over-year increase of 29 percent in 2012, compared to $1.8 billion in 2011. Search revenues in 2012 totaled $16.9 billion or 46 percent of 2012 revenues, up 14.5 percent from $14.8 billion in 2011. Display-related advertising revenues in 2012 totaled $12 billion or 33 percent of 2012 revenues, up almost 9 percent from $11 billion in 2011. Retail advertisers continue to represent the largest category of internet ad spending, accounting for 20 percent in 2012, followed by financial services, which is responsible for 13 percent of the year’s revenues.

For the second year in a row, mobile achieved triple-digit growth year-over-year

Mobile accounted for 9 percent of total internet ad revenue in 2012.

“These record-breaking numbers represent a paradigm shift when it comes to marketers recognizing the role a multiplicity of screens plays in effectively reaching today’s consumers,”

“As Smartphones get smarter, cellular networks get faster and user penetration of smart mobile devices increases, the combination of personalization and location will have tremendous appeal to marketers,”

Performance-based 64.6% $20,491 65.9% $24,093

There's no way to compare the results to people's views on standard banners, because Harris didn’t ask respondents about that format. It did, however, ask the same questions about infomercials and print advertorials, with similar results.

We’re not saying native doesn’t have a place in a marketing mix. We’re saying, that’s not the most effective way to build a brand.”

Of course, there are issues with self-reported surveys, especially one that requires participants to be honest about their views about something as divisive as advertising.

the results also conflict with joint research by Nielsen and Facebook that found that overall, social ads—those served to Facebook users whose Facebook friends are fans of, or interacted with, the advertised brand—generated a 55 percent lift in recall over non-social ads.

“Engagement rates with sponsored stories are substantially higher than other ads on the site, and typically, [people] engage with things they find relevant and interesting,” Bruich said. “We do not see any evidence that they negatively impact people’s experience on the site.”

It’s also worth noting that Harris showed respondents generic examples of sponsored stories, not examples of actual sponsored stories people are served on their own Facebook news feeds, where the ads are aligned with their personal experiences and preferences.

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.

People had the strongest reaction to sponsored video ads, with 85 percent saying they

negatively impacted or had no impact on their perception of the brand. Sixty-two percent said the same of Promoted Tweets and 72 percent of Sponsored Stories. The survey also revealed that 45 percent found Promoted Tweets misleading, while 57 percent and 86 percent said the same about Sponsored Stories and video ads, respectively.

Corporate websites perhaps have a key reputational role to play in the marketing mix, supplementing and underpining social media marketing spending — by providing reassurance of a brand’s professionalism where a Facebook page can provide evidence of user engagement/approval (or otherwise).

The results indicate that corporate websites still have a key role to play when it comes to marketing a company’s offerings, despite the big role also played by social media. It’s also notable that mobile marketing is still relatively low down the priorities list, with an aggregated percentage of 24%. It’s still far better than the poor unloved (and doubtless rarely updated) company blog, though, with just 6%.

The survey asked respondents to rank different marketing activities first, second and third in importance, collating all three preferences to get the overall percentage. On first place preference, corporate websites came out joint top with online advertising, cited by 18% apiece as the most important activity. Social media slumped in importance on this measure — cited by just six per cent of respondents as the most important activity (and second only to the company blog):

The top priorities for increased budgets in 2013 are commerce experiences, social and mobile marketing, and content creation and management

And look at Facebook’s desktop ads as a whole, including both Sponsored Stories and the traditional sidebars ads. They’re getting just 0.083% CTR at a $0.88 CPC earning Facebook an eCPM of only $0.74, so mobile Sponsored Stories have 13.7X the CTR and earn Facebook 11.2x as much as its combined desktop ad offering.

Meanwhile, a quick look at a campaign in the tens of thousands of dollars by AdParlor showed that mobile ads have a CTR of 0.821% while traditional Facebook ad campaigns that mostly show up in the web sidebar with some presence in the web and mobile news feed had a CTR of regular ads have a CTR of just 0.032%. That’s a 25x better CTR on mobile. The campaign at gaining new fans for a Facebook page, and while the click-to-fan conversion rate on mobile was slightly worse – 55% on mobile versus 72% across placements – the improved in CTR makes up for it many times over.

Another Ads API giant Spruce Media told MediaPost that its tests with Facebook mobile sponsored stories have seen click-through rates from .8% to 1.7%, the same range as TBG Digital and AdParlor.

This all doesn’t seem like users are just clicking the relatively new, three month old ad units out of curiosity. It looks like users are actually perceiving them as content, and are clicking through to learn more about the Pages and apps their friends interact with.

Attaining such a high click-through rate for mobile Sponsored Stories is game-changing for Facebook, because there’s simply not as much room for it or any service to advertise on mobile. There’s no space for an ads sidebar and if far too many ads are injected into the content feed, users could get angry and stop browsing. But the impressively high CTR and eCPM mean Facebook doesn’t have to show too many Sponsored Stories to make a ton of money off of them.

Other social sites like Google+ and Twitter don’t have the scale, social graph, or on-site activity to serve Sponsored Stories that are as effective as Facebook’s. While Twitter and G+’s interest graph can power accurate ad targeting, only Facebook know who your closest friends are thanks to photo tags, wall posts, messages, and more. Its massive time-on-site also produces lots of interactions with brands and local businesses that can be turned into Sponsored Stories ads.

Facebook is just getting started. Sources say it’s working on a hyper-local mobile ad targeting product that could serve extremely relevant local business ads to users within a few hundred feet of a brick and mortar store. Thanks to the new Facebook Exchange real-time bidding system, Facebook could drive up CPC or CPM prices by getting advertisers to compete to reach specific mobile users, including ones who’ve been retargeted after visiting sites that indicate purchase intent.

High mobile Sponsored Story CTRs indicate at least some users don’t hate the ads, and wouldn’t rebel if they see more.

The New York Times, for another, launched a new native ad unit on its desktop site in January, but a rep said it’s not expected to roll out on mobile for another few months.

Marketers are already confronting the implications of a more shadowy Internet, specifically the phenomenon known as DarkSocial and DarkSearch.

In the near-term, brands will have to confront a potentially darker Internet, as the roadblocks to data-driven marketing thrown up by DarkSocial, DarkSearch and an emerging DarkNet increase. There will be real consequences, including in investments in marketing, if it becomes more difficult to quantify customer engagement.

cloud services like Google and Apple are proactively stripping referral data out when sending users to third party sites via search. These DarkSearch visitors, like their DarkSocial counterparts, also end up in the “direct referral” bucket of analytics reporting, indistinguishable from the geography-less visitors who typed your domain name directly into their browsers to visit your site.

“DarkSocial,” estimates that 69% of the publication’s social traffic is dark--meaning users who access content by clicking on a link emailed or IMed to them. Marketers don’t know where these users came from or what exactly drove them to their website.

In the longer-term, we may see a nascent e-commerce system more familiar to science fiction fans (and current users of services like Silk Road, the online illegal drug marketplace). Imagine a future Amazon.com-like e-commerce site where all profiles are anonymous, all payments utilize crypto-currencies, and all deliveries of physical goods use inexpensive, multi-hop services that conceal the ultimate end delivery address behind anonymous dropboxes.

Facebook will cap the ads so that no user will see an ad more than three times in a day. It is still unclear if advertising executives will want to cut down the typical 30-second television ad to fit Facebook's 15-second guideline, or if they'd create new ads especially for Facebook.

What Facebook can't yet promise, of course, is whether its billion users will actually sit through — or even tolerate — such intrusive ads, even just once.

Consumer surveys reveal that television advertising stands above all others in terms of influencing purchase decisions. 

Even amongst college students, for example, who are likely to be very social media savvy, television advertising is clearly the most influential of all.