As in EPIC, Copeac and several other companies, once the death knell is rung on PMI, the company involved usually announces that they are official closing down. This time, EWA has announced that they are closing the doors effectively pretty much immediately, two days after Ryan Eagle was declared somewhat dead. Unfortunately, this will leave a lot of affiliates unpaid for their hard work and the tenor of the announcement will do little or nothing to alleviate that problem.

This seems to be part of a long list of CPA Networks that have announces their closing. Personally, despite my article two days ago, I’m without a doubt completely flabbergasted by this growing trend of networks going out of business — for the same reasons as the other networks going out of business. Despite the signs, the articles about their advertisers going bankrupt, the message boards, affiliates and other networks still continue to be fooled that these companies will survive huge and catastrophic loses and ignore the obvious. When as an industry will we start to pay attention?

Update: It has been revealed that the person behind the fall of Ryan Eagle is actually Uber Prankster Ronaiah Tuiasosopoooooo!!! Nooo!!! 

‘Nuff said, their announcement is below.

Dear EWA Affiliates,

First off, I would like to personally apologize as truly and honestly as I can for everything that EWA Private Network has put our publishers through these past months. It’s been a turbulent road for my company and it’s taken quite the toll on me and the staff around me. Believe it or not, I care about the reputation of my company I care about the publishers in my network – it burdens me daily to see what has happened. We incurred massive losses due to non-paying merchants, combined with internal problems lead to a situation which needed an outside investor to help resolve.

I spent upwards of a year seeking individuals and companies to invest into EWA and the entire process of finding an investor was draining on me – I was lead on and let down many times. Unfortunately, our most recent investor possibility ended up falling through leaving EWA with no other options. We have decided that it’s time to close our doors while we continue to seek a new investor to take over the company. Meanwhile, we will be working with a restructuring agent to liquidating our receivables and sell our assets in a way to repay outstanding payables.

Leaving EWA Network on a note like this was the absolute hardest choice I’ve made in my business career. I gave it my absolute 100% best and tried the hardest that I could, spending hours a day trying to make this company the best that it could be. Running EWA Network for these past four years and interacting with the thousands of EWA affiliates has been one of the best experiences that I’ve had, and I’d like to apologize once again to all our clients for the situation that we were put in.

Finally, I would like to apologize to our staff – especially the account managers, international partners, and our network manager on the front lines everyday. They were put into a situation where they were at the mercy of the companies problems. I accept the blame fully for it, and I want nothing that happened to the company reflect onto their shoulders because they did the best they did with cards they were dealt. When we thought the investor was coming through, I told them to pull – and when we were left empty handed, they were the ones to take the blame. They were the lifeblood of our company and I appreciate every minute they spent making EWA great.

On March 1st, 2013 we will be pausing all traffic to EWA publishers. Thank you for your years of support and the millionsof dollars in revenue that has run through EWA Network. It’s been amazing to see the growth of so many publishers since the beginning and I’m truly grateful for every single one of you.

Being one of the biggest names in digital marketing, Google rarely finds trouble giving advertisers what they want or what they need. However, there is one area where Google has found itself lacking a bit in success. Mobile marketing, one of today’s most exciting new marketing platforms, has proven quite an issue for the big boss of the web. This is essentially due to the fact that mobile search queries monetize at only about half the rate of desktop searches, causing Google a struggle when it comes to CPC’s. And even though people are expecting the number of searches on mobile to far surpass the number of searches on Google’s desktop version in the coming year, Google’s CPC issue is starting to make marketers wonder, not just about Google’s mobile performance, but their entire standing in the marketing world.

However, if there is one thing that everyone knows Google as being good at, it is fixing a problem whenever they or somebody else finds one. Google saw the problem that they were having with mobile CPCs and got straight to work on fixing it. The result of their work was their new AdWords Enhanced Campaigns.

Larry Kim, the founder and CTO at WordStream,Inc., tells us that WordStream was just one of three companies that worked with Google on the development of their new AdWords Enhanced Campaigns. He also tells us that before these Enhanced Campaigns, advertisers had to put in a substantial amount of extra work in order to fully reap the benefits of Google’s mobile advertising features, and because of this, many advertisers simply choose against using Google’s mobile offerings.

Currently, advertisers are expected to create multiple different ad campaigns – one for every city and every possible device combination, which quickly becomes pretty difficult as there are now millions of possible combinations.

What Google Has Changed

According to Larry Kim, Google has done some fantastic things to cater to the mobile advertising needs of its AdWords advertisers. The current PPC campaign structure that advertisers have become used to is about ten years old, and Google saw that it was time for a major update. So, now advertisers will be able to access those mobile advertising features that are most important, and that were previously very difficult to utilize, with ease. The features will be very user friendly, and accessible by default, therefore ridding of the need to create a different campaign for each and every combination of location and device.

So overall, the idea of Enhanced Campaigns is to take the mobile advertising features that were previously available – but almost never used because they were too hard to implement – and offer them in a much more scalable way for all Google advertisers.

Because of this, it is almost guaranteed that mobile CPCs will rise, closing the large space that has been forming between mobile and desktop CPCs. This will be the direct result of all ad campaigns that exist now being automatically added as mobile campaigns as well. Not only that, but new advertisers will see the impressive and useful mobile tools of Google’s AdWords, and will be excited to use them.

Google saw the problem, and mended the wound, giving advertisers that struggled with mobile before, a chance to see success on multiple screens with AdWords. Larry Kim states, “By simplifying this process, I’m confident that we’ll see an uptake in mobile advertising adoption and ROI. I think the new enhanced campaigns will be particularly helpful for SMBs who are not yet taking advantage of mobile search.”

To hear more from Larry Kim, visit the WordStream Blog.

Many of the marketers on the web today have already stepped into the social marketing community, and have begun developing their presences on social networks. Social marketing has worked quite well for most marketers, but it seems that all attention is being focused toward companies like Facebook and Twitter. That is, people spend a majority of their social marketing efforts dealing with these social networks, hearing from across the web that they bring in the best performance that can be found. However, without giving the other companies much of a chance, how is it that marketers can really be sure that they are making the right decision at all? A new survey shows that many marketers are giving other social networks a chance, with plans to expand their social reach.

The survey comes from Nectar Online Media, a social commerce software company, along with the Social Media Clubs, a non-profit organization with the main goal of educating the public with information regarding today’s newest technologies. The respondents of the survey are made up of 400 marketers that manage social media campaigns.

A chart from the reporting of the survey results shows that Facebook remains the number one choice, as 93% of the respondents confessed to having a Page on the network. However, in the coming year, just over half of respondents said they plan to increase the amount of marketing they do on Facebook. Some said that this was because of increased restrictions that Facebook has put on businesses when trying to make the most out of the network’s marketing tools.

As for Twitter, about 81% of respondents said that they are on the network for marketing purposes. According to the results, which do not exactly make perfect sense, about 87% of these respondents Tweet marketing content on Twitter, but only 76% of these respondents have actual Twitter accounts for their brands or businesses. No matter what this means, about 61% of respondents said that they will be increasing their efforts on Twitter for the year to come.

The real interesting numbers come from networks like YouTube. Apparently, more respondents plan to use the network for marketing in the coming year than there are marketers that already use it. As of now, only about 57% of marketers use the network for marketing, but in the year ahead, over 60% of marketers plan for YouTube campaigns.

Another case similar to this is that of Pinterest. In the chart, that shows the difference between current efforts on social networks, and plans for the future, Pinterest is not even included. This is because only about 36% of marketers currently use the network. However, in the year ahead, 60% said they would like to increase the amount of effort they put forth on the site. The excitement about Pinterest seems to be growing rapidly, as this is the largest increase in interest of all those reported.

So, although Facebook and Twitter are expected to remain steadily at the top, networks like Pinterest and YouTube are offering to marketers reason to be excited, and attention is being redirected.

Sure, Google has some of the greatest tools for search marketing that can be found on the web, but that surely is not the only reason that so many marketers flock to the company to advertise their brands, businesses, and products. To put it simply, people like to advertise with Google because of the enormous amount of search traffic that the company sees on a daily basis. The amount of queries that Google receives each day is far more than anyone could find with other search engines, making the company the perfect place to create search advertisements. However, Google’s query number may not be quite what marketers think it is. It is not as if Google has lied about their numbers, but marketers may not be quite clear with where these search queries are coming from.

Google, of course, receives billions upon billions of queries in any given month, but according to Nikesh Arora, who is senior vice president as well as chief business officer at Google, says that half of these billions of queries come from partners of Google, and not Google itself. This was stated during a talk with Liz Gannes of AllThingsD during the Dive Into Media conference that just recently took place.

This is really not a statistic that many people found it a need to consider, but it is quite interesting and relevant to search marketers. If half of Google’s queries are not even happening on Google’s search engine itself, marketers are not reaching nearly as many searchers as they originally thought. Obviously, the number of queries entered into Google itself is still enormous, but it has essentially just been cut in half.

There are a lot of companies that use Google to supply their websites and online businesses with search functions, and apparently Google takes the searches that occur on these sites into account with their totals. It is completely justified that they would do this, but a separate statistic would help marketers gauge exactly what they are dealing with. This number includes searches from mobile partners as well.

Also, at the conference, Nikesh Arora elaborated a bit about his expectations of things to come in the near future for online marketing. He stated that he believes that about half of all advertising will be on the web in at least the next five years. However, what he did not elaborate on was the new Enhanced Campaigns from Google, which we all had hoped to hear something about.

This information does not change much, but it is definitely something that Google search marketers should not be without knowing. Google’s own search engine still remains the most popular search engine around, and still receives countless queries each day, so marketers can still rest easy that they are reaching a large number of searchers. So, I suppose whatever Google’s query number is reported as, we can take into consideration that marketers really only deal with half of them.

In the mobile world, the two names that are being tossed around more frequently than any others are Apple and Android. The competition between the two world famous operating system has always been heated, even though Android has taken the lead in most categories. However, one thing that Apple has had over Android for quite a while has been a higher number of total ad impressions. For this reason, interest in Apple as a mobile marketing destination has stayed put. However, recent numbers show that Apple may even be losing in this category as well. Android, much like Google itself, is on its way to mobile domination. At least, there is plenty of evidence that points toward this being so.

The final quarter of 2012, which is getting further and further away, showed Android’s takeover of the top spot in mobile ad impressions. According to a report from Thursday by Opera Mediaworks, which is Opera Mobile’s mobile ad tracking department, Android finally surpassed Apple’s performance in driving ad impressions.

To be precise, Android drove about 31 percent of all the mobile ad impressions that Opera tracked in the timespan between October 2012 and December 2012. That is, 31% of the 500 million ad impressions that occurred during that time, across over 12,000 mobile sites and applications. Lagging behind a bit was Apple iOS, driving only about 29% of mobile ad impressions. Listed by Opera are some emerging trends that are believed to have led to Android’s pulling ahead.

• The growth of Android as a platform that is driving the acceleration of ad requests and impression volume

• The emergence of the Russian Federation as a vibrant mobile ad market

• The rapid adoption of more sophisticated devices driving equally rapid innovation in ad units

• The growth in Android impressions was partly driven by the introduction of the Samsung Galaxy S III, a device that now accounts for 9% of all Android traffic.

Even though, according to Gigaom, a business, marketing and tech news site, Android has taken this lead, iOS is still in the lead for overall impressions, taking into account iPads and iPod Touches. Also, iOS stays in the lead as far as bringing in ad revenue for mobile advertisers.

The company quotes Opera’s EVP of the consumer mobile division in an interview regarding Google’s new slight lead.

In the U.S. we think that this is considerably helped by the emergence of Samsung and the Galaxy S III. They’re pouring a lot of dollars into the market, and they have favorable pricing with mobile operators, so that entire market has a lot of momentum [toward] adoption of Samsung Android devices.

Even though you saw that for the first time Android phones have a larger volume of impressions, the dollars associated is still considerably in favor of Apple and iOS and iPhones.

Although Google has not completely taken the lead for impressions, as iOS still brings in the bucks, this shows that Android is well on its way to becoming not only the most ubiquitous OS in the hands of consumers, but also the more successful OS for mobile advertising.

People can now surf the web on their televisions, which is quite indicative of the multi-screen phenomenon that is sweeping the country right now. With consumers hitting the web on every way possible, marketers have a lot of new considerations on their plates. However, as the trend of multi-screen browsing grows, there have not been many solutions created to help marketers keep up with the growth, which makes the whole debacle a bit more difficult. Not only do marketers now have to consider the devices they are reaching consumers on, but they still have to consider things like time of day and location. The continued growth of multi-screen browsing is causing stress to say the least, but Google is now trying to help out with this issue by spiffing up its AdWords service a bit.

A blog post from Google states that the company is bringing out enhanced AdWords campaigns for its marketing users. Now, all kinds of marketers will be able to use AdWords for managing and keeping up on numerous ad campaigns at the same time. Marketers will be able to keep track of things like devices, while at the same time managing locations for targeting, and time of day. All of this can be done while accessing analytics reports from AdWords, taking quite a bit of stress away from the process and bringing everything to one place.

Senior Vice President of Engineering, Sridhar Ramaswamy writes in the blog post,

This creates great opportunities for businesses, but can also make marketing more complex and time-consuming. For example, a pizza restaurant probably wants to show one ad to someone searching for “pizza” at 1pm on their PC at work (perhaps a link to an online order form or menu), and a different ad to someone searching for “pizza” at 8pm on a smartphone a half-mile from the restaurant (perhaps a click-to-call phone number and restaurant locator). Signals like location, time of day, and the capabilities of the device people are using have become increasingly important in showing them the right ad.

So, to be exact about the new enhanced AdWords campaigns, allow me to elaborate on the key features.

Multi-Device Marketing Tools

As is stated above, the improvements to AdWords help marketers better manage consumer devices and locations, as well as better consider time of day. Also, bid adjustments help marketers manage bids better across devices, time of day, and locations, all in one campaign.

User Context Optimization

There is a huge difference in what people on the move are looking for when they search using Google, and what people are looking for while searching from the comfort of home. “With enhanced campaigns, you’ll show ads across devices with the right ad text, sitelink, app or extension, without having to edit each campaign for every possible combination of devices, location and time of day.”

New Conversion Types = New Reports

So, as I stated a multi-screen world has allowed consumers to reach ads and engage with them in new and unique ways. For example, users may download apps, click-to-call, or even just see an ad on a brand new type of device. Since these are such new ways for users to create conversions, enhanced AdWords campaigns provide new ways to measure this performance.

These new AdWords campaigns will be rolling out for marketers to use over the next few weeks, reaching the point of all campaigns being upgraded by the middle of the year. Google will be releasing tips and advice for using the enhanced campaigns during the duration.

Stanislav Telyatnikov, the Ukrainian millionaire who founded MGID.com is not sitting down amid mass emails sent to the industry claiming that his company is involved in child exploitation. It seems that someone unknown entity had been sending under the guise of a fake charity called the “Clean Internet Charity Foundation” had targeted MGID.com for attacks,  claiming that their network is associated with child exploitation, among other things — including claims that they were associated with the Russian Mafia, and were nothing but a fake company.

The company isn’t sitting down and decided to take legal action against these claims, filing a suit in United States District Court of New York against Outbrain Inc, the Clean Internet Charity Foundation and Yaron Galai. Yaron Galai, is a well known Israeli internet entrepreneur that founded Quigo, and sold to AOL in 2007. It seems that the case and story gets more complicated from here, as his involvement with the statements about MGID are unknown, and if he or his company was involved in the statements or they were just posted on his website.

Either way, MGID.com received a preliminary injunction against the companies, which among other things, requires the companies to stop publishing any statements that MGID is involved in child pornography, spyware, malware, ponzi schemes or a variety of other claims that seem to have been made.

According to a statement from MGID

     Over the past several months, CICF, and persons believed to be affiliated with CICF, have been posting similar false accusations about MGID on various websites.  On January 16, 2013, in response to these attacks, MGID commenced a federal court lawsuit against CICF and others, and immediately obtained the attached injunction requiring that all such statements to be taken down.

The copy of the injunction is below