Top PPC Expert John Rampton speaks with Murray Newlands of PMI-TV about his predictions for 2013. He speaks how several platforms will grow substantially; including Bing, which he thinks, may overpass Google eventually. He speaks about search on Facebook, how it will be opened up like adwords. Here is a lot of amazing information about where he sees the PPC world going in the next year. He calls out experts Bryan Eisenberg, Tim Ash and several other important newer people including Rick Galan and Adam Green.

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In the continuing saga of Epic Media aka Epic Marketplace aka and aka Kinetic Social, it seems that they have been in a quandary with the FTC for the last year or so. While it probably doesn’t matter, since we have no idea what company is what, nor what assets were transferred to their new company Kinetic Social, it’s still interesting to know that they settled with the FTC today, admitting to illegally gathering data without users permissions.

The settlement, found here, permanently bars Epic Media aka Whatever, from sniffing users browsers to find history and then target, without permission those users.

According to the press release by the FTC:

 Consumers searching the Internet shouldn’t have to worry about whether someone is going to go sniffing through the sensitive, personal details of their browsing history without their knowledge,” said FTC Chairman Jon Leibowitz.  “This type of unscrupulous behavior undermines consumers’ confidence, and we won’t tolerate it.

Whatever the agreement is, I’m not sure it really matters at this point, with Epic Media Group effectively gone, having wiped almost all history of its previous existence off the internet, including removing all corporate sites.

Strangely enough, their twitter account, last updated from 2011 is still active, and their last posts claiming the charges, originally noticed by a Stanford student in 2011 were completely false. Interestingly enough, now settling with the FTC (after shuttering their company) it seems that they’ve finally admitted not only were they doing something illegal, but were lying. What’s new?

Our friends at AdExchanger, were nice enough to point out that the FTC didn’t mention Kinetic Social, and even strangely enough referred to Epic in the present tense.

 The FTC’s announcement makes no mention of Kinetic Social, a company that is led by former Epic CEO Don Mathis and employs numerous former Epic employees. In a May story, AdExchanger noted the extensive similarities between the companies. We observed based on LinkedIn and other sources that Mathis and many other employees appeared to have taken jobs with Kinetic around the same time. The likeness extended to website copy, some of which was identical between the two companies.

Then in August, the NAI said Epic Media Group had ceased operations ”for economic and financial reasons.” Therefore it’s unclear why the FTC describes the company in the present tense. “Epic Marketplace is a large advertising network that has a presence on 45,000 websites.” Anyway, the FTC’s consent order on its signature page has places for Epic CEO Mathis’s signature, along with that of president David Graff, but does not actually display those signatures.

That last part is interesting: while claiming that they were no longer involved with Epic, and they had “moved on” it seems that legally Mathis was in fact running both companies at the same time, out of the same offices, using the same resources.

Oh that’s not at all suspicious.

Oh, let’s also not forget when we published they were going out of business, we received legal letters telling us that we were wrong.

Epic’s hope is that by changing their name and pretending that they are not the same company, people will ignore their FTC problems, their payment problems and their history of not being completely truthful to clients and publishers. However, thanks to the internet, most people still are putting the two together.

Possibly one of the most useful pieces of information available to digital marketers for today’s marketing world is a multiplatform rankings report. Just at the end of last week, comScore released their multiplatform rankings results, and they have a lot to tell about the state of mobile in today’s most popular advertising platforms. All of the biggest names in marketing are represented in comScore’s report, and it gives marketers the information they need to decide between mobile and desktop advertising campaigns with each ad server.

From comScore’s reporting of their results:

The most notable change from traditional Media Metrix rankings are the overall audience increases for media properties with a measurable mobile presence; in some cases, these increases are substantial. Specifically, the Media Metrix Multi Platform view shows 10 properties reaching 100 million unique visitors compared to six in a non-multi-platform view, 28 properties reaching 50 million (vs. 19), 77 properties reaching 25 million (vs. 51), 223 reaching 10 million (vs. 171) and 410 reaching 5 million (vs. 334).

Mobile continues to grow with many of today’s most popular advertising servers, and unique visitors continue to go up as well. The world is further converting to a completely digital consumer base, which is great news for those marketers whose campaigns are almost entirely online. Here are some more key findings from the report:

• Google Sites ranked #1 was the only property to surpass 100 million unique visitors across both desktop and mobile channels.
• Facebook moved up one spot to #3 in the multi-platform rankings, and ranked as the top property in terms of total engagement in the mobile channel.
• Amazon, eBay and Walmart each reached at least 20 percent more visitors across platforms than via desktop alone.
• The most mobile-centric property in the ranking, Pandora, had an incremental reach of 164 percent and captured the #23 ranking, a full 38 positions higher than in the standard Media Metrix ranking.
• Twitter reached an incremental mobile audience of 54 percent, second only to Pandora on this list.
• ESPN had the second biggest jump in the rankings, ascending 4 positions to #19, with an incremental mobile audience of 36 percent.

It is probably no surprise that Google has ranked at the top of the list for unique visitors for both channels, nor is Facebook’s position on the list a surprise. What is significant is that Twitter and Pandora have both reached new heights with their mobile audiences, with the majority of their users on mobile devices now.

Effective marketing on mobile devices is growing in importance, as the world continues to go mobile. The entire list of sites by unique visitors on multiple platforms is available in comScore’s reporting of their findings, and it will give a lot of insight into the status of many of the more popular companies amongst marketers, in regard to their prominence by platform.

It is obvious to most marketers by now that there are mixed feelings toward social advertisements with consumers, but it is also clear that social media is constantly changing the way that marketers and brands reach their customers and potential future customers. However, it seems that the amount of social marketing that is taking place today is getting to be a bit too much, in that there seems to be an uneven ratio between marketing efforts and consumers that actually use social networks. A recent article from eMarketer gives a lot of insight into the excess of marketing on social platforms, as well as the way these social users feel about the marketing that is aimed toward them.

According to a poll study conducted by Pitney Bowes Software, an industry solutions company, as reported by eMarketer, in the case of a few of marketers’ most used social platforms, there are far more marketers on the networks than the amount of users calls for. A chart shows that, for Facebook and Youtube, the numbers are actually just where they should be, with more consumers than marketers which creates a great balance for marketers. However, in the case of Twitter, 57% of marketers confirmed that they are currently on the network and have put for marketing efforts on it, while only 31% of internet users said that they had accounts with the network. On Google+, the difference was even greater, with only 22% of consumers using the site, and 51% of marketers surveyed having social campaigns on the network. The largest difference is with LinkedIn, in that there is a 31% difference between the amount of LinkedIn users and the amount of LinkedIn marketers.

The marketers that are on these networks, however, have told Pitney Bowes Software quite a bit about the levels of annoyance that these marketing efforts bring.

From the eMarketer article:

The annoyance rate of consumers who saw ads from brands they followed was 11%, but jumped to 24% for those confronted with social media marketing messages from brands they didn’t follow, showing that tolerance for unsolicited messages was noticeably lower.

One of the main reasons that social users like or become fans of certain brand pages is so that they can receive the posts from these brands, where they can learn about promotions and deals that they otherwise would not have. However, they only enjoy the ads that they were expecting to receive, and now that there are so many new ways for marketers to reach users that are not fans, people are becoming more and more annoyed.

If this article tells us anything it is that a lot of caution needs to be taken in social marketing. Internet users visit social sites in order to socialize with friends and family, and not so much learn about brands and businesses. Finding a way to market to users without interrupting their social activity too much is the only way to receive a successful response from consumers on social networks.

The overall use of social media shows no signs of letting up, as internet users are causing the total amount of social traffic on the web to continue to skyrocket. Earlier today came the release of Nielsen’s 2012 Social Media Report, and in it we can see that social is doing just as well as everyone was hoping it would be. The numbers in the report show that, with the coming of more innovative technology, comes more traffic to social networks. However, what may be the most significant data from the report is the amount of time that internet users are now spending on social media sites, creating much higher amounts of unique visitors to the most popular networks in the marketing community.

The recent proliferation of mobile devices and connectivity helped fuel the continued growth of social media. While the computer remains as the predominant device for social media access, consumers’ time spent with social media on mobile apps and the mobile web has increased 63 percent in 2012, compared to the same period last year.

Mobile devices have been growing in prominence since their beginnings, and even since last year their impact on social media use has increased greatly. The average time spent on social networks by internet users this year was 121.18 minutes, as opposed to last year’s average which was only 88.48 minutes. So, as is made clear by the change in averages, the growth of social is occurring quickly and steadily. Social networks are becoming a very prominent reason for consumers to use the web these days, and have been forecasted to soon catch up to search as the most useful advertising platform.

Facebook, of course, remains at the top of the list of social networks, by unique visitors. The site, at the time of the report, had a total of 152,226 unique visitors. Just below Facebook are Blogger, with 58,518 unique visitors and Twitter with 37,033. For Twitter, that is a 13% increase from 2011, which is no surprise as it is well known that Twitter has grown greatly in popularity this year.

As for mobile’s impact, the mobile web has increased 82% in total unique users since 2011, and the use of mobile apps by U.S mobile users is up 85% since last year. While these increase, desktop use has gone down 4%, which is not too significant, but is some small evidence of the ever growing use of mobile in today’s digital society.

Both mobile and social are becoming what marketers see as the only way to advertise today, and with their growth, more opportunity shines. As long as these two marketing platforms continue to grow, they will have no problem in becoming the most influential ways to advertise within a few years. The social world has become digitalized, and seeing that change in any way is unlikely at this point, as the emergence of mobile in society has only strengthened a digital way of life.

This year Mike from NDemand again brought some of his top affiliates plus some of the biggest names in the industry together in the Bahamas. Even though this is just year two of his meetups, they have already become legendary, because he brings the best of the best, plus top bloggers like my friend Ian Fernando and traffic experts like Ben from POF together to find how to make more money. As Ian called them, these are all “top notch bosses.”

Here are a few photos from the Meetup in the Bahamas, and I highly recommend that you consider working with NDemand and sign up here.

It seems another gem of information has come from Business Insider’s IGNITION conference on November 28^th. We have heard a lot about Facebook from the conference already and apparently there is still more. However, this news is not quite focused on Facebook itself, but rather it is focused on a comparison between Facebook and Google Plus. Google Plus of course has been criticized quite a bit these days, being called a ghost town and being put out of mind by marketers. However, according to an interview from the IGNITION conference, the company may still have a few tricks up their sleeve to prove to marketers that their social network is not useless in marketing, or at least to the everyday internet users.

The interview with Google Plus’s VP of product, Bradley Horowitz was only a short 15 minutes long, but in that short time he was able to divulge quite a few points that show that Google Plus is still relevant. Of course, Horowitz mentioned Google Plus’s substantial amount of users, which is currently at about 400 million registered users with 100 million who return to the network monthly. Clearly, in regard to the amount of registered users, Google Plus still does not quite measure up, and this is the basis for most arguments that favor Facebook as top dog.

When Horowitz gets on the topic of comparing the marketing potential of both of the networks, this is what he says:

“When you and I are having a conversation, the least opportune thing you could do is have a guy with a sandwich board run between us and try to sell me a sandwich. I’m trying to connect with someone. I’m trying to communicate in that sacred space of social connection. It doesn’t matter if I ‘like’ the sandwich. It doesn’t matter if it’s personalized with my favorite mustard. That is the wrong moment to try to dangle a sandwich in front of me.”

This statement brings to question something quite interesting. For anyone who knows the story of Facebook’s beginnings, or for anyone who has seen the hit film The Social Network, this statement will appear very similar to the feelings that Mark Zuckerberg had toward advertising on the network in the beginning. The type of advertising that Horowitz is speaking of in the excerpt above is relatively recent. It could be argued that Facebook is able to get away with “dangling a sandwich” in front of users in such a way is because it happened over a great period of time. In the same regard, Google Plus has not been around nearly long enough to get away with that.

Either way, Horowitz heavily believes that the recommendation features that Google Plus offers are a more effective way to allow marketers to use a network. He argues that they allow users to look at the recommendations of their contacts instead of having product thrown in your face.

“It turns out recommendations are very valuable to users without compromising the user experience.”

The fact is, marketers enjoy the ability to get users attention in a way that is a bit assertive, because users may not know they are interested in something until they see it. Plus there are few data points proving that Facebook advertising compromises the social experience. So, I suppose the question is this; Does Horowitz’s argument for Google Plus hold any truth, or is he just defending the network while it is being beaten?

The full interview with Horowitz can be found in this Business Insider article.

There is a simple fact that every marketer should know if they do not already which can make a huge difference in a marketing campaign. That fact is that an ad has to be in view in order for it to see any engagement or conversion. How is an ad that is out of view supposed to be clicked or generate any conversions? Somehow, these out of view ads are generating results, but in order for the real substantial results to occur, an ad must be in view for the consumer. According to a recent article by eMarketer, the difference is pretty substantial, even though it is something that many marketers think will make little difference.

Using results from a study by MediaMind, a digital advertising solutions provider, eMarketer shows that overall, rich media ads generate a clickthrough rate of about 0.22%. However, the clickthrough rate for viewable rich media ads boasts an average of 0.34%. With a bit of simple math one can determine that that is a 54.5% increase from the overall CTR. These are ads that are categorized as viewable by literally being in view, or at least 50% in view, for at least one second.

The viewability of ads also had a big impact on conversions, according to eMarketer.

The significance of viewability rose further when measuring conversions. Post-click conversions rose in tandem with clickthrough rates. And once ads reached 60% viewability, and kept rising, clicks—and post-click conversions—rose alongside.

So, what can be done if your ads are not exactly viewable? Well, the only real solution is to make them viewable, of course, and to do that more money needs to be spent. It just goes to show that the more expensive an ad placement is, the better the results will be, as is the way of the world. Quality costs more these days, and finding ways around spending the extra change is not as possible as it once was.

Since viewability may not be in the cards, eMarketer has a few suggestions to avoid the subject all together.

“Marketers can also look beyond viewability in the hopes that ads placed alongside engaging content, in front of an appropriate audience, will be seen whether they are further down the page or not.”

Some marketers are worried that if they start spending money for the larger, more expensive placements of their ads, they will be losing much more if the ad does not succeed. However, with the average CTRs and conversion rates attributed to the more viewable rich media ads in eMarketer’s article, it is starting to seem that taking that risk may very well be the best answer, if not the only answer to better rich media ad success. After all, marketers cannot expect the consumer to do all the work to generate results on ads. It is the marketer’s job to do all that they can to generate results and if that means spending a bit more money on placement to increase CTR that may be necessary. If all else fails, it seems one must take the bigger risk.