Every now and again, there is a lot of talk about mobile optimization and its benefits. Optimizing for mobile is important, and there are many people that have still not done everything they can to optimize their websites or marketing content for mobile web platforms. However, the number of mobile optimized sites and content is on the rise, so that is good news. The problem now is that people are focusing all of their attention to mobile phones, when they really are only one mobile platform that can bring results. Tablets cannot be forgotten, as there is countless proof that people intend to continue using tablets heavily, like the huge number of sales from Apple, Amazon, and Google.

What is quickly becoming reality is that tablet users are buying more than PC users. With a purchase being the basis of all that is marketing, I would say that this is a pretty important fact. However the only way that mobile tablet users are going to make purchases, or click ads for that matter, is if there is mobile optimization. Otherwise, many people will not bother, as speed and convenience are becoming everything in the digital business. Catering to the consumer is priority one, therefore mobile optimization is a necessity, specifically in tablets these days.

Conversions are what marketers are constantly seeking, and in the mobile realm, it is the tablet that brings in a much higher conversion volume. Smartphones today are used more for research before a purchase in-store, or to look up directions to a store. With conversion being more from tablets, the importance of optimization is clearly being taken for granted. In fact, an ecommerce tools and marketing solutions company, Skava, has released data that tells us that only about 7% of all retailers online have websites that are optimized for tablets. That being the case, many of the clicks that occur on tablets that could potentially lead to conversion simply do not, and opportunities are being missed.

Here are some of the top problems that Skava says that consumers are dealing with in terms of tablet web use:

• Site not optimized to switch between landscape and portrait
• Images not working correctly
• Drop down buttons not functioning
• Text too small
• White space
• Links difficult to click

All of these design issues combined will almost definitely drive a customer away from a website. Sure, with the larger screen sizes found on tablets, it becomes much easier for some companies to get away with sites that are not optimized. This fact though, is partially responsible for the lack of optimization, being that marketers and businesses believe this is true for all websites.

As of right now, CTRs on tablets are higher than PCs with tablets having 3.30% and PCs having 2.26%. Also, the order value for tablets is higher than both PCs and mobile devices at $123. For mobile devices tablets have the highest conversion rates with 2.3%, all of which is according to data from Adobe. That said, it is pretty clear the importance that tablets hold in today’s digital marketing.

Clickbooth is not the first network to settle with the FTC, but their fine of $2M is the largest fine yet.  Clickbooth attributes this to the fact that they are the largest network and worked the hardest to establish workable industry standards.  In a letter from Clickbooth’s CEO, John Lemp, the company announced today that they had come to an agreement with the FTC.  This puts them within a year of the FTC reaching out regarding weight loss advertisers last December.

In the letter to partners, Lemp states that when the FTC approached Clickbooth last December they quickly realized they had two options.  They could have fought.  Unlike other networks, Clickbooth has never been an advertiser or publisher and they were prepared to litigate the question of how an ad network should be regulated.  Or they could negotiate a settlement that would protect their current partners and create more clarity for all networks.  After carefully considering the options, settling with the FTC was the best alternative.

The most interesting thing is how Clickbooth’s order differs from previous orders. It seems that Clickbooth worked a little harder and successfully leveraged this opportunity to work with regulators on establishing a clear set of industry standards that will benefit the industry as a whole.  Publishers and advertisers will also be happy to see that they’re order does more to protect them. As a close personal friend of John for 10+ years now we’ve talked and he’s had the money set aside outside of cash flow for over a year. This really shouldn’t affect Clickbooth at all.

Clickbooth actually gained some ground for the industry as a whole  from this lawsuit. It’s clear that without a unified industry self regulation program, the FTC is going to litigate each and every network until one was made. Clickbooth has taken the first step towards unified regulation.  “The thing that is different about our settlement and some of the others that you’ve seen is that put a real focus on establishing industry best practices and making things less grey.  We don’t think there is anything wrong with the advetorial or nutra spaces. There are just a few guys who took things too far and gave affiliate marketing a bad name,” says Clickbooth.  Clickbooth has already implemented these compliance changes over the past year and will continue expanding on these, notably in the weightloss and publisher lander areas.

The industry has yet to see what all Clickbooth is capable of.  As one of the oldest networks in the industry, Lemp has shown us time and again that he and his team are up for any challenge that comes their way.  Recently they announced that their CPA and CPC network, according to Quantcast, now reaches more Unique US households than Facebook.  Despite the impending settlement, Clickbooth was able to generate more traffic this year than ever before

What do we all think of print advertising these days? The general consensus is usually that of course print media has taken a hard hit from internet marketing, but it certainly has not fallen too far from years in the past. Internet marketers usually find that advertising on the web is far more successful than advertising in print, but there are still many instances in which print marketing is the best option. Well, a recent graph from a company called Statista, a company in Germany that specializes in statistics, shows just what is happening to print media in recent times, and how well the takeover by internet platforms is coming along.

The graph has been presented to the world by CNet, and it compares the ad dollars that Google has raked in during the years from 2004 until the present to the same for newspapers and magazine. As one could imagine, in 2004, print media was bringing in far more ad dollars than was Google. The real turning of this scenario began showing itself in 2009, when Google reached just over $20 billion in ad dollars. The real news in all of this comes from this year, when print media has shown that it is slowly coming to an end for marketers.

Now, the graph does not show that Google has skyrocketed past $20 billion, for in 2011 it was at about $37-38 billion, and now has dropped back to just over $20 billion. However, print media has steadily decreased over the years, and now its ad dollar amount rest just below the $20 billion mark. That’s a huge drop from last year, when it was just over $40 billion. What is significant though, is that Google has surpassed the amount of ad dollars of all print media combined, showing the diminishing that print media is facing.

From the CNet article written by Shara Tibken:

The rise of the Web and the fall of print have been well documented, but Statista’s chart makes this trend pretty evident. Several years ago, the print sector’s ad revenue dwarfed Google’s results. But print ad revenue has been falling pretty steadily since about 2006. Google, on the other hand, has seen the opposite effect over the past several years.

Google is clearly not the only reason behind the fall of print media as a reliable marketing source. Print can thank all digital advertising for its impending doom. However, for digital marketers, this is only good news. If print marketing is falling, that means that digital marketing is growing more and more in success, and more marketers are starting to grab hold of the opportunity. Google will continue to grow in its advertising success, and print media will probably continue to feel the pain of digital marketing’s takeover. This graph simply shows an interesting perspective and some solid proof that digital marketing is growing, and other forms of marketing are not proving to be quite as successful these days.

The graphic can be found in the CNet article here.

Today, we find that Facebook is continuing on their journey to becoming a favorite, go-to place for marketers to see results. Facebook has for a while been building up their marketing reputation, but more recently they have been working on the success of Pages. These pages allow for anyone to run a functional marketing campaign on Facebook, as they are much like Facebook profiles, only for brands and businesses. Anyway, the recent improvements we have seen with Facebook Pages are things like notifications from Pages as well as the ability to sponsor any post for just a small fee. However, we all knew that these were not enough to keep Pages in the minds of marketers everywhere, so Facebook has now allocated a feed to them.

The News Feed is where all the action happens on Facebook, and it is where most users spend most if not all of their time. Everyone knows that, and everyone uses it to their advantage. Now, Facebook has taken things a bit further for Pages users, by creating a Pages Feed. The company unveiled it today, and it looks very similar to the News Feed that everyone has come to know and love. The big difference is obvious; the only things that show up in the Pages Feed are posts from Pages that a user has liked and become a fan of.

Originally, marketers liked the idea of Pages so much because, by putting them directly in the eyes of those who they were trying to reach in their News Feeds, there was no way for users not to see the advertisements. Now that users are beginning to embrace the marketing that takes place within these liked Pages, the new Pages Feed will probably be quite successful. There are many users today who use Facebook to view content from Pages just as prominently as they do to view content from friends and family.

Recently, there have been issues with the amount of reach that posts from Pages on Facebook were getting, and the reach began to slightly drop. With the addition of this new feed, the reach of Pages will eminently increase, as there is now a place where users can view all Page posts without having them be knocked out of the way by posts from friends. It is yet another improvement that Facebook has made with perfect timing, restoring any shakiness that marketers may have had about Pages due to a slight drop in reach.

As of right now, the Pages Feed button has not appeared on the home screen of Facebook. However, the feed is available to all users currently, if they use the given Pages Feed URL. When the button does come to be however, it will appear in the left navigation bar, just where one would expect it to be. There is no doubt that people will use the Pages Feed, and marketers who use Facebook Pages should be pretty excited about this new little bonus that Facebook has handed them.

It seems that the Arkansas Attorney General, Dustin McDaniel is looking at Selling Source, Partner Weekly and Money Mutual, all based out of the same address in Las Vegas, for aggressive advertising practices. According to the the Attorney General, they’ve been using Montel Williams to push pay-day loans in the State of Arkansas, among other places.

McDaniel isn’t too happy about that for some reason, and wants to know more about their practices and has issues a Civil Investigate Demand to them on August 9^th, asking them to answer some questions. According to McDaniel, they haven’t responded to his demands, and he’s filed a complaint with the courts asking that they be prohibited from doing business in Arkansas unless they respond.

“We believe that these companies are luring Arkansans into applying for loans that only push consumers further and further into debt,” claims McDaniel “The companies appear to be advertising for loans that are unconstitutional in Arkansas. We will continue to take actions to ensure that organizations related to payday lending do not harm our State’s consumers.”

The main part of the argument is that the Arkanas constitution does not allow for loans that are in excess of 17 percent, while these loans are in theory as much as 300 percent.

Just as smartphones did after their first appearances years ago, tablets are growing in popularity at a rapid rate, and they are beginning to become a crucial consideration in digital marketing. As people are reaching the web in a growing number of ways, desktop digital advertising solutions are not going to necessarily create a successful campaign anymore. Mobile is slowly but surely taking over a huge role in digital marketing, and most marketers are definitely benefiting from the change. Just as we have always seen with smartphones, the tablet industry is dominated by the same two big names: Apple and Android. They have been competitors since the beginning of smart technology, and Google has led the way for a while now, but which company is the best option from a marketing perspective?

Some information from a company called Onswipe, a “touch” web content solutions company, gives insight into which of these two competitors could be the most beneficial choice for digital marketers. The information, as reported by MarketingLand, comes from a recent study of theirs, and it states that Apple’s iPad accounts for at least 98% of web traffic on tablets to the company’s partnering publishers. This means that other types and brands of tablet only bring in about 2% of web traffic on tablets.

Although the number itself is almost unbelievable, it also means that Apple is destroying Google in the web traffic competition, at least when it comes to tablets. Google has always prided itself with its Android platform being extremely popular among consumers, but no amount of tablet sales will bring web traffic up. In the competition for tablet based web traffic, Apple clearly holds to top spot, and the company can feel pretty confident that they won’t be losing it any time soon. So, although Google’s Android has a lot of people buying products, what really matters to marketers is how products are being used. Therefore, it seems that the most valuable tablet usage comes from Apple.

MarketingLand reports even more valuable information from Onswipe regarding user engagement on Apple’s iPad. Here is an excerpt from their article:

Onswipe also points out that iPad owners are more engaged and spend 56 percent more time per session with their tablets vs. the iPhone. The iPad also is responsible for more web traffic than the iPhone and Android devices combined, despite the fact that smartphones are considerably more numerous than the iPad.

For the mobile world, I always saw Google as the head honcho, seeing as they have always been the leader in sales and marketers seem to love Android. However, it seems that Apple’s iOS has been the more valuable platform for marketing to mobile users, specifically those using tablets. It really shows how functional Apple’s products are, as Google sells far more mobile devices than Apple, but Apple accounts for nearly all mobile web traffic on tablets. Web traffic is valuable, of course, and Apple is in the perfect position for marketers to become interested in the company.