Display ads can go up and down quite frequently in regard to their performance, but they still remain a very well used form of advertising. As we have all seen for a while now, Google and Facebook have long battled it out for the top name in display advertising. They have both proven very successful when trusted with display ad campaigns, and can both be seen all over the web. An eMarketer article shows both results and predictions relating to the state of this display ad fight for the top. EMarketer has predicted that Google will soon be the top name in display ads once again, even though it already is.

No, that sentence does not make sense at all, but what eMarketer has actually predicted is that Google will steadily increase in net US ad revenue over the next few years, including this year, gaining a prominent lead over Facebook. For this year, eMarketer has predicted that Google will account for 15.4% of the total display ad revenues, while Facebook will come in at 14.4% which is only .3% over their total share of net revenues from last year. However, last year Google only accounted for 13.5% of the net ad revenues in the US, bringing it up almost 2% in a year. By 2014, eMarketer expects that Google will have reached 21.2% of the net US ad revenue, and Facebook will have only made it to 15.5%.

So, it seems that eMarketer has put their faith in Google for the next few years. Facebook’s display marketing efforts are gaining credibility too slowly for them to be on top much longer, so it makes sense that Google would do so much better for this year and the next two to come. In general, though, the display market is expected to improve greatly. Here is eMarketer’s prediction for the display ad market overall:

This year, the overall US display ad market will grow 21.5% to $14.98 billion from $12.33 billion in 2011, eMarketer estimates, driven by the expansion of both Google and Facebook as advertising platforms; the continued health of banner spending due to the expansion of inventory, aided by mobile growth; and increased spending on digital video advertising, especially YouTube.

So, with the display ad market doing well over the next few years, the only hard decision will be deciding who to trust with your advertising campaigns; Google or Facebook? The simple facts are that by 2014, Google is expected to be bringing in an annual digital display ad revenue of somewhere near $4.39 billion dollars. Facebook however, will only be bringing in about $3.2 billion in ad revenue by the same year. Both ad companies are quite successful right now, and they will remain that way over the next few years. However, the predictions from eMarketer show that marketers may want to lean toward Google, as they show a steady and sufficient increase. It will be interesting to see the twists and turns that this race takes along the way that could potentially change what eMarketer has to say about the subject.

Small and medium sized businesses today still rely heavily on the reviews and social media comments that they accrue from past customers to market their business. Word-of-mouth has always seemed like the best way to keep a smaller business rolling, and it’s been working well for some time now. However, with things like that constantly changing in this world, there will come a time when word-of-mouth just will not be enough to keep up good business. Many SMBs are on top of their marketing and advertising needs, and have pretty successful advertising campaigns running already. A survey performed by Borell Survey, sponsored by mobile advertising blog company Pontiflex, shows how SMBs feel about mobile advertising in particular, and just what their plans and expectations are for the future in regards to it.

In their posting of the results, they go over the main points from the survey of 1,300 small and medium businesses. The first is:

SMBs are increasing spend on mobile (72% will increase/maintain spend over next twelve months)

To be more precise, 27% of the SMBs plan on increasing their mobile ad spends over the next year, while 45% are planning to maintain the amount they are already spending. This tells us that nearly half of the surveyed small and medium businesses are already advertising on mobile, and are happy with what they are spending. In fact, a chart in their reporting shows that in the next year, 49% of the surveyed SMBs are at least somewhat likely to incorporate mobile ads into their advertising and marketing efforts versus the 32% who are not very likely or not at all likely.

Another of the most important points of the survey was,

 However, SMBs are not satisfied with ROI on mobile advertising, and would increase spend even more if they got ROI. (49% of SMBs that have done mobile advertising say that higher ROI will make them increase even further).

One of the main reasons that some SMBs have not embraced mobile advertising may be because of the ROIs that others have been seeing with their mobile campaigns. Pretty much half of the SMB advertisers that do have mobile campaigns would only start spending more if the ROIs increased, which makes perfect sense. It isn’t only SMBs that are often seeing low ROIs on their mobile campaigns, but these returns will continue to increase in the near future, as mobile media use continues to grow.

The final point was this;

SMBs prefer paying for signups as opposed to paying for clicks or impressions  (27% as opposed to 19% for clicks and 6% for banners).

Signups are much more effective for SMBs, therefore it is easy to see why they would prefer that payment method over clicks and impressions. SMBs were possibly the slowest to get to mobile marketing, and now that they have, their views on it are clear. All they want is to be able to spend more, to see a better return on what they are spending, and to be able to pay the way that makes most sense for SMBs.

Once again, there has been a prediction that proves the certain success of mobile advertising for many years to come. This time, however, the prediction has been made about a specific type of ad spend and that is for mobile web search ads. It is not a type of mobile advertising that you hear a lot of talk about, but it would appear that it is doing quite well. A forecast from Juniper Research, the trusted marketing research company, shows quite a bit of confidence that mobile web search ads will sort of sky rocket in popularity over the next few years.

Juniper Research’s report shows their forecast, stating that the ad spend on mobile web search advertising will reach $12 billion per year by the year 2017. As of right now, the annual ad spend on mobile web search ads is $4 billion on average. With a prediction of the ad spend tripling in the next 5 years, Juniper must expect some sort of huge burst of interest in mobile web search ads to be happening soon. There is so much interest in it now, though, that I did not even think it could get that much higher at all.

Here is some of Juniper’s reasoning on their prediction;

The size of tablet displays – typically either 7-inch or circa 10-inch – makes performing search queries a more comfortable experience, while the fact that these devices are used more in the home or at work for longer periods also means that users will make more queries per session. For these reasons, the report found that tablet users on average make around three times as many queries as smartphone owners, and ten times the number made by users of other handsets.

What that quote tells me is exactly what I forgot to consider. The popularity of tablets these days is through the roof. What do people use tablets for? Search. As the report says, the screen size makes it the optimal mobile search device. Even though people do use web search on smartphones, the tablet has made the experience so much easier and more comfortable that we can probably contribute a majority of the mobile web search success to them. When tablets came into existence, they ushered in countless new opportunities for marketers and advertisers, and one of those was the ability to more effectively use mobile search as an advertising platform.

Juniper’s prediction may seem huge, and that is because it is. However, though it is quite large, there seems to be a very good chance that it is also quite possible.

Usage of web search on mobile devices will be driven by continued adoption of high-usage tablets, with the number of these devices in-use reaching 672 million by 2017.

To have 672 million tablets in use in the world by 2017 will make the mobile advertising business quite a hot one. The year 2017 is still quite a ways away, but if Juniper’s prediction is anywhere near the mark, then marketers can still look forward to the steady increase in mobile search ad performance from now until then.

It’s obvious that Google AdWords is one of the more popular marketing platforms used by marketers of many different types. With all these marketers come thousands of budgets ranging from very high to very low. Combine these numerous budgets with the multiple advertising campaigns that each marketer may be running with AdWords, and you get quite a jumble of data and finances to deal with. In order to create a bit more organization in their advertising platform, as well as to provide advertisers a much easier and clearer way to allot their money to different campaigns. Google’s new feature will ultimately improve the way ad spend is managed and probably lead to more ad spending overall.

From the AdWords blog;

Shared budgets is a new feature that lets you establish a single daily budget that’s shared by multiple campaigns in an AdWords account. Shared budgets can make it easier to match your AdWords spending with how your business allocates marketing budget. And they can save you time and improve your AdWords results.

Also in their blog post, Google provides an example that explains just how Shared Budgets work. If you are using Adwords for multiple campaigns such as desktop and mobile, you used to have to figure out for yourself how to wisely allocate certain chunks of your daily budget to each, depending on how you believe each campaign will perform on that particular day. If your estimations are wrong, and you end up spending less than the allocated amount of the budget for one campaign because that campaign did not perform as well as you had thought it would, you are sort of out of luck. That unused chunk could have been used for your other campaigns that may have been performing better that day. It is a bit confusing to explain, but their example better describes the purpose of their new feature.

With Shared budgets, the unused portion of your budget will automatically be distributed to other campaigns, so that the best performing campaigns on any particular day will receive the parts of the budget that they require. This way, marketers won’t have to keep constant watch on their budgets and separate AdWords marketing campaigns.

This seems to me like a way for Google to make sure that no money goes unused by marketers. It may look like an improvement that was made for AdWords marketers, but it could also be Google’s way of making sure that all of the money that marketers meant to spend on their campaigns is actually spent, maximizing Google’s ad revenue. After reading around the web, I wasn’t the only one who realized this possibility.

Anyway, regardless of Google’s intent, this new feature will help marketers who use AdWords as their main advertising platform and who want to get the best results they can from it. Budgeting for AdWords marketing has just become easier, and more efficient. Advertisers can spend exactly what they meant to spend, and see the results that they may have been missing in the past.

Since ZeekRewards has been shut down by the the SEC for a $600M Ponzi Sceme, some of the affiliates are looking to recover money as soon as possible from them in a federal lawsuit. Filed in the US District Court in Louisiana, the lawsuit has been filed against both the founder Paul Burks and Rex Venture Group. The suit claims that ZeekRewards mislead affiliates into giving money to ZeekRewards, promising them 50% of the company’s profits, when in fact it was nothing more than a Ponzi Scheme.

The Suit says “Burks personally made explicit, deceptive and untrue statements of material fact” and that the “purpose and effect of the statements, as well as the underlying scheme, was to induce (affiliates) to invest in Zeek Rewards.” For those interested in getting involved, a website at ZRLAWSUIT.com has been set up by Patrick Miller Law for anyone who is interested in joining in on the lawsuit.

However, while some affiliates are looking to recover money, the court-appointed receiver, Kenneth Bell is actually looking for those affiliates who weren’t defrauded to return their money immediately. In a public letter, posted on his website Kenneth Bell wrote:

 Among those from whom we intend to recover assets are those affiliates who took more out of Rex Ventures than they put in.  Many of you received little or nothing from this enterprise.  In order to make everyone as whole as possible, those who profited from participating should surrender their gains.

Obviously those who have may been defrauded should get as much as possible, but affiliates who made money are asking why they should be penalized for making money. In fact, over 33,000 people have actually signed a petition to the WhiteHouse saying that not only was ZeekRewards not a Ponzi scheme, but  was a profitable venture that made many affilaites money and only lost money because it was shut down by the SEC.

 In no way that this company defrauded anyone. We believe that Zeekler/Zeek Rewards has given us the leadership and the freedom to support our families. For it to be taken away from us is devastating. So we are behind Paul Burks, Rex Venture Group, Zeekler/Zeek Rewards and it’s affiliates 100%!! We don’t want to be silent to these allegations that the SEC & AG office is making.

The Whitehouse refused comment on the petition, saying that they do not get involved in enforcement matters.

In this episode of Performance Marketing Insider TV, Murray Newlands interviews Steph Lewis of Power Wallet at FinCon 2012 to learn about their recently launched affiliate program. The program pays out on every free signup plus has a long term commission based on the new users. PowerWallet puts you in the driver’s seat with a simple but powerful dashboard that lets you manage every nickel, dime and dollar in all your financial accounts. PowerWallet is smart. The more you use it, the more it gets to know and understand you. It automatically categorizes your transactions and even offers advice to help you to get the things you want out of your money.

With all the hype about Apple’s brand new iPhone 5 and the excitable iOS 6, many marketers are bombarded with potential new marketing prospects, opinions, and numbers that vary back and forth. There are so many things that marketers can be excited about with Apple’s new innovations, and everyone is trying to report them all at once. However, there is one aspect of iOS 6 that advertisers may see as a big speed bump in their mobile advertising campaign with Apple. A feature that has come with iOS 6 that is being reported all over the web is one that gives users the ability to block advertising tracking.

Essentially, the information that advertisers used to be able to use to target certain iPhone users can now be switched on or off by choice of the iPhone user. When users use the new anti-tracking feature, their behavior cannot be tracked by advertisers, therefore making targeting them nearly impossible.

CNet reports this statement from Apple;

“iOS 6 introduces the Advertising Identifier, a nonpermanent, nonpersonal, device identifier, that advertising networks will use to give you more control over advertisers’ ability to use tracking methods. If you choose to limit ad tracking, advertising networks using the Advertising Identifier may no longer gather information to serve you targeted ads. In the future all advertising networks will be required to use the Advertising Identifier. However, until advertising networks transition to using the Advertising Identifier you may still receive targeted ads from other networks.”

So, as of now, targeting iPhone users will not be completely out of the control of advertisers, but eventually every marketer with an advertising campaign on Apple devices will have to abide by the restrictions of the feature.

Since a huge number of mobile users strive to avoid advertising on their phones, there is a very good chance that the feature will be well used. Of course, this only hurts targeted ads on Apple devices, but those seem to be popping up more and more on mobile devices these days.

The transition from Apple’s older ad tracking settings to the new optional tracking switch may take a while but Apple has not released an actual timeline for it. This will give advertisers time to assess the impact that the new feature will have on their Apple mobile campaigns.

The opinions of how this new feature will affect the popularity of marketing with Apple are fluctuating, still. Some say it will have very little impact, but others see it as a significant mistake from iOS 6 developers. Either way, the feature will be here soon, and smartphone users will start to use it. We will just have to wait and see how Apple advertising performs after people start switching off the option of ad tracking. I say that Apple will be fine, because of all of the other forms of marketing that are available on mobile devices today.