Mobile commerce sales in the United States are expected to double this year, according to eMarketer. By 2015, that number will quadruple. The incredible expansion is predicated by the growing number of smartphones, tablets and other mobile devices.

Transactions over mobile devices should reach $6.7 billion this year. While that is still a small portion of overall retail sales, it is over a 90 percent increase over 2010, and expected to rise another 71 percent for 2012. eMarketer’s estimates are based on a variety of data from different research entities. Transactions include everything from physical goods to tickets for entertainment events. The numbers exclude digital downloads.

Some of the sites that benefit the most are auction sites. Consumers like the quick action on eBay and similar sites where their mobile device allows immediate satisfaction. Many time bound offers do well with mobile shoppers.

Traditional retail stores can be at a disadvantage if consumers simply pull out their mobile device and shop online retailers for a lower price. At the same time, local retailers with robust mobile sites can direct shoppers to one-of-a-kind opportunities right at the store, deals they cannot get at sites like Amazon, etc.

Results from this week’s Cyber Monday are illustrative. Total online sales came to $1.25 billion, the largest ever. According to CoreMetrics, mobile users made up 6.6 percent, up 2.3 percent from the same day in 2010.

“There is a convenience factor, whether it be iPhone, iPad or Android,” John Squire, chief strategy officer at Coremetrics told the Wall Street Journal. “And retailers have really invested in their sites to give mobile users a more compelling experience.”

EBay reported that Cyber Monday customers spent 2 ½ times more on their mobile service than the same time in 2010. PayPal exhibited similar trends, as they saw a sixfold increase in global mobile payment volume on that day, and the company’s commerce unit, which supports a number of retailers, saw a fourfold increase in U.S. mobile sales, according to the Journal. These results might extend through the week as many retailers are offering extended sales. Wal-Mart, Best Buy and others are dubbing it “Cyber Week.”

According to SeekingAlpha, the five most popular categories shopped through eBay Mobile were Clothing, Shoes and Accessories; Cell Phones and PDA’s; Jewelry and Watches; Collectibles and Toys and Hobbies. In electronics, it broke down as iPhone Accessories, iPhone 4 Black, and iPod Touch 8GB.

While some people thought that perhaps twitter would make a partnership with Google or Bing, it turns out that they have decided to start their own program, opting to compete with Google. This comes almost a year after they denied that this was something they would ever do, instead trying to promote that Twitter was a forum for brand advertising. Twitter ad sales chief Adam Bain infact confirmed the existence of the program. Despite denials, pretty much the entire industry was sure this would have to eventually happen for Twitter to compete in the marketplace.

Similar to Google, this will allow anyone to place advertisements on Twitter using a credit card to buy directly, and in theory allow affiliates and performance marketers to change their advertisement on the fly.

 These advertisers can now set up and run their own Promoted Products campaigns and pay via a credit card. This is an important step in continuing to grow Twitter’s business. Our Promoted Products can help small and medium-sized businesses build their audience on Twitter and better engage with the people they want to reach. As with all of our advertising efforts, we’re starting small, testing carefully and making improvements as we learn what works. We will slowly roll this capability out to more advertisers in the coming weeks and months.

Mashable’s Todd Wasserman mentioned of the ads:

Twitter has indeed been taking its time with the initiative. A year ago, the company rolled out a turn-key advertising solution that lets marketers express their interest in advertising. However, such potential advertisers were not able to actually buy ads until last month.

This is great news, as more and more people have been complaining that having twitter fans in itself wasn’t at all effective.

According to research firm eMarketer, Twitter’s will be around a total of  $139.5 million in 2011 and reach $260 million in 2012. This is only of course, if Twitter survives 2012.

There is no word when the platform will be open to the general public.

PointClickTrack: Great Incent Campaigns

As part of trying to expand our coverage of new parts of the industry, Performance Marketing Insider started a series of interviews with content unlocking companies. Please note, at first I questioned the entire Content Locking industry, but have begun to realize the benefits and that there are legit uses for the methods. This incentive based industry is one of the fastest growing segments, very similar to the social media currency, except that is generally not social based. The whole model is simple: sites want to provide something of value, but don’t want to provide it for free. Instead of asking a user to pay for it, they work with a content unlocking company to provide a gateway. In our industry, this means that if a user does something, fills out an offer, downloads a product, registers for a giveaway – or anything – they will be provided with the content for free.

We did a series of interviews with the leaders of the content locking and unlocking industry, and below are some of the interviews. Additionally, we have done a lot of insightful “how to articles” also listed.

Must Reads
Content Unlocking Exposed: Insiders Look at the Industry
$10k a day On Content Locking?

ADSCEND MEDIA

Adscend Media is one of the established companies in the industry run by Content Unlocking King, Fehzan Ali. He’s proven to be one of the most vocal members of the industry, telling anyone who will listen to him that content unlocking is a legit part of the industry and can provide a lot of use. Interview with Fehzan Ali

CPALEAD
CPALead is the company to beat in the industry. While the exact amount of money they make is not known, they are considered one of the top sources of traffic for dozens of networks, providing more than one CPA network several million dollars a month in revenue.  Their reach extend everywhere and I’ve been told that several download offers completely depend on them for the majority of their traffic.

BLAMADS (OUT OF BUSINESS!)

We bring the best support in affiliate networks community. No matter who you are emailers, mediabuyers… we can help you to find good niches or even help you to design your custom landing pages, html creatives…

I’m not sure condom ads are ever very classy, but most of them contain naked women or worse, bananas to signify men’s desires. Who knows the reason, but I’d think most men would rather have a condom that would work, than one that is “cool.” Frankly, condoms never match your clothing, so who really cares, right?

Of course, some ads are purely PSAs pointing out that if you don’t use them, your “special friend” might fall of when you get some sort of disease you can’t actually spell.

Either way, Olla Condoms has decided to make their own version of the ads, and has used babies stalking men on facebook as part of their strategy. If you are unfortunate enough to be part of the people targeted by this Facebook campaign, you’ll get a profile for a child with your name, with “Jr” tacked onto the end. You’ll get a friend request from this fictional baby, with the message “Avoid suprises like this one…”

This is a bit on the weird side, and frankly very, very creepy.

I have somewhere around 1,500+ friends, half of them I have no idea who they are. Now I have to worry that some ghost baby is going to annoy me and try to tell me what condom I need to wear.

Funny and interesting, bing has released the top searches of 2011 to the public. I’ve mentioned before how important it is to know about trends, because you’ll be able to create, develop and market products that match those trends. If you were smart enough to have bet $500k on that Kim Kardashian’s marriage would have lasted less than 3 months you might be a millionaire many times over. Similarly, imagine having developed Amy Winehouse tribute bobble-heads.

Congress has started legislation to start a possible federal sales tax, specifically aimed at online retailers. The Performance Marketing Association, has expressed support on this idea, pointing out that it is a better idea than having tons of State Nexus Taxes.

“There is a real sense of urgency for this legislation to become law. If Congress doesn’t act quickly, there are 60,000 small businesses that have had their incomes seriously constrained. Other states impatient for some sort of action, will pass affiliate nexus tax laws even though they are futile and ineffective, putting additional small businesses at risk. We need a Constitutional framework that provides states with an equitable sales tax collection policy for all businesses,” says Rebecca Madigan the Executive Director of the PMA.

The bills have support from brick and mortar merchants, such as Walmart who have seen their revenues hit by more and more people turning to the internet instead of shopping in person.

Ebay on the other hand does not support the federal sales tax measure, pointing out that it will significantly hurt small sellers on EBAY. Tod Cohen, Ebay’s Deputy General Counsel said that eBay Sellers have actually seen decreases in electronic commerce sales the last two years, as Amazon and other stores gain.

In my opinion the PMA has a lot of explaining to do in supporting this.  Many of their members, and more importantly the entire Internet marketing system depend on the lack of sales taxes. While I understand their concern about having multiple state taxes, as they have pointed out in their own fight against it, those laws will eventually be considered unconstitutional.

Small businesses have been able to strive online because of this advantage of not having taxes. Large businesses like Walmart, Target are completely disingenuous in claiming that they are at an disadvantage, because they get tons of tax breaks from local, state and federal governments that small businesses don’t get.

Also, the PMA is ignoring the fact that a federal sales tax will create a significant issue if its applied to dozen of other types of transactions, including lead generation and site memberships. Do we really need to have to charge consumers when they join a dating site?  In this depressed economy the online entrepreneurs are what are sustaining us. Supporting a bill that helps the big businesses at the expensive of small business is a really bad idea.

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Google recently changed Product Ads to include the ability to show five separate products at a time. The improvement give users more information and pricing details and lets advertisers showcase more of their inventory at the same time.

Product Listing Ads show product images, prices, and merchant name without using extra keywords. When users conduct an online search related to a product in a Google Merchant Center account, the company will show the products with their images in the ad space.

The change takes place in all countries with Product Ads. This month the company added the United Kingdom to that list, along with Germany and France. Since the program was launched with a U.S. beta, studies shows users were twice as likely to click Product Ads as a regular text ad in the same location on the page.

In addition, the leads were higher quality resulting in higher ROI. Google has seen over 600% increases in traffic to retailers using Product Listing Ads in relation to the previous year. The company expects the holiday season to be even more productive.

Product Ads draw their data from Google Merchant Center accounts. Retailers considering Product Ads can benefit from the recent changes:

• Use all of the inventory- select the “All Products” option when setting up your product target to make sure the entire inventory is shown.
• Check quality control- the Merchant Center has a Data Quality tab that merchants should review which helps make sure Google has enough of the right data to line-up products with online searches.
• Improve your copy- shoppers still respond to classic sales copy with details such as “Limited Time Only” or “Extended Guarantee.” Make sure ads use an appealing call to action.
• Maximize bid opportunities- the holidays are an especially competitive ad bidding season. Ensure that bids are placed competitively with enough budget firepower behind them.

Product Listing Ads make it easier for retailers to show their entire inventory. They have proven more engaging as users are better educated on each product even before they get to the website.

Advertisers pay for listings on a Cost Per Action (CPA) basis. This provides a low risk way to find a larger audience as they only pay when a user clicks an ad and buys a product on-site. Because shoppers can see the product, price and image before they click, they are more likely in a buying mode when they arrive at the merchant’s site.

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