Nearly half of mobile industry executives and analysts in a new survey expect mobile ad spending to double this year, while almost one-third expect it to grow by 200%. That’s quite a bullish outlook. The survey by mobile consulting and research firm Chetan Sharma on 2010 predictions also covered topics including app stores, tiered pricing and mobile payments.

Google has unveiled its new Adwords feature, click-to-call mobile ads for smartphones (previously this feature was only available for WAP devices). These ads will have a clickable phone number attached to an advertiser’s ad. If an advertiser is running local business ads and/or local extensions. The phone number will be displayed on the 5th line of the ad.

Local extensions can be setup at either the campaign level or at the ad group level. When set up at the campaign level, Google will dynamically match a campaign’s text ads with the most relevant address in the account to the user’s location or specific search terms. There are two ways to enter in your business addresses with Google; using a local business center account or entering addresses manually into an Adwords account.

Mobile Search and User Experience

Mobile search ads evoke one of three different actions:

1. The user clicking through to the advertiser’s site
2. A click that sends the “user” to a Google-supplied Business Page
3. A click that immediately and automatically dials the advertiser’s local business phone number

The click-to-call mobile feature is perfect for the following types of companies:

1. Retail businesses that do the majority of transactions by phone or people use on the fly, such as take-out/delivery restaurants, or taxi companies
2. B2B businesses where phone leads are their main source of business. Towing Companies, etc.
3. B2C companies whose aspects are a mixture of the previous two. Professional services: legal, financial, investment, etc.

Some internet marketers would agree that display ads on the content network don’t receive the credit they deserve. Some feel that only certain industries can do well with display ads in the content network.  However, Google has created view-through conversion tracking to help show advertisers and companies that display ads in the content network are producing results. 

View-through conversion tracking is an advocate for display ads in the content network. According to Google Adwords, view-through conversion tracking “provides a measure of the number of online conversions that happened within 30 days after a user saw, but did not click, a display ad on one of the sites on the Google Content Network.” View-through conversion tracking shows who went back and converted even though they didn’t click on the ad.

View-through conversion tracking is a great feature because it proves that ads can be triggering conversions even though there were no clicks. Think about it, when display advertising came out, it was on a cpm or (cost per thousand impressions) basis. Some marketers felt that this metric wasn’t convincing enough. People saw the ad, but that didn’t mean they were converting. As time went on Google offered cpc or (cost per click) ads and some marketers felt they were missing out because there ads weren’t being clicked on by consumers. View-through conversion tracking solves the issue for both parties. Whether an advertiser does cpm or cpc for display ads, they can see conversions that occurred, simply because someone saw an ad.  

Internet marketers can prove that display ads in the content network are producing results with Google’s view-through conversion tracking. The results are coming in from view-through conversion tracking and some people will be surprised. There are conversions coming in without a single click being made. View-through conversion tracking is definitely an asset for any internet marketer running display ads.

Less than a month after Yahoo pulled the plug on their popular Paid Inclusion program. The company has decided to outsource its shopping engine to PriceGrabber. This decision to exit the shopping engines won’t come as too much of a shock to those in the industry given Yahoo’s future plans with search advertising. However, it is surprising that they decided to give this business to PriceGrabber over Microsoft’s platform, Bing Shopping.

Perhaps Yahoo believes that by giving Microsoft their shopping business, they will eventually become too dependent on them. Either way, it should be interesting to see how this will play out for all parties involved.

Most importantly is how this will affect the advertisers. My suggestion would be to stay ahead of the game and open an account with PriceGrabber directly. Be ready to capture the major shift in traffic as the largest shopping engine outsources all their traffic to a direct a comparison shopping site. By advertising through these types of engines you have the ability to reach a more qualified audience.