It was opening day this past weekend for Little League baseball here in Boca Raton, FL, the weather cooperated and we had a great weekend of games.  We were treated to a very close hard fought game with lots of strike outs on each side.  A few of the pre-season practices had to be cancelled due to weather, so I was not surprised by the high number of strikeouts.  As the teams get more at bats, the hits will begin to ramp up as the strikeouts decrease. I thought it was interesting that a parent was utilizing an iPhone app to perform the score keeping for the home team, no more worries if you break your pencil lead. Smart phones and their apps are everywhere and as they continue to grow in number so too will the advertising opportunities.

Mobile advertising will also be ramping up rapidly and 2010 should be the year you begin laying your foundation by getting a .mobi or using a sub-domain for your mobile friendly site. We here at MoreVisibility have the experts and experience to accomplish this task, freeing you up to manage your day to day schedule, visit our “going mobile” content today if you need assistance. The reason we will experience rapid advances in mobile advertising is due to the advances in network speed and infrastructure, the cloud and the maturity of the devices and their adoption in our daily lives. Smart phones are a very personal piece of ones life and store loads of information; we have all our contacts and our appointments as well as pictures and music in them and we always have them with us. The location of your phone is also known and available to the mobile advertisers, which will better aid them in providing the correct content at the right time.

We know Google is putting resources and emphasis toward mobile advertising via Eric Schmidt’s comments from Mobile World Congress 2010 keynote speech this past February, where he proclaimed “Mobile first”. Google will be assisting the mobile consumers to locate goods or services, via voice recognized search and image search, Google Goggles . The potential for success with your mobile advertising dollars has never looked better.

For any person using Facebook for contextual advertising, it has been a major source of frustration that it did not have conversion tracking or a means to determine if visitors were completing any actions on their site. Not having the option to track conversions limits the amount of analysis and optimization an advertiser can do to improve the performance of their ads. Using an analytics platform was one way to track certain goals that were completed; however, not every advertiser uses analytics.

Conversion coding enables advertisers to track certain goals as well as make strategic decisions on performance of ads. Testing different ad copy or targeting is beneficial for marketers so they can actually measure what is performing the best. On the flip side, they can also see what isn’t performing and make decisions to optimize the campaign. Larger search engines including Google, Bing, Yahoo, Ask and Business.com all offer conversion coding.

Facebook recently released a very limited beta program for conversion tracking. Not much is known about this beta, but it clearly shows that Facebook is looking to be a contender as a major advertising platform. By giving advertisers this tool, Facebook is making it easier to show how well ads can perform.

No longer is Facebook a valuable market for just for building brand awareness, it is moving toward becoming a portal in which advertisers can expect to see conversion driven success.

My physician will describe how to age gracefully during my annual physical exam and I figure if I continue to jog during lunch and have an apple a day, I’m doing the right thing.  In the growing smartphone market, Nokia is probably not aging gracefully as is evident by Apple’s growing market share of global ad requests as measured by AdMob network.  Nokia lost 15 percent points from 2008 Q4 to 2009 Q4; while Apple grabbed 24 percent during this period

I can attribute this to the iPhone going global and of course the Apple App Store’s treasure trove of applications running on the iPhone.  There are simply many more developers embracing the Apple’s OS versus the Nokia backed Symbian OS.  We all understand that the secret sauce in the mobile advertising niche will be unearthed by an application, probably not yet developed.  Having said that, one would think attracting developers is a prerequisite for a successful mobile advertising platform.  Gartner is projecting 4.5 billion mobile app downloads for 2010, with 82% of the apps free! So how will those developers monetize their apps, if eight out of ten downloads are free?

Developers can earn their money from mobile advertisers, and the various banners, embedded video, overlays, animated gifs, ad bugs and so forth added to their content.  An important piece of this income relies on knowing the location of the smartphone, in order to provide timely advertisement of goods or services.  After reading an article in the Apple App Store tip section of their developer center, I became confused and began to wonder how Apple can continue to attract developers if they are disallowing the use of their Core Location Framework, “If your app uses location-based information primarily to enable mobile advertisers to deliver targeted ads based on a user’s location, your app will be returned to you by the App Store Review Team for modification before it can be posted to the App Store”

So, Apple is protecting their valuable customers from unwanted advertisements, or are they flexing their muscles and attempting to leverage their newly acquired Quattro Wireless mobile advertising division? Hmm, first the threat to replace Google with their past adversary Microsofts’ Bing as the iPhones’ default search and now this constraint on app developers

It will continue to get heated as these industry giants juggle for position in the race for your mobile advertising dollars. Our team at MoreVisibility is here for you and will be keeping abreast on the ever changing climate of the mobile advertising niche. Just yesterday at the Mobile World Congress 2010, Google’s Eric Schmidt gave the keynote speech in which he proclaimed “Mobile First”. Websites must take heed and be prepared to present their content on mobile devices, or possible miss opportunities to present their goods and services to the rapidly growing mobile users. Stop by our Mobile Websites Knowledge Center first to learn more or call us and let us explain how we can guide you in all your internet marketing needs.