Many marketers had predicted that 2007 was going to be the year that this advertising option would break through to the mainstream, but Mobile Advertising has still not begun to realize its huge potential. Slow growth of high speed networks and lack of an overall mobile internet audience have slowed the mass adoption by advertisers.

The recent introduction of flat-rate mobile plans and lower cost smart phones should help to expand the mobile phone user audience and increase mobile ad spending levels. According to eMarketer, worldwide mobile ad spending will grow from 2.7 billion in 2007 to over 19 billion in 2012. Text message (SMS) campaigns will likely account for the majority of the spend, with advertisers using the “walk before you run” approach before testing more complex campaigns with Mobile Search and Display formats.

Consumer costs continue to drop and mobile technology is improving, but there are still obstacles to overcome with mobile carrier constraints, user privacy, multiple ad formats, campaign tracking, and the unawareness of what the space can provide to an advertiser. 2008 probably wont be the year that Mobile Ads hit the mainstream, but its a good bet that Mobile Advertising will eventually rival Search Advertising.

Shopping cart abandonment happens when a visitor initiates the order by starting the check out process, but leaves before the purchase can be completed. The rate at which visitors abandon the cart is a critical indicator of website performance. For online businesses with their main goal of selling products, shopping cart abandonment can mean the difference between profitability and loss.

According to various industry publications the average shopping cart abandonment rate is currently around 40% - 60% for most online merchants. That means that roughly one out of every two visitors who adds an item to their shopping cart ultimately abandons it instead of completing their purchase. Although the rate of abandonment is alarming, the opportunity for improvement is significant. E-commerce businesses have to learn how to identify and implement effective strategies to streamline and optimize their ordering processes. Understanding the causes of shopping cart abandonment can help any online merchant convert more visitors to buyers.

Leading causes of shopping cart abandonment, involve a lack of effective conversion marketing strategies. Some of the most common reasons people abandon their shopping carts are:

• Comparison shopping and browsing - The Internet makes comparison shopping easy. Consumer performs shopping research before buying, which causes a time delay between initial visit and actual purchase. It’s not unusual for consumer to add items to the cart to determine the total cost of purchase including tax and shipping or save items for later purchase. Visitor may return later after further comparison shopping on other websites or may completely abandon the site and buy elsewhere.

• Confusion in regards to checkout process - Consumer is intent on buying, but can’t determine how to complete the checkout process. Consumers may be confused about added costs such as shipping or distracted by other elements on the pages.

• Impatience and frustration - Consumer becomes impatient if the checkout process is too long, shopping cart pages load slowly, site requires registration before purchase, or requests non-purchase related information. Client gets frustrated when facing shopping cart technical problems like receiving a form error message but not being able to figure out what was in error, or has been returned to the form to find the original data cleared as well when facing payment issues i.e. the site doesn’t take certain credit cart type. Out of stock and back ordered products may also irritate customers, they will not want to wait for the product and may purchase from other site or offline instead.

• Privacy, Safety and Security Fears - Consumer is concerned with providing personal information, including credit card. A lack of confidence and trust in an e-commerce business is a sure sign of shopping cart abandonment, especially with the rise of spam, identity theft and other fraudulent activities. Anything that seems a little out of the ordinary or order forms that ask for too much personal information may scare potential customer away.

• High shipping prices or long delivery times - High cost of shipping and the lack of shipping options may discourage customers from purchasing products online.

• Total Cost of Purchase ends up being more than expected

Shopping cart abandonment is a significant problem. The many ways to reduce it will be discussed in Shopping Cart Abandonment Demystified - Part 2.

During a discussion on the next big thing in internet search here in the SEO department at Morevisibility, we speculated on the future of the Open Directory. Back in the day, search directories were the first real way that websites were found on the internet and even after the web crawlers made their debut, directories were important. Those days are long gone. Does this auger the demise of the Open Directory? Well, maybe not. For one thing, as sophisticated as all the new technology and search engine algorithms are, most successful search engines still rely on human opinion. It has been suggested that the rise of social media harks back to the early early days of the internet when word of mouth was the way that a site was found – that it’s all part of a cycle of search technology development. With the rise of social media, word of mouth recommendations are fast becoming a way for sites to be found by visitors. Sites like www.stumbleupon.com and www.coolsiteoftheday.com are extending this by letting us take recommendations from strangers as though they were our friends. So, if search technology is working in a cycle, will directories assume more importance in the years to come? Maybe not for standard text search but it seems to me that human editing would be invaluable for determining keyword relevance of images and videos. In fact, Google already employs this to a certain degree with Google Image Labeler. It’s more like a game at the moment and even though the presence of an opponent does make it a little more valid, how well it works to really assign relevance to images remains to be seen. Is there a place for image and video directories in the internet of the future? Given all the new technological breakthroughs lately, this is definitely a question that is up in the air but a great place to find out more is by reading this article: http://blogs.mediapost.com/search_insider/?p=776