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Mobile To Drive One-Third Of Paid Search Clicks By Year End (Search Engine Land)
Marin Software released a report called The State of Mobile Search Advertising in the World. The 2012 data is drawn from search campaigns conducted in 13 geographies including the U.S., UK, China, Europe and Australia.
Marin forecasts that mobile devices will drive a third of U.S. paid clicks by December 2013. The company says that as of December 2012, mobile devices accounted for 23.4 percent of all US paid-search clicks. Mobile also captured 18.4 percent of search budgets in December.
Marin found that paid search campaigns on smartphones and tablets delivered higher click-through rates (CTR) at a lower cost-per-click (CPC). However, overall, conversions were lower on mobile devices. But because there are relatively few e-commerce sales on smartphones, this metric (“conversions”) isn't a great fit. Read >>
Facebook’s Mobile Strategy: Create Experiences That Can’t Be Done On Desktop (AllFacebook)
Facebook is working on mobile-first programs. The social network sends 180 million clicks per month to the Apple App Store and Google Play, and that figure will only grow in the future. Mobile users are becoming more addicted to Facebook, as 70 percent visit the site daily, in contrast to less than half of desktop-only users. What else are they doing? The relationship with Zynga isn't over, being a strong platform that developers and partners will continue to invest in, and focusing on Facebook as a social discovery engine. Read >>
More Evidence That Apple And Samsung Dominate Smartphones (Gartner via TNW)
Gartner released the results of its 2012 report. The analyst firm found that, during the fourth quarter of 2012, Apple and Samsung accounted for more than 50 percent market share for the first time, while Nokia charted its lowest market share to date.
Sales of smartphones grew 38.3 percent over 2012, to reach 207.7 million units. But Samsung and Apple, the mobile industry’s big two ‘frenemies‘ dominate, accounted for a joint 46.4 percent in the final quarter of the year. Much of their growth is based on momentum, according to Gartner, which states that merely the “strength of their brands as much as their actual products” have seen them rise to a joint dominant position. Read >>
Mobile On The Cusp, Again (AdWeek)
Mobile still makes up a single-digit share of overall ad spend, but its growth rate has been strong, being fueled by advertising opportunities on popular sites which are seeing large chunks of their traffic coming from mobile. With mobile now fully ingrained in consumer behavior, marketers are eager to get their efforts moving. "It's not a race to mobile first, but not wanting to be mobile last," says Ernie Cormier, CEO and president of Nexage, a mobile ad exchange. "What we see is in the past, brands wondered whether it was too early to get into mobile. Now advertisers don’t want to be too late." Read >>
How Location-Based Data Is Making Mobile Advertising Explode (BI Intelligence)
With 770 million of the 1.2 billion smartphone devices worldwide equipped with GPS, location data has begun to permeate the entire mobile space. Location-enabled mobile ads have generated excitement for their effectiveness and the impressive prices they command. And many mobile ad trading platforms have recently reported triple-digit increases in location-enabled impressions.In a recent report from BI Intelligence on location-based data, we analyze the opportunities emerging from this new local-mobile paradigm, examine how location-enabled mobile ads have generated excitement, look at how location-based feature have boosted engagement for apps, explain how local data can connect hundreds of thousands of small and medium-sized businesses to the mobile economy, and demystify some of the underlying technologies and privacy issues. Read >>
Hey, Microsoft: It’s Time To Pull Phone Into Windows (WindowsITPro)
Windows Phone 8 isn’t Windows. It’s sort-of Windows. It’s something that looks like the part of Windows 8 that no one actually seems to like, the misunderstood Metro environment. But it doesn’t run Windows 8/RT Metro apps, let alone desktop applications and utilities, even though it can and should. Instead, it runs toy apps, and silly games, and its user experience wins are ignored because no one can see past those damned tiles. Boy, did Microsoft blow it. Imagine a phone that could run real Remote Desktop. Real PowerShell. Anything that can run on your desktop PC. Make it happen, Microsoft. It’s time to take the phone seriously. Read >>
Apple Makes More Money From iPhone Accessories And Apps Than Others Do Phones (Asymco)
Here’s an awesome chart by Horace Dediu:
Check out how big Apple’s iTunes and iPhone accessory revenues are compared to the entire mobile phone revenue of every other large smartphone manufacturer (except Samsung). Read >>
How Mobile Payments Will Transform Shopping (readwrite mobile)
How do we know that 2013 is really the year that mobile wallets will finally take off? Here are four indicators from players across the ecosystem that suggest we will see a global shift in mobile payments this year:
- Chetan Sharma Consulting voted mobile payments the top mobile applications and services category for 2013.
- Visa Europe claims that in 2013, there will be 40 issuers offering mobile contactless payment services to consumers, and by the end of 2013 around 80 types of smartphones will be certified to carry out contactless payments.
- A study performed by Shop.org and Forrester research, found that 51 percent of retailers said that their top priority in 2013 had to do with optimization, including mobile payments.
- China is set to embrace a cashless society as it taps a boom in e-commerce and electronic payments, with mobile payments likely to soar 52.7 percent annually in 2013.
There are big rewards waiting for the first companies able to put it all together for their customers. Read >>
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