The report also looks at actions marketers are trying to get consumer to take when they see the ads. "Social media actions in particular had significant growth quarter-over-quarter, as  marketers are trying to use advertising to drive actions such as ‘liking’ a FB page," a spokesperson for Millennial Media tells WebProNews.

Some takeaways from the report include:

- Telecommunications was the top vertical for mobile advertising. This was primarily driven by carriers and device manufacturers that doubled down their mobile buys doing the holiday season. Windows Phone 7 devices in particular relied heavily on mobile advertising.

- Six verticals had triple digit growth year-over-year. Automotive grew 623% and Retail & Restaurants grew 572%

- 49% of mobile campaigns were designed to drive consumers to a website. 16% of campaigns were designed to drive app downloads

- Leveraging the increasing consumer desire to use LBS as part of the mobile experience, 22% of campaigns used a "store locator" as the desired campaign action.

- 14% of campaigns had a "social media" post-click campaign action-where consumers can interact with FB or Twitter, or perhaps post pictures to a custom site

- 57% of campaigns used a general broad reach, while 43% targeted a specific audience. Of the targeted campaigns, targeting by demographic was the most popular method.

Millennial Media recently reported that Android surpassed iOS as the largest smartphone OS on its network in December. Find the new SMART report here.

"Everyday consumers are using their phones to search Google and a growing number are turning to mobile to complete a variety of purchases," says Anna Khesed with Google’s Mobile Ads Marketing Team. "In fact, according to internal Google data, in Q3 Google searches from mobile devices grew 130% year over year. Additionally, a Mobile Marketing Association study found that 59% of holiday shoppers said they plan to use their mobile phones to facilitate holiday shopping. So this year we are creating a better mobile shopping experience by helping consumers identify highly rated online merchants."

"Having a great online reputation is key," she continues. "Now with Seller Ratings on mobile, businesses can extend this important information from desktop to mobile devices. By showcasing relevant and useful rating information for your business, the extension can help differentiate you from your competition and guide potential customers to purchase from your site. Seller Ratings are aggregated from merchant review sites all around the web and the extension will only show when a merchant’s online store has a rating of four or more stars and at least 30 reviews. As seen in the example below, the ad will display the merchant’s star rating as well as a clickable link to the seller’s reviews."

To maintain positive reviews, Google suggests starting with good customer service (contrary to the exposed practices of one business, which led to Google changing its algorithm). The company also suggests reading the reviews about your business and being proactive about resolving issues. Another thing mentioned on a help page worth noting:

To help ensure that customers submit ratings to the right businesses, be sure to confirm that Google Product Search review sites display the correct business name and website URL for your business listing. Your business name and website URL should be consistent across review sites, and should also be consistent with your Google Merchant Center account if you have one. This helps customers identify the right businesses and helps avoid ratings for other businesses being included within your own seller ratings.

The extensions will automatically transfer to mobile when advertisers are using them for the desktop, but they must already be showing campaigns to users of "high-end devices" with full Internet browsers. The extensions are only available for Google.com, Google.co.uk, and Google.de thus far. 

The extensions can also only be used for advertisers with paid godos or services or those that enable the buying and selling of goods or services. The ratings only apply to the merchants, as opposed to products themselves.

To use the extensions, you can’t use another extension plus box (like product extensions, location extensions, etc.) or sitelinks.

In the scenario described, someone has car trouble and is able to quickly find a nearby car rental place from the side of the road as they simply enter "car rental". 

"Hyperlocal distance information enhances the location extensions ad format with a marker providing the distance between the user and your business location," explains Google Mobile Ads Product Manager Surojit Chatterjee. "This visual cue instantly helps customers who are on the go and close to a point of sale know that your business is nearby which can drive more traffic to your store and generate more revenue for your business.  Users see the hyperlocal ads only if they’ve opted into sharing their location on Google.com. And because the hyperlocal distance feature is built on top of location extensions, users can also easily click to see where your business is located on a map and click to call and connect with your business immediately. 

"Hyperlocal distance information is automatically enabled for location extensions and does not require any additional configurations, allowing you to effortlessly perform hyperlocal advertising with your existing location extensions," adds Chatterjee. "Campaigns must also be opted into showing on iPhones, Android OS phones or other mobile devices with full Internet browsers. The ad format is available only on the Google search network and in countries supporting location extensions ad formats. Advertisers are only charged when users click to visit the website or on the phone number shown in the ad."

Google has also been showing off some interesting innovations in display advertising this week. The company demonstrated four different things at an ad event. More on those here. 

In fact, AdMob really hasn’t come up a whole lot in the discussions that I’ve been witness to. But that hasn’t stopped Google from talking about various mobile ad formats its offers. A portion of a lengthy keynote delivered Thursday morning was devoted to this.

Google VP, Engineering, Vic Gundotra had the following to say (paraphrased):

It turns out we know a little bit about advertising. This year is Google’s tenth anniversary of providing ad solutions. We’ve learned a few things. if you want a healthy ecoystem, you need advertisers and we have hundreds of thousands of them. we’re not new at this game…

He reminded everybody that Google has Doubleclick, AdWords, AdSense, and Analytics. He then revealed some new expandable ad formats for mobile. More info about Google’s mobile ad formats can be found here. Google is expanding its click-to-call ads to mobile content and apps as well. More on this here.

Gundotra said in a Q&A that the company is being careful about ads so they span both apps and mobile sites.

When it comes down to it, mobile ads mean money for developers. More importantly, they mean motivation to innovate with mobile apps, which of course is critical to Android’s success.

Apart from monetizing the apps themselves, mobile ads can greatly contribute to the discoverability of mobile apps themselves.

"We believe that Apple’s proposed acquisition of Quattro serves as yet another validation of the vibrant mobile advertising industry and can help accelerate the pace of innovation and competition in this space."

Original Article: Apple is reportedly set to acquire Quattro Wireless for $275 million. This is according to the generally reliable Kara Swisher of BoomTown, who claims to have the information confirmed by several sources.

Quattro Wireless is a mobile ad network similar to AdMob, which is in the process of being acquired by Google. Reports suggest that Apple was in the running for Admob, but was outbid, so the next logical step was to seek a competitor to stay competitive with Google in this market.

The $275 million price tag is much smaller than what Google paid for AdMob ($750 million), but Quattro is considerably smaller. However, they both directly deal in advertising on smartphones, a market both Google and Apple are heavily competing in.

Google’s latest iPhone competitor, the Nexus One is scheduled to be unveiled today. You can read a bit more about that here.

According to Swisher, the official announcement about Apple’s acquisition of Quattro could come as early as today, but this has not been confirmed. Quattro is based in Waltham, Massachusetts. It counts Ford, Disney, and the NFL among its clients.

Related Articles:

> Consumer Groups Ask FTC To Block Google AdMob Deal

> Google Provides an Update on the AdMob Acquisition

> Google Buys Mobile Ad Firm For $750 Million In Stock<

AdMob released its Mobile Metrics report for September, which highlights the rapid growth in usage of mobile web sites and apps on new devices in the past year.

In September of 2008, the Motorola RAZR was the top device in the US and the iPhone was the only touchscreen device in the top 10. This year, things have changed a bit. The lost of the top 10 devices includes five with touchscreens, six with Wi-Fi capabilities, and six with application stores.

"These devices are responsible for a much higher percentage of mobile usage than their share of handsets sold," says AdMob. "However feature phones like the Samsung R450 and Motorola RAZR V3 still represent 60 percent of ad requests in the US.  The strong mobile Web usage on these feature phones is likely driven by unlimited data plans."

Other highlights from the report include:

- In September 2007 AdMob had 1.6 billion ad requests, in September 2008 5.1 billion, and in September 2009 10.2 billion.

- Nearly every region of the world experienced immense growth in the past two years, with North America, Asia, Western Europe, Oceania and Latin America seeing a six-fold increase in traffic since September 2007.

- Worldwide iPhone and iPod touch traffic increased 19 times from September 2008 to September 2009 in the AdMob network.

- In September 2009 42 percent of requests in the US were made from Wi-Fi capable devices. 18 percent of actual US requests were made over a Wi-Fi connection in September 2009 compared to only 5 percent in September 2008.

- Devices running on the Android Operating System (OS) accounted for 17 percent of smartphone traffic in AdMob’s network in the US in September 2009, up from 13 percent in August 2009. The HTC Dream (G1) was the number three device and the HTC Magic was the number 10 device in September 2009 in the US. As with the iPhone OS, much of the Android traffic in AdMob’s network came from applications.

AdMob’s data is based on usage of handsets and smartphone devices during the month of September in their network of over 15,000 mobile sites and apps. AdMob’s market share is calculated by the percentage of requests received from a particular handset. The company deems this a measure relative of mobile web and application usage.

Related Articles:

> App Store Gets Twice the Downloads of Android Market

> That’s a Lot of Mobile Advertising!

> What’s Your Favorite iPhone App?

Chitika conducted a study of mobile vs. non-mobile Internet usage, and based on a sample of 92 million impressions, found that mobile users are approximately half as likely to click on an advertisement as non-mobile users.

- Of the 92 million impressions cited in the study, approximately 1.3 million (1.5%) came from mobile browsing.

- non-mobile held steady with a 0.83% clickthrough rate

- mobile as a whole pulled a mere 0.48% – just over half of the average

"While the recent growth in ‘smartphones’ has sparked a renewed interest in mobile advertising, it appears given the numbers that mobile Internet users are not receptive to advertising – a phenomenon that is not surprising, given the mobile users’ propensity to be searching for quick answers or directions," says Chitika.

I would agree that it is not surprising that mobile users aren’t thrilled about mobile ads. However, I also believe if an ad is targeted well enough, a user will find it acceptable, a theory that accounts for Compete’s findings.

Of Android, iPhone, Microsoft’s Windows CE, Palm OS, and BlackBerry, iPhone ranked the worst for clickthrough rate at 0.30%. "iPhone also accounted for the bulk of mobile hits, at 66%. The group which clicked on ads the most is the "Other" group, comprised mainly of BlackBerry users and a small handful of other phone operating systems (including Symbian, Nokia, and HTC)," says Chitika.

Chitika maintains that mobile users do not want to be served ads. Perhaps that is why Mobile Marketing Association President Mike Wehrs has said that if you do it well, it doesn’t become an advertisement. It becomes information that they were looking for anyway.

For more on mobile marketing without being annoying, read this WebProNews interview with Tom Foran from Crisp Wireless.

The firm said 18 digital and non-traditional media segments, accounted for 16.1 percent of total advertising and marketing spending in 2007, up from 7.9 percent in 2002.

"By 2012, we anticipate one out of every four dollars spent on advertising and marketing will be earmarked for alternative media," said Patrick Quinn, President and CEO of PQ Media. "Alternative advertising and marketing media are driving a new media order that presents vast opportunities for industry stakeholders, but also key challenges for some of the fastest-growing digital media segments."

Estimates of total US online ad spending in 2007 range from $10.9 billion (Universal McCann) to $30.5 (Veronis Suhler Stevenson).

eMarketer tracks U.S. online ad spending estimates from 23 companies and estimates that online spending was $21.1 billion in 2007.

"Technological advances have led to critical changes in consumer behaviors and media usage patterns, which have pushed the advertising and marketing ecosystems into a seminal period of transition", added Quinn.

"Driven by these market forces, brand marketers are seeking new strategies to connect with consumers through engaging means in captive locations, while at the same time providing proof-of-performance metrics. This confluence of trends is fueling the migration of dollars to alternative media."