For AdWords advertisers wanting to reach mobile screens, how you optimize your site or landing page plays a huge role in how and where your ads are displayed.  Last year, for example, Google started limiting ad serving on high-end mobile devices if they pointed to landing pages with Flash-heavy content.  Likewise, the search giant announced today via its “GoogleMobileAds” blog that it will introducing the mobile optimization of a Website as a new “ad-quality” factor for AdWords campaigns that are driving mobile search traffic.

What this means is that ads that have mobile optimized landing pages will perform much better in AdWords compared to sites that retain their PC-based design — meaning they’ll drive more mobile traffic at a lower cost.  A recent study which asked users about the performance of mobile websites found that 61% of users are unlikely to return to a website that they had trouble accessing from their phone, proving once again how important having an optimized mobile presence really is.

On its “Inside AdWords” blog today, Google said that +1 buttons have been installed on over a million Websites across the Web with more than 4 billion daily impressions.  By adding the buttons to display ads across both the Web and mobile, advertisers have the ability to run social-enabled ad campaigns that work across millions of sites on over 40 countries around the world.  The new feature is being added to display ads by default, though users can opt-out manually via their AdWords account.

The idea is that a display ad becomes much more powerful when people can see which of their friends and contacts have chosen to endorse it.  On the Web, the +1 button and recommendations will appear at the bottom of display ads, then fade out until the viewer hovers over the ad.  On mobile, the +1 button will replace the existing “g” logo and recommendations will appear for several seconds before fading out.

The buttons placed on display ads will also work together with buttons on search results, search ads, and Websites — meaning a single +1 applies to the same content across the Web, no matter where it appears.  While the theory is solid, I’m not sure people will be “+1ing” ads as much as Google hopes.  Will you?

Localized paid search is becoming the most popular, with the study finding that 22 percent of  respondents’ budgets were spent locally on targeted paid search.  In the US the same question was asked to companies and it found that a greater proportion of company’s' pay per click marketing budgets were being allocated to local search, with actual figures being 37 percent for agency respondents and 23 percent for clients.

Some other key findings from the study include the following:

• The rise of the mobile internet is the trend which is regarded as having the most impact on search marketing, with more than three-quarters of companies (79%) deeming it as ‘highly significant’ or ‘significant’.
• The use of social networks for marketing continues to grow. The percentage of company respondents who say they use Facebook for marketing now stands at 84%, up from 73% last year.
• More companies are outsourcing search and social media. Only 44% of companies are now carrying out search engine optimization in-house, compared to 51% last year. Only 55% are doing social media marketing in-house, compared to 62% a year ago.
• Companies and agencies are increasingly using third party bid management technology for paid search marketing. Just under half of responding companies conducting search engine marketing rely on basic tools.
• Google’s dominance as a search engine is clear from both advertiser and agency results, with the vast majority of companies (95%) paying to advertise on Google AdWords.

The following is a guest post from Andrew Hudson, PPC Analyst at Epiphany Solutions.

As I’m sure we are all aware, the market for high end mobile devices is huge and is an important growth sector with an enormous potential and target audience for Mobile Ads.  We all, as search marketers, need to be right on top of this sector and need to ensure we are maximising the potential of this channel.

By 2015, it’s been estimated that  shopping via mobile devices will account for in excess of $163 billion in sales worldwide, 12% of global ecommerce turnover (ABI Research, 2010), with 59% of consumers using their smart phones to perform mobile shopping activities from home (Experian Study, 2011).

With this in mind we need to ensure we are embracing all the latest technologies available at our fingertips. I would like to outline a couple of useful snippets that should help us all improve our mobile campaigns.

The first of which being the “Click to Call” facility. This feature has been around for a while now, since January 2010 in fact, and is a much underestimated tool. It enables the user to click on a phone link and call directly the desired business. Recently, statistics unveiled by a Senior Product Manager at Google revealed that campaigns with the “click to call” function typically experienced a 6-10% rise in click through rate, which could have a dramatic impact on sales.

Another useful nugget is adding the location extension to your ads. When a user searches for one of your mobile ads they will be able to see how close to your business they are, where your business is on a map and again a “click to call” link.

Surojit Chatterjee, a senior product manager of mobile ads for Google, surmises that mobile users are much more focused on fulfilling immediate actions and are looking for things they can act on immediately.

Both of these functions are very appealing to the mobile user and in my experience they really work well, they can make the difference between success and failure.

If you are not trailing them, why not?

While Google dominates desktop search, the mobile arena is still anyone’s game really.  Growth in mobile search is being driven by two standout trends, according to the research, which include voice-based and local search.  ”While voice is becoming an important trend driving mobile search, language differences are likely to benefit local or first movers in different regions,” the research suggests.  ”The development of voice recognition into a personal digital assistant offers new opportunities and is being integrated into platforms and devices.”

The mobile search market generated roughly $901M in revenues in 2010, equivalent to around 3% of total search revenues.  By 2015, when revenues are estimated to reach $8B, it will represent a CAGR of a whopping 55%.  In addition, the research suggests that mobile search makes up around a quarter of total mobile advertising revenue, with it expected to exceed 40% in 2015.  The full report is available here.

According to Covario’s “2011 The Year of Facebook” report, the top SEO priority for advertisers in the U.S. next year will be social media program integration (36%), yet surprisingly, mobile SEO was the number one priority for just 1% of respondents.  There’s a lot of movement in terms of the intersection of Online marketing and social marketing, yet it’s not translating to the mobile channel like it should.

According to the research, social media advertising on Facebook/LinkedIn was top of the list for almost half (46%) of respondents, followed local search advertising programs (18%).  Mobile search advertising was a priority for just 11%.  The report noted that major spending increases on Facebook search advertising are planned for 2011.  It estimated many advertisers would be spending 10% to 20% of their pay-per-click budgets on Facebook next year, giving the social networking site a major share of that market.

Social media is inherently mobile, and combined with mobile search — especially localized mobile search — is an extremely targeted advertising channel for brands, yet few realize the opportunity.  As the convergence of traditional and social media marketing continues, attention will undoubtedly be turned to mobile, even though mobile should be the number one priority from day one if you ask me.

Location-based social media from the likes of Foursquare, Gowalla and numerous others have placed heavy emphasis on location information, and as search engines index that information, more weight is placed on location than anything else, especially now that it’s been revealed that nearly one-third of mobile searches have a local intent.  Still, how does this effect SEO?

In an excellent post on PromotionWorld.com, a site was referenced in saying apps like Foursquare are “making it way easier for searchers to find great deals from their mobile phones, kicking up the need for excellent SEO services geared towards mobile search.”  The same site revealed interesting statistics that looked at business profile pages indexed in Google over the past 24 hours,  coming from the following sources:

• Yellowpages.com: 219
• Superpages.com: 553
• Yelp.com: 928
• Foursquare.com: 11,300

These stats show the clear impact location-based apps are making in search engines like Google.  The author explains “if you are a retailer this is extremely important for optimizing your website.  One thing you can do is to implement your GIS Latitude and Longitude coordinates within your website.  Doing this will help you get your website up in the location rankings.”

Hardcore optimization, such as what was once necessary in traditional SEO, is in large part no longer needed due to the location-aspect.  If you’re a local business, your main focus should be to make sure your profile pages exist on as many location-oriented sites as possible, such as Yellowpages, Yelp, Foursquare and others.  The “optimization” in terms of search engines is already taken care of due to the nature of how location is indexed.

Unlike anything seen in recent memory, entertainment and social networking websites experienced near crashes and exploding servers as a result of millions of hits that congested web traffic to an unprecedented extent.

The mobile web in particular was tested like never before and came through shining on the other side.

Even before Michael Jackson’s death was confirmed, celebrities took to Twitter to comment on a day of celebrity death (first Farrah Fawcett, then Michael Jackson). Throughout the evening, other celebrities tweeted to similarly express their reactions to the King of Pop’s death at the age of 50.

Several pranksters then released false stories on Twitter about Harrison Ford and Jeff Goldblum also dying today in freak accidents. None were true. But all caused such a flurry of mobile web searches that the internet as a whole had to fire on all cylinders to keep up.

A look at Google Trends tells the whole story.

For mobile marketers and mobile content providers, however, Thursday proved a test for the mobile industry that it passed with flying colors. From making sense of the madness to handling the wild ride of rumors and reports with poise and consistency, the mobile web added some substance to its reputation built mainly on style until now.

Last night the world reached out through the mobile web. And the mobile web was right there to reach back.

If you have a mobile site then make sure your PC site detects a mobile device and presents the made-for mobile version.

That used to be easier said than done. Fortunately there is a free online file generator which enables webmasters to create a meta.txt file of their site. This file contains all the information necessary to help a visitor to your site get to the right version of your site. The meta.txt file is the brainchild of Visibility Mobile, a mobile search engine optimization firm offering services and tools to brands, search engines and mobile agencies.

To fully understand the meta.txt file and why it is important, you should grab their 7-page white paper, MetaTXT: Solving Mobile Search through Simple Technology. It is easy to read and you will understand exactly how to use the meta.txt file you can generate for your site using their meta.txt online file generator.

Visibility Mobile’s Founder, President and CMO is Bena Roberts. She has fifteen years experience in mobile and has been proactive in mobile search since 2004. She has used her insight into mobile search to conceive and develop early stage Mobile SEO techniques that work. As well as being the President of visibility mobile Bena is also the Editor of GoMo News.

Their agenda sounds like it could turn out to be pretty interesting. I hope they’ll put the audio up on the Mobile Monday NY Blog (pretty please). Google will have a representative there. I wonder where Microsoft, Yahoo and Ask are? They should be there too, all three of these companies operate mobile sites and should be backing the mobile community.