The question every business professional must ask is, “How much will we spend on SEO?” Keep reading for all the information you’ll need to make that decision, plus some helpful tips on how SEO agencies work so you can be successful as you forge a crucial partnership with an online marketing firm.

Read more at Search Engine Watch.

The drops in search traffic is an analytics problem, caused by what some are calling “dark search” or “dark Google.” The issue is a technical one, but in simple terms, it’s caused by certain browsers blocking websites from tracking exactly how users arrived there. For example, when users of Safari on iOS 6 click on a search result, the site they’re visiting has no way of telling they found that content through search. Analytics packages typically lump this traffic in the “direct” bucket, giving an inaccurate picture of where their traffic is actually coming from.

Read more on DigiDay.

One measure of technological modernity is the smartphone. In the Western world, smartphone penetration hovers around 50 to 60 percent for most countries. However, in Africa, that number is much lower, around 17 to 19 percent across the continent. In India, smartphone penetration is just 9 percent. In the Middle East, a handful of countries’ smartphone adoption rates are at parity with their Western peers, but some, like Egypt, lag around 5 percent.

Even when you take away the smartphone aspect and look just at Internet access, you get a similar picture: a sharp divide between the digital haves and have-nots around the world.

Read more at Venturebeat.

On Monday, eMarketer adjusted its end-of-year mobile advertising forecast upward, citing Facebook’s mobile newsfeeds and Twitter’s Promoted Products suite as driving forces.

eMarketer anticipates that mobile ad spending will hit $4 billion by year’s end, up 180% from 2011 — a substantial revision of the forecast the firm released just two months ago, which said that mobile ad spending is expected to increase 80% to $2.61 billion for the year. That figure includes a variety of ad products designed to run on phone and tablet devices, including search, display and messaging-based ads.

Read more on Mashable.com.

Facebook’s ad products delivered $1.25-billion, or 85 percent, of the $1.46-billion it generated in revenue during the quarter while payments carried the remainder, lifting the company’s net income to $219-million. Total advertising revenue grew 43 percent year-over-year.

Read more at ClickZ.com

The idea arrived to create a dozen sections that would carry “banner” advertising. This wasn’t entirely original. Early Web service Prodigy had used similar methods, although it placed its banners at the bottom of the screen. (This led to the first ad blocker; a piece of plastic affixed to the bottom of monitors to obscure the dreaded advertising.) The ad was small and unobtrusive by necessity. “We were designing for a 13-inch black and white screen,” said Hotwired’s CEO at the time, Andrew Anker. “It was state of the art at the time.”

Read more at DigiDay.

That was the common consensus among brand, agency and publishing executives who attended Digiday’s Brand Summit earlier this week. Marketers agreed that people often focus on the glitzy outcomes like that tweet rather than the long, hard slog of raising the metabolism of marketing internally. The real struggle brands face isn’t tweeting; it’s organizing.

When you think about it, real-time marketing isn’t real time at all, since companies are planning ahead to prepare for any anticipated conversations that may happen around an event or even a post that a brand makes.

Read the full article on DigiDay.

When Google Now first came out last June for Android, the information “cards” it supported were so limited, and showing so rarely for me, that I didn’t think much of it. That’s since changed dramatically. As Google Now has added support for more cards — and gathered more of my personal information — it’s become super smart.

Read more on Search Engine Land.

On the surface, retargeting makes perfect sense. The biggest weakness of display versus search is display doesn’t have very good intent signals. Someone who has shopped at an e-commerce site like Zappos — that’s a much better signal than the fact she is reading an article about fashion.

The problem is that before long the Web could find itself dominated by retargeted ads and little else. Ad exchange operators already estimate that up to half the impressions traded in their marketplaces are informed by first-party data, most of which is simple site-retargeting data. Retargeting is the one area of display advertising where ROI isn’t questioned. (There are legitimate debates over whether attribution models give retargeters too much credit — after all, many other things generated that demand in the first place.)

Read more on Digiday.

Recent information from the Financial Times and The Guardian showing how users access these sites and sheds some insight onto user behavior. Both papers see evening and weekend spikes in mobile use in addition to weekday desktop usage.

The Guardian shares more data on their reader, and it’s especially interesting to see that tablet users tend to use the desktop site more than either the mobile site or the tablet apps available.

Read more on Search Engine Watch.