After collecting a slew of stats for my recent presentation on the state of the mobile Web (at the invitation of Qualcomm), as well as background for my upcoming mobile search white papers and on-going mobile advertising projects (such as Mobile Advertising U.K.), I am well aware of the importance of critical and credible data points. To make the numbers easy to find, and even easier to understand, I will collect and share them here on a regular basis.

U.K. MOBILE INTERNET: A new report from eMarketer – true to its name always an excellent source of mobile marketing stats and insights. U.K. Mobile Internet connects the dots in mobile user behavior. How many users are there? Between just 7.2 million and 17.4 million, depending on the report you read.

But the report conclusion is hardly subject to interpretation: The mobile Web is “gaining ground in the U.K., and soon the audience will be large and broad enough to interest mainstream advertisers.” Key drivers: iPhone and similar high-end devices, cool new apps, and improved usability. Still, more of the same are sorely needed to increase the number of people using the mobile Web.

LOCAL MOBILE SEARCH: The Kelsey Group gives us hard figures on the size of the local mobile search advertising opportunity in the U.S. It reckons mobile advertising revenues (search and display) will grow to $3.1 billion in 2013, from $160 million in 2008, representing a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 81.2 percent. During the same forecast period, the research firm predicts mobile local search advertising revenues will increase from $20 million to $1.3 billion. On paper, local marketing looks promising. “There is a strong correlation between local search and the mobile use case, which will cause a good portion of the ongoing mobile application boom to focus on local,” Michael Boland, program director, Mobile Local Media (MLM), The Kelsey Group, said in a press statement. What’s missing is a sure-fire strategy to get local shops and businesses on board. And, if the end-game is location-aware advertising, then there are even more issues to solve before we can get to the revenues Kelsey is forecasting. The press release gleans over these details, so I suspect it’s a numbers-focused report. Nonetheless, there is some value to having the hard facts.

Among the findings:

• The percentage of mobile searches that have local intent will increase from 28 percent in 2008 to 35 percent in 2013
• Currently there are 54.5 million mobile Internet users in the U.S., representing 25 percent of online users
• Approximately 15 percent of iPhone applications are local

RINGRING MEDIA RESULTS: The email just came in that Ben Tatton-Brown, RingRing Managing Director, and I are set to discuss these new numbers and much more in a briefing later this week. In the meantime, RingRing is bullish on mobile search following some successful campaigns. We don’t know the base numbers, but the company has increased its own mobile search spending four-fold. Why? Because keyword campaigns run by RingRing on behalf of its clients have achieved click-through rates of up to 16 percent. The company says conversion rates have “peaked at over 110 percent, generating tens of thousands of content downloads at an unprecedented cost per acquisition.” As a result, clients are now attributing much more of their mobile advertising budgets to search. (By way of background, RingRing specializes in planning and buying mobile advertising and search campaigns, and has already booked substantial volumes of search this year through Yahoo and Google. This includes buying search terms across Yahoo’s mobile advertising network and on-portal directory links on mobile operators Vodafone and 3 in the U.K., as well as on Google Mobile. More on what RingRing Media does and how in an exclusive Q&A next week.)

Tags: eMarketer, Every Single One Of Us, Kelsey Group, Location-based services, Mobile Advertising, Mobile Advertising U.K., Mobile Internet, Mobile Local Search, Mobile Marketing, Plaza Mobile Internet, Qualcomm, RingRing

This entry was posted on Wednesday, March 4th, 2009 at 12:57 pm and is filed under Local Search, Location-based services, Mobile Advertising, Mobile Research, Mobile Search. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.