One thing is clear: there is opportunity in the mobile/local space. Here at ILM West in San Francisco weve heard a lot of great numbers to prove this. But how can businesses take advantage of this opportunity? How do we navigate this new and quickly changing space? This morning a panel of mobile ad networks and product developers tried to answer these questions. Present were Chi-Chao Chang )President of Products and Technology, xAd(, Andrew Osis )President,

Today brought another great afternoon of sessions at ILM West in San Francisco . Of particular interest was the session about targeting in online advertising and discussion of the proximity effect. *** OHare, CEO and Founder of Local Yokel Media, discussed his companys ability to provide hyper-local targeting. And Jeff Minich, Senior Product Marketing Manager at Yahoo!, presented information about Yahoo!s Proximity Match product. Why is local targeting important?

This morning at ILM West in San Francisco, Gillian Heltai )Senior Director with comScore( presented some great data on mobile usage in the US. The data reveals what she described as a perfect storm for local based services and advertising. First lets talk technology: 3 out of every 4 mobile subscribers own a device with GPS functionality. Over 1 in 3 own a smartphone and in 2013 that number will reach 50%. Both of those numbers are huge for local based services!

This afternoon at ILM West in San Francisco , the topic focused on online lead generation. Panel members included Adam Burrows )VP Business Development, ServiceMagic(, Tom Higley )CEO, Local Matters(, Pamela Springer )President and CEO, Manta(, and Marco Zappacosta )CEO, Thumbtack(. What is a lead? First question to the panel: what is considered a lead? The answer: anything really including phone calls, emails, form, lead sheets, likes, and digital word of mouth.

The first day of ILM West in San Francisco is under way with some great discussions about interactive local commerce. Im a data guy, so my favorite session of the morning was the analysis of a digital advertising survey given to small businesses. BIA/Kelsey commissioned the survey and Steve Marshall )Direct of Research( and Matt Booth )Program Director, Interactive Local Media( presented the results. Some key findings: Based on responses to the survey,

Im psyched! Why am I psyched? Im psyched because next week is the ILM West conference in San Francisco and I will be there to cover all of the goodness for the Microsoft Advertising Community. Local digital advertising is no longer right around the corner its here. Local search revenues in 2010 were $5.1 billion and BIA Kelsey projects this number to reach $9.1 billion in 2015. So Lo Mo )Social, Local, and Mobile( is essential and video works in local markets.

The final day of SMX West included a panel of experts speaking about search spam, those people trying to game the search engines to get top search rankings even though they are providing a poor user experience. Moderated by Danny Sullivan , the panel included Sasi Parthasarathy of Bing, Matt Cutts of Google, and Rich Skrenta of Blekko. The group covered two main topics: what search engines consider to be spam, and what they do about it. From a search engines perspective,

The final day of SMX West included a panel of experts speaking about search spam, those people trying to game the search engines to get top search rankings even though they are providing a poor user experience. Moderated by Danny Sullivan , the panel included Sasi Parthasarathy of Bing, Matt Cutts of Google, and Rich Skrenta of Blekko. The group covered two main topics: what search engines consider to be spam, and what they do about it. From a search engines perspective,

The final session of SMX West day 2 )yesterday( centered around searcher behavior, specifically in regard to how users search on computers, TV, and mobile devices. Shari Thurow with Omni Marketing Interactive focused in part on discovering how people interact with different devices. Some options for conducting research include: Log file analysis can show data about how people search, what they search for, and how they interact with the results.

Day 2 of SMX West began with a keynote from Danny Sullivan , the Editor-in-Chief of Search Engine Land . His topic the state of search marketing. The Search Quake Peoples attention to search engines waned during the explosion of Facebook and Twitter; it was no longer the new, cool kid on the block. But people still search and in recent months, the attention has been refocused.

I just finished listening to a great panel on mobile search ads at SMX West . Included on the panel were Paul Cushman from Yahoo, Dennis Glavin from Microsoft, Jeff Licciardi with Performics, Michael Slinger with Google, and Kerri Smith with iProspect. There were two great highlights from this sessioN; advice and data. Mobile Search Ads Advice Dennis Glavins advice? Crawl, then walk, then run. Crawl: Port your desktop campaigns to mobile.

SMX West is running strong on its first day. This morning, Paul Yiu from Bing and Mike Cassidy from Google spoke about social signals and how they are factored into ranking algorithms and search results. What are social signals? Both Bing and Google use social signals to produce personalized search results that youll care more about. For example, if a friend of yours likes a site on Facebook,