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With Facebook's first earnings report coming down today, everybody is weighing in on how the social network can do mobile and advertising better, including one company that uses Webcams to track eye movements on sites.

EyeTrackShop uses tracking to help companies with ad placement, with the idea to get the ad in the place where eyeballs naturally go.

"Where your ad goes is so critical and really if you are doing branding, the only way to know where people are looking at is to track it," EyeTrackShop President Jeff Bander said.

This type of study has been … Read more

When Facebook reports its first quarterly earnings as a public company later today, all eyes will be on how well the company is doing with mobile. More and more users are accessing Facebook via smartphones, yet the company only recently started running ads on mobile devices.

Those ads -- and they are only Facebook's first efforts to make money from mobile users -- are in the form of what Facebook calls sponsored stories. Companies can create "stories" that show up in a news feeds of a brand's fans and their friends. Facebook only started adding sponsored … Read more

People don't go to Facebook to shop for necessities, or even for luxuries, so it's not surprising a survey released today found that folks don't want to share their personal data in return for service on the social-networking site.

The survey -- done by Placecast, a location-based marketing firm -- found that U.S. adults are more than twice as likely to trust Amazon than Facebook with personal information. The firm aimed to gauge Americans' comfort with relinquishing private data in exchange for receiving marketing promotions offline, online, and through mobile devices.

Sixty-six percent of U.S. … Read more

Apple's iOS devices are bigger and more user-friendly, making mobile advertising on iOS more successful than on other operating systems, according to a report released today by Opera Software.

This seems like a no-brainer when it comes to advertising -- bigger screens equal more real estate for ads, which equals more engaging ads with more info, and more clicks. Trying to hit that sweet spot between portability and screen size may be a challenge for some device makers, but it's working for Apple, judging from the report's numbers, anyway.

Advertising on iOS sees more traffic and a … Read more

Twitter introduced targeted promoted tweets today, which means advertisers can send tailored messages based on where users live and what devices they're on.

"What if you want to make an offer just to New York Twitter users? Until today, it's been impractical to send these kinds of highly tailored Tweets, since there was no way to reach people in New York without also reaching followers in Norway, Nebraska and Nigeria who can't take advantage of your offer," Kevin Weil, a Twitter product manager, wrote in a blog post.

This advertising tool is meant to appeal … Read more

Note: The headline of this story, and the story itself, have been altered to reflect a retraction by the study's author, TBG Digital. See the note at the bottom of this post for more information.

Facebook's average cost per thousand impressions has increased by 58 percent in the second quarter of 2012 compared with the year-ago period, meaning Facebook is earning more and more from its ads.

Breaking down by country, the U.S. saw an increase of 25 percent, while Canada saw 21 percent and the U.K. saw 7 percent. The data comes from a study … Read more

While brands and advertisers have flocked to Facebook to promote their wares and connect with consumers, the jury's still out on the true value of the site for marketing.

The BBC recently completed an investigation into the effectiveness of the social network as a promotional tool. Running a campaign for a fictitious business called VirtualBagel, BBC technology correspondent Rory Cellan-Jones spent $10 advertising the company's Facebook page.

At the time of writing, the company's page -- which contains only an image of a bagel and the address Ealing, London -- has amassed 3,113 "likes" … Read more

"Big Data" promises to turn terabytes, petabytes, and exabytes (with, presumably, zettabytes and yottabytes to come) of what's often ambient digital detritus into useful results. That promise often seems to come with an implicit assumption; with enough data and the tools to crunch it, useful insights will follow. Insights that can be used to make businesses more efficient, tailor everything from medicine to advertising for individuals, and employ instrumentation and automation on larger and more complex physical systems than ever before.

For example, we're in the early days of what sometimes goes by the name of … Read more

Facebook knows who you are, who your friends are, what you like, and where you live. And still the ads suck. Google, on the other hand, gives you ads based only on what you're searching on, and its ads rock.

Can Google's ad performance be brought to Facebook and other social sites? Jeffrey Davitz is trying to do that with his startup, Solariat. The idea, he says, "is to take the Google model of responding to intention and place it in the context of social networks."

Davitz confirms that Facebook can help an advertiser find very … Read more