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In its ongoing quest to capture more local ad dollars, Google yesterday announced the launch of AdWords Express, a simplified version of their search advertising platform. This new advertising product aims to streamline the process of purchasing search ads, enabling smaller, local businesses to get on board.

If AdWords Express looks familiar, that's because it was originally launched in select markets last October under the name Google Boost.

Independent mobile advertising network, InMobi, reported a 37.9% growth in mobile advertising in Africa over the three months from February to May.

On InMobi's blog, Surag Patel said, "This growth was largely driven by the continued growing trend towards smartphone adoption in these markets."

Facebook isn't accepting advertisements that promote Google Plus on its social network, as one self-described "Internet Geek" recently found out. After having placed an ad that informed Facebook visitors to add him on Google Plus, Michael Lee Johnson reported that Facebook shut down all his advertising campaigns, and banned him from using the Facebook advertising system.

The price of advertising on the world's biggest social network appears to be on the rise.

The average cost of purchasing pay-per-click ads on Facebook rose by 22% in a single quarter, according to a new report by digital marketing platform provider Efficient Frontier.

Mobile advertising company Medialets rolled out a new Universal SDK this week, which it says is its biggest release yet. The Universal SDK 2.5 for iOS offers support for third-party rich media ads, new ad formats and new creative capabilities, like social media sharing, email, SMS, add-to-calendar functionality and embedded maps.

A new mobile app platform called WiO is set to revolutionize the TV watching experience by allowing customers to immediately get information about the products and services they see advertised on screen, both in TV commercials and within the shows themselves.

Through a mobile app running on customers' phones, marketers can offer a variety of follow-up actions to the TV viewer, including coupons, reminders, contact info and more. In total, there are 10 follow-up actions offered. And the consumer is in complete control of which ones, if any, they respond to.

When setting up Google AdWords campaigns, it can pretty difficult to guess which ad copy is going to perform the best. Sometimes even the tiniest, most unexpected changes can have a dramatic impact on ad performance. But how do you know what will be most effective?

A new Y Combinator-backed startup called MixRank wants to help take some of the guesswork out the process. The self-described "spy tool for contextual and display ads" offers businesses a glimpse at AdSense campaigns being run by other companies and shows which ones had the best performance.

So you've set up your small business's Facebook Page. You've even optimized it for search engines. The "likes" are just pouring in. What's next?

If you haven't already, you might try taking Facebook's social advertising offerings for a spin. The ability to target ads to people based on very specific criteria and cap your ad spend at a daily amount of your choosing makes for a very cost-effective way to reach consumers, especially for smaller operations.

The cost of converting people to sign-up for events, purchase products and register for services decreases considerably when businesses run Facebook advertisements that target existing fans, as opposed to non-fans. Registration acquisition costs can be 44% cheaper, while event sign-ups cost 33% less and purchases are 15% cheaper to achieve.

This is according to a recent blog post on Inside Facebook, who was privvy to data from the social advertising agency TBG showing these results. Over the course of a thirteen-client, 4.1 billion ad impression study, TBG found that targeting Facebook fans was more effective than targeting non-fans when it comes to these specific types of conversions.

Rumors surfaced over the holiday weekend that Twitter was in talks to acquire AdGrok, and the startup has just confirmed the news on its blog.

A Y Combinator alum, AdGrok offers a platform to help businesses manage their Google Adwords. The company built a number of tools to make the process easier for businesses to be able to gauge the performance of the keywords they're buying, with a breakdown of the impressions, clicks, and conversion rates.