ReadWriteWeb

Designing and managing your business's Google AdWords can be an overwhelming process. Even though there's plenty of information available - or perhaps because there's so much available - figuring out your strategies can be confusing. Even if you have a clear plan, the Google AdWords interface can be incredibly frustrating.

But Google AdWords are still a key form of online advertising - and it remains Google's largest source of revenue. Frustrations with the service, then, make it a great opportunity for a startup like AdGrok that launches to the publi today.

The Y Combinator alum provides search engine marking tools to small businesses, simplifying keyword bidding and and ad creation.

Analytics firm Flurry has just announced a new video advertising network called AppCircle Clips which aims to bring a "TV commercial"-like experience to mobile applications and games. The video advertisements will reach over 30 million people per day, says Flurry, a larger audience than most successful primetime TV shows.

While initially, a consumer's gut reaction may be a groan at the thought of an ad popping up in the middle of an intense gaming session, the new service offers an enticing feature which may change their minds. Gamers can actually earn in-game rewards like virtual currency for viewing the clips and have the opportunity to earn even more if they share those clips via Facebook or Twitter.

Companies used to pay millions of dollars to splash advertisements on the front page of MySpace, back when that social network was the hottest one on the web. One of the people in charge of selling those ads was Rita Garg, a Stanford and Harvard educated mathematician and economist.

Today Garg announced, in a Tweet, that she's left MySpace and is now working on business development at Twitter Inc. Twitter keeps scooping up the leaders from other giant tech companies, ReadWriteWeb reported first last month that Bing chief scientist Alek Kołcz left Microsoft to join Twitter as well. That sounds like as good a use of the company's coffers filled with venture capital as any.

When Facebook Places launched last summer, one of the first questions (other than "how will this impact my privacy?") was "How will this impact other location-based startups?" While Foursquare was gaining tractions and users, some questioned if Facebook's entry into location would serve to squash it.

Foursquare has hardly been squashed. The startup ended 2010 with over 380 million check-ins and now boasts over 6 million users. But a new survey from MerchantCircle suggests that while users may be flocking to Foursquare, businesses' marketing dollars are going elsewhere.

Just in case you haven't been paying attention, yesterday was national "Let's Willingly Watch TV Commercials" day. Some people also call it Super Bowl Sunday. More than 100 million people tuned in yesterday to watch the annual handegg championship match, guffaw at TV commercials and tweet about the experience.

So, the big question then is who won? No, not the Packers, silly. We're talking about ads and their impact online. Who got the most mentions on Twitter? TweetReach, a Tweet-tracking media analytics tool, kept track and says that some of the usual brands were lacking, while others made a big splash.

Facebook's acquisition of Rel8tion, a stealth-mode startup out of Seattle, may hint towards the social network's growing interest in the local advertising space. Rel8tion was developing a system for matching up a person's location and their demographic profile with relevant ad inventory, according to AllThingsD, which was able to pull a bit of information off the startup's website before it turned into the mysterious black page that it is today.

While Facebook won't officially confirm what its plans are for Rel8tion's technology, it's pretty easy to decipher: location-based advertising. On mobile. Using your Facebook profile info.

In fact, speaking at the Inside SocialApps conference yesterday, Facebook CTO Bret Taylor confirmed the company's primary focus in 2011 is mobile.

Twitter is in the process of testing its self-serve ad platform with a few advertising agencies, according to a preview in MediaPost.

One of the beta testers is Clix Marketing Founder David Szetela, whose clients using the new ad platform include investor Guy Kawasaki, who's using the service to promote his forthcoming book, Enchantment: The Art of Changing Hearts, Minds, and Actions.

Update: According to Twitter spokesperson Matt Graves, what's described in the MediaPost story is not the company's new self-serve platform. "While we have previously discussed plans to offer a self-serve offering for advertisers in 2011, this isn't it," says Graves. Rather, this is part of the Promoted Products offering, and involves working with an in-house sales rep.

Facebook is launching a new ad format called "Sponsored Stories," which allows participating advertisers to promote your Facebook activity by turning it into homepage ads seen only by your friends. This activity can include liking a Facebook page, checking in via Facebook Places or sharing content to the News Feed from a Facebook application.

These shares, which would have appeared in your friends' News Feeds anyway, are now given special promotion by way of a Facebook ad that appears on the right-hand side of the homepage. The ad will display your friend's name, photo, a picture and link to the relevant Facebook Page or application, plus any likes and comments.

When the Federal Trade Commission announced late last year that it was investigating ways to protect consumers' privacy, it suggested a "Do Not Track" option for every browser. This would give users the ability to opt out of online advertising - an effort akin to the "Do Not Call" registry, from that bygone era where solicitations came via the phone rather than pop-up ads.

In response, both Mozilla and Google have announced changes to their respective browsers todays, with the addition of "Do Not Track" features for Firefox and Chrome.

As Apple faces a class action lawsuit where it's being accused of sharing users' personal information with advertising networks without their consent, the Mobile Marketing Association (MMA) is now stepping in with plans to develop a set of mobile privacy guidelines for the industry.

The new guidelines will complement the group's existing Global Code of Conduct, and will attempt to address the growing need for marketers and consumers to have a "transparent, accepted understanding," in its words, as to how information on a mobile device is collected and what's being done with it.