Cyber Monday sales jumped 30.3% from a year ago, making it the biggest online spending day to date, according to new data from IBM. Mobile continued to play a growing role in holiday shopping, with 18% visiting a retail site via mobile, up 70% from a year ago. Mobile as a percentage of online sales on Cyber Monday nearly doubled to 13%. Mobile sales and traffic, however, were both down more than 20% from Black Friday as people went back to work and did more shopping from their desktop PCs. As with Black Friday, the iPad generated more traffic than …

With no Olympics, U.S. Election or other major event, the ad industry will take a hit next year, according to Warc's latest International Ad Forecast.

Facebook Gifts has a big new retail partner: Apple. The social network has added the ability for people to send iTunes digital gifts through its own gifting service in the latest integration effort between the two tech giants. Through the partnership, Facebook users can recommend albums, movies, games, apps and iTunes credits in denominations of $10, $15, $25, or $50. Facebook already sends users from its App Center to the iTunes App Store to download iOS titles, and Apple has tightly integrated Facebook into iOS 6. The latest step to incorporate iTunes into Facebook Gift should help to further …

More figures highlighting mobile shopping growth: Page views on the iPhone and iPad increased 35% during the Thanksgiving weekend compared to a year ago, according to Compuware’s E-commerce and Retail Real User Index. For Thanksgiving Day and Black Friday, page views on the Apple devices jumped 250%. The increase is driven in large part by the proliferation of iPhones and iPads in the last year, with overall smartphone penetration surpassing 50% in the U.S., and tablets at 15% to 20%.  The Compuware findings also underscore the popularity of the iPad in particular as a shopping tool. Earlier …

Walmart was by far the retailer generating the most mobile searches on Black Friday, according to findings released Monday by GPS app developer and mobile ad platform Telenav. It had three times as many searches as the next closest retailer—Best Buy—based on a representative sample of million of Telenav’s users. Despite not opening until Friday, Best Buy still had double the number of searches of all the other top 10 retail brands combined except for Walmart and Target. Rounding out the top five were Sears and Kmart. See the full list here.

AOL earlier this month reported higher than expected revenue and earnings for the third quarter on its highest advertising growth in seven years. The latest home page ad-tracking report from Macquarie Securities suggests AOL’s ad improvement from the latter half of the third quarter is carrying over into the current quarter. The study found sales of oversized/custom units on the AOL home page in the first half of Q4 were up 47% from the year-earlier period, and 19% from the first half of the third quarter. The home page also featured a much higher share of purely brand-focused ad units, …

Parental concern about online behavioral tracking of teens seems to have surpassed other privacy and security concerns, including worries about how teens manage their online reputations and whether they are interacting with strangers, according to a new report by the Pew Internet & American Life Project.

Mobile could represent about 12% of e-commerce sales this holiday season as a result of higher smartphone and tablet penetration, according to a new research note from JPMorgan analyst Doug Anmuth. He projects e-commerce spending overall in the fourth quarter will grow 19% across desktop and mobile, compared to 18% in the prior quarter. Among other top holiday shopping trends, Anmuth expects showrooming to be bigger than ever, with 37% of consumers browsing products in physical stores but buying online or on mobile devices at lower prices. The online holiday shopping season begins earlier and ends later as Web shopping …

For the second straight year, Houston was ranked as the nation’s most “mobile shopping savvy” city, according to a study by the Interactive Advertising Bureau. Runner-up was Seattle-Tacoma, moving up from No. 10 in 2011, with San Francisco, Los Angeles and New York rounding out the top five. Breaking into the top 10 this year was Boston at No. 9. The results are drawn from a biannual survey of over 20,000 consumers conducted in June about their media behaviors and influences. The trade group’s Mobile Center of Excellence based the rankings on four criteria: ownership of a mobile device …

Mobile shopping service shopkick has added Sony Stores as its latest retail partner in time for the holiday season. Shopkick is also rolling out a series of Black Friday and Cyber Monday deals with Sony and other participating retailers including Old Navy, Sports Authority, American Eagle Outfitters and Best Buy. Besides deals on specific products, shopkick is offering additional walk-in rewards points at select retailers during the Thanksgiving holiday. On Black Friday, for instance, users can get 200 walk-in points via the shopkick app at Target, Best Buy, Macy’s and Sony, among others. The points can be redeemed …