Google has made some changes to the way ads shown to Gmail users are selected. If you use the service, you have probably noticed that Google often shows ads that are somehow related to the content of whatever piece of email you are currently reading. If you have noticed this, you have probably also noticed that sometimes the ads don’t seem to have anything to do with your conversation whatsoever.

Google has decided that instead of showing completely irrelevant ads in such cases, it will just dig back into another conversation from your Gmail usage, and show you ads related to that. This is illustrated in the clip below.

"Let’s say you’re looking at a confirmation email from a hotel in Chicago. Next to your email, you might see ads about flights to Chicago," explains Gmail Product Manager Steve Crossan. "But sometimes, there aren’t any good ads to match to a particular message. From now on, you’ll sometimes see ads matched to another recent email instead. For example, let’s say you’re looking at a message from a friend wishing you a happy birthday. If there aren’t any good ads for birthdays, you might see the Chicago flight ads related to your last email instead."

Google is careful to point out that it doesn’t store any extra information to show these ads. It just picks a different recent email to match. It’s all automated, and no humans are involved in picking the ads. The process is compared to Gmail’s spellchecker. Google also notes that no email or personal information is shared with advertisers.

The change will be rolling out over the next several days, so if you are still seeing ads completely irrelevant to any conversation you’ve had, you may not have the new system implemented yet.

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If you’re interested in new trends in advertising, you may be interested in the possibility that you will be seeing trucks driving around playing full HD videos. Hopefully you won’t be so interested that you stop paying attention to the road.

Flick Studio is making these trucks with the hopes that companies will be interested in purchasing them for their own advertising purposes. The idea comes from trucks that are already out there, which feature rolling ads. This takes the concept to a whole new (and likely expensive) level.

Information about FlickTruck is scarce. The FlickTruck site only shows a couple videos (which offer no real details) and a GPS tracker tracking the journey of one of the trucks, "Flick-2". However, at the Consumer Electronics Show (CES) in Vegas recently, WebProNews spoke with David McDonald of Flick Studio (FlickStudio.com or FlickTruck.com).

As you can see, it’s a truck with 3 big TVs built in. The displays are higher than 1080p. The are WUXGA and can be viewed easily in broad daylight.

Flick Studio began producing the trucks six months ago, and currently there are only two of them. Those are just to drive around executives who are interested in the technology. Who knows where they will go from there?

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Google announced that it is now making sure that ads linking to mobile app downloads automatically appear only on devices that actually offer those apps. In addition, the ads will display a "download" link rather than a URL.

"Simply include ‘itunes.apple.com/’ or ‘market.android.com/’ followed by the app name in the ad’s visible URL, and it will automatically display as ‘Download iPhone App’ or ‘Download Android App,’" says Katrina Kurnit of Google’s Inside AdWords crew.

Advertisers also have the option to select specific devices or carriers for their ads in general.

"If you’ve chosen to show ads on iPhones and other mobile devices with full internet browsers, you can now target specific mobile devices or carriers," says Kurnit. "This feature makes it easier for you to reach the right users if you have a carrier- or device-specific message. This includes landing pages that have been optimized for a specific device, billing relationships with certain carriers, or mobile apps developed for a specific platform. For example, if you sell iPhone cases, you can use device targeting to ensure that users with Android phones won’t see your ads."

Mobile Internet usage is expected to continue to increase rapidly. That means a lot of people using a lot of different mobile devices through multiple carriers. Google’s new targeting options could become increasingly important in getting your ads seen by the right people, depending on what you are advertising.

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Opera announced today that it has acquired mobile advertising firm AdMarvel. Opera says the acquisition will enable it to expand its portfolio of products and services to include "highly scalable ad monetization services" for Opera branded mobile products and services.

"In our fast-growing industry, mobile advertising represents an interesting long-term revenue opportunity. Every month, nearly 50 million people access the Web using Opera on their mobile phones and together with AdMarvel, we think we can play an important role in the evolution of mobile advertising," says Opera CEO Lars Boilesen.

AdMarvel is based in San Mateo, California. It was founded in 2006, and works with a lot of different advertising firms around the world. It’s official description says:

AdMarvel makes mobile advertising work by enabling mobile publishers and operators to easily source, provision, manage and track advertising from virtually any ad network or direct sourced advertising inventory. As the leading trusted third party in mobile advertising, AdMarvel works with mobile publishers, developers, carriers, ad networks, agencies and advertisers to optimize advertising inventory and revenue. AdMarvel services work across mobile web, WAP, SMS and in-application modalities.

"We are very excited about joining forces with Opera," says AdMarvel CEO Mahi de Silva. "What started as a commercial relationship has blossomed into a wonderful partnership to serve the global mobile marketplace. Combining our monetization and analytics platform with the Opera browser and widget platform will create a new intelligent platform, where local and global advertisers can interact with a highly instrumented mobile audience."

Mobile advertising firms are being bought up like hotcakes. Other recent deals include Google acquiring AdMob and Apple acquiring Quattro. The Opera AdMarvel deal is reportedly for $8 million in cash plus a $15 million earnout.
 

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AdGooroo, a competitive intelligence agency, has released a new report, which indicates that there as has been a decrease in active advertisers for Google, despite projected Q4 gains.

"Google experienced a quality purge this quarter and banned what we believe to be more than 30,000 advertisers, accounting for about 5.3 percent of its active advertiser base," said AdGooroo Founder and CEO Rich Stokes. "While this typically signals a negative impact on revenues, AdGooroo also tracked increased competition for ad placement, resulting in higher ad prices for Google and unusually high clickthrough rates. Google seems to be taking advantage of a strong Q4 to make some quality improvements."

The report maintains that ad coverage, which has been steadily climbing for the past 12 months took a sudden dive in December, dropping nearly 10% — from 5.48 ads per keyword in November down to 4.97 in December.

In the report, the firm notes that the fourth quarter has traditionally been strong for Google, and expects this to be the case again this year. "This seasonal improvement has less to do with total search query volume (which historically is about the same as November), and more with increased competition for ad placement (higher ad prices) and unusually high clickthrough rates," says AdGooroo.

Here are some interesting graphs from the report:

Other interesting information in the report includes lists of the top 25 advertisers on Google, Yahoo, and Bing, and the most expensive keywords on each of these search engines. These are based on the total number of recorded first-page ad impressions, and doesn’t necessarily reflect total ad spend. You can check out the report in its entirety here (it’s complimentary).
 

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Remember that proposed Microsoft Yahoo search and advertising deal? It’s still awaiting regulatory approval, but it might be a step closer to its destiny soon, no matter which way it goes.

The European Commission has set a deadline for a decision on approval of Microsoft’s bid (via Reuters). The date is February 19, or exactly a month from today. The deadline was published yesterday within a list of other deadlines for other deals.

Also published was the "description of the concentration" (pdf), which states:

The notification concerns the acquisition of control by Microsoft Corporation (U.S.A.) of Yahoo! Inc.’s (U.S.A.) online web-wide algorithmic search and paid search advertising business under the terms described in the Letter Agreement of 29 July 2009, the Search and Advertising Services and Sales Agreement and the License Agreement agreed between the parties on 4 December 2009 by way of transfer of certain assets and employees. Yahoo! will continue to innovate by delivering its own user search experience that incorporates the search results provided by Microsoft’s search platform.

The deal was first announced back in the summer, though it wasn’t finalized until December, when the two companies announced that it was pending regulatory approval. Yahoo has said (as the above description appears to confirm) that it will continue to do its own thing on the front end user interface while Microsoft’s Bing will power the behind the scenes functionality of the search engine.

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Perpetrators of click fraud are getting sneakier and sneakier. Harvard Business School professor Ben Edelman has uncovered one of the more diabolical click fraud schemes known to be hatched. As he summarizes it:

Here, spyware on a user’s PC monitors the user’s browsing to determine the user’s likely purchase intent. Then the spyware fakes a click on a Google PPC ad promoting the exact merchant  the user was already visiting. If the user proceeds to make a purchase — reasonably likely for a user already intentionally requesting the merchant’s site — the merchant will naturally credit Google for the sale. Furthermore, a standard ad optimization strategy will lead the merchant to increase its Google PPC bid for this keyword on the reasonable (albeit mistaken) view that Google is successfully finding new customers. But in fact Google and its partners are merely taking credit for customers the merchant had already reached by other methods.

Do you cosider click fraud a big concern? Discuss here.

Edelman details all of the specifics about his dicovery, pointing to an example perpetrator – Trafficsolar, which he blames InfoSpace for connecting Google to. He also suggests Google discontinue its relationship with InfoSpace and other partners who have their own chains of partners, making everything harder to monitor. In his example, he finds an astounding seven intermediaries in the chain between the click and the Google ad itself.

"Furthermore, Google styles its advertising as ‘pay per click’, promising advertisers that ‘You’re charged only if someone clicks your ad,’" says Edelman. "But here, the video and packet log clearly confirm that the Google click link was invoked without a user even seeing a Google ad link, not to mention clicking it. Advertisers paying high Google prices deserve high-quality ad placements, not spyware popups and click fraud."

As Andy Greenberg with Forbes points out in an article, which brought Edelman’s findings to the forefront of mainstream exposure (and likely to Google’s attention), Edelman has a history of criticizing Google, is actually involved with a lawsuit involving misplacement of Google ads, and has served as a consultant to Microsoft, but maintains that this research is not funded by Microsoft or a company involved in that lawsuit. Greenberg reports:

As for its ability to detect the new form of click fraud, Google has long argued that it credits advertisers for as much as 10% of their ad spending based on click fraud that the company detects. While the company wouldn’t comment on Edelman’s TrafficShare example, a spokesperson wrote that the company uses "hundreds of data points" to detect fraud, not just clicks.

In a report last October, click fraud research firm Click Forensics measured click fraud at around 14%, significantly higher than Google’s estimates. But even Click Forensics may not be counting the sort of click fraud Edelman accuses TrafficSolar of committing. Because Click Forensics’ data is pulled from advertisers, the company can’t necessarily detect click fraud that is disguised as real customers and real sales, according to the company’s chief executive, Paul Pellman. Pellman believes, however, that the kind of click fraud Edelman discovered is likely mixed with traditional click fraud to increase the scheme’s traffic volume while keeping it hidden.

Click Forensics’  own Steve O’Brien says "it was probably a fairly low-volume scheme to begin with.  It’s limited to machines of users that are infected with spyware who also visit select Google advertisers…It’s a problem, but probably not a huge one.  What would make it more serious is if there were another version of the spyware that simply clicks on paid links in the background without the user’s knowledge…"

As for Edelman’s suggestion that Google sever ties with Infospace and the like, O’Brien doesn’t think it is worth going that far. "A better solution would be for Google and InfoSpace to deal only with reputable partners who provide verified, audited clicks to ensure advertisers get what they pay for," says O’Brien.

Though Click Forensics appears to downplay the threat compared to Edelman’s own analysis, it shows the increasing sophistication with which fraudsters are carrying out their plots. Good times.

Do you think Google should take more action in trying to prevent new kinds of click fraud? Share your thoughts here.

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Real-time search engine OneRiot announced a new "real-time ad network" today. It’s called RiotWise, and the company says its designed to help developers monetize their apps.

"2009 witnessed an explosion of apps and services catering to users of the realtime web," says Tobias Peggs, GM of OneRiot. "RiotWise is the way to monetize those apps in 2010. Our ads make sense to buyers, make sense to users, and transparently deliver revenue to developers across the realtime web ecosystem."

The following image illustrates how the Riotwise ads work:

OneRiot says RiotWise proved "extremely effective" at monetizing mobile apps, desktop clients, social search engines, and other applications in the realtime web space in a now completed pilot phase. "RiotWise ads are contextually relevant in realtime, resulting in high Click Through Rates (CTR)," the company says. "Advertisers include a range of publishers such as entertainment sites, sports networks, and news organizations. Dynamically created ads link to quality content from these publishers that is highly related to a users’ realtime search term or a global trending topic."

According to OneRiot, the ads have been performing at 3-4 times industry standard CTR for ads in real-time web apps, and delivering significant revenue to developers.

Developers can customize the display of the ads to fit their particular application. "For example, partners such as Digsby (the wildly popular social messaging client) and ÜberTwitter (the #1 Twitter Client for BlackBerry) are showing ads directly in the realtime stream," explains OneRiot. "Other implementations include more traditional mobile banner placements or the familiar AdSense-style text block."

OneRiot shares advertiser revenue with developers.

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comScore has released the top 15 ad networks based on their reach among U.S. Internet users in December 2009.

The ranking found AOL Advertising remains the top ad network, reaching 187 million U.S. Internet users, or 91 percent of the total audience, followed by the Yahoo Network (180.9 million) and the Google Ad Network (178.1 million).

The fastest growing ad network by audience reach among the top 15 was Microsoft Media Network, which grew 31 percent compared to a year ago, followed by Collective Network (up 22%) and Audience Science (up 16%).

"Ad networks continue to be a powerful mechanism for delivering a large audience online, with eight different networks reaching at least 75 percent of the entire U.S. online population," said comScore senior vice president Jeff Hackett.

"Increasingly, however, ad networks are improving their capability for reaching more targeted audiences as well, which delivers enhanced value to advertisers and helps sustain higher CPMs for the channel. 2010 should bring us continued innovation and performance from this growing online sector."
 

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Unless you live under a rock, you are probably at least somewhat familiar with the current controversy regarding NBC’s shifting of late night television talk show programming that appears to be leading to an uncertain future for current Tonight Show host Conan O’Brien. I’m not going to get into that whole story here.

While he is not the only one to raise such a point, Jason Falls of Social Media Explorer asked his Facebook fans a good question: "What if Conan went web-only?" More specifically, he asks:

- Would you watch it?
- Would you watch it regularly?
- Would you pay closer attention to the advertisers?

Jason has so far received some thought-provoking responses. One person compares such a prospect to what Howard Stern did when he went to Sirius Satellite Radio. Another notes that Conan reaches a young enough demographic to pull off such a move.

It would probably not be very hard for Conan to find a good partner to convert his show to the web and attract a good amount of advertising dollars. What if the show went a different route? Dare I say, even a paid route? Would you pay, let’s say a dollar a month, to see Conan’s show on the same regular basis?

Regardless of which way it was monetized, the show would have the potential to be successful (at least when compared to other online-only shows). But consider that consumers don’t have to turn to their computers to watch TV online anymore, perhaps the biggest obstacle for the medium. It was made abundantly clear at this year’s Consumer Electronics Show (CES) that Internet-ready TVs are going to become much more common.

People watching TV online is a phenomenon that is growing rapidly already. Once the average TV watcher doesn’t have to get out of his/her easy chair to watch a show online on the same TV, what is to stop them from watching a show like a web-based Conan O’Brien show over the traditional TV alternatives?

In reality, it is highly unlikely that Conan will go this route. Maybe there’s too much at stake. But if it did happen, could it work? Would it? Share your thoughts on the topic.

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