Just like Anton Chigurh chasing Llewelyn Moss, Google is following you, and similar to the No Country for Old Men hitman, they’re after the cash.

Well, maybe it’s not quite that sinister. A new study published by graduate students at Cal shows that Google, through a combination of its Analytics and advertising (AdSense and Doubleclick) services, manages to drop its pixel on 92 of the top 100 Web sites, and about 88% of the top 400,000 domains (video).

Google maintains that, as a matter of policy as well as technology, tracking individual users is not something they do. If you believe their motto, you might be inclined to believe them. But with such comprehensive reach across the Web, even aggregate traffic behavior statistics give the company something very valuable: the means to properly price inventory.

To do this, Google must integrate its analytics and advertising data, something it also claims that it is contractually obligated with its advertisers not to do. That might be the response to privacy advocates, who are concerned with behavior tracked to individuals. But if that data is anonymized and aggregated? The Google Toolbar captures it, and I suspect if you dig through the Analytics and AdSense TOS, you might find that it’s not prohibited with these services, either.

Advertisers picking placements in traditional media, such as magazines and television, often have a lot of control over where their ads are placed. They typically have access to the editorial calendar or a synopsis of the episode to be aired, and also often know who (some of) the other advertisers are.

In contrast, advertising online usually affords advertisers relatively little control and transparency into the environment their ads are being placed in. Although they can often cherry-pick the sites where their ads appear, they can’t usually pick what content is running adjacent to their ads. Transaction-oriented advertisers might not really care, but this is the sort of thing that drives big brand advertisers and agencies nuts.

Social media ad network BuzzLogic has launched what it calls its “Conversational Advertising Dashboard” to allay exactly these types of anxieties. Information about the type and tone of the ad-adjacent content, the scope and nature of the conversations, author credibility, content freshness and ad performance by conversation are provided, across the 3,000+ “influential” blogs in its publisher base. Along with insight comes control: advertisers can yank placements if they don’t like what they see.

BuzzLogic’s dashboard is an addition to its Conversational Advertising platform, which it launched last year. The network reaches 33.3 million unique monthly visitors and serves approximately 2 billion impressions in concert with networks such as AdSense, BlogAds and Adify.

Ren and I are attending WordCamp in San Francisco, the Automattic-sponsored one-day event dedicated to WordPress, the popular blogging platform (and the one we use here at YieldBuild). This is the fourth anniversary of the SF-based WordCamp—the event has spread to more than a couple dozen around the world in 2009.

Forgive the choppy style – I’m semi-liveblogging. It’s also a bit geekier than your usual YieldBuild blog post, but hey, this is a blog platform conference.

Highlights so far:

• 730 registered attendees, and 2900 blogs (double the number of attendees in 2008)
• Tim Ferriss offered tips on blogging: how long posts should be (both long- and short-form can work), how much time you should spend on a post (as much time as you enjoy) and how to outsource your dating (can have bugs–beware!)
• Google’s Matt Cutts offered his SEO advice: modifying your default and specific blog entry URLs, doing some decent keyword research (esp via the Google keyword tool), using Google Webmaster tools, writing backlink-worthy posts, whether you should post videos or podcasts (HotOrNot score <6? Podcast) etc.
• Social media PR whiz Tara Hunt, doing a conference junket for her book The Whuffie Factor, talked about social capital. (see slides here) Establish connections and build reputation/credibiity. #1. Turn the bullhorn around (listen instead of shout to your customers). Direct2Dell example. #2. become part of the community you serve. #3. create amazing customer experiences (“automagicness”-seamless experience; “throwing sheep”-fun social frivolousness that makes customers comfortable to do more; “lighten up” – defuses business seriousness) #4. embrace the chaos (benefits of openness, transparency and daring) #5. find your higher purpose (gift-giving to build social capital)
• WordPress creator Matt Mullenweg – about 3.5 million WordPress blogs, 11 million downloads, 22 billion pageviews, 4.9 billion spam comments killed by Akismet; history of WordPress from its b2 beginnings, through the various versions and updates. Announced GPL-compliant Theme Developers Page. GPL-compliant business models – Alex King founder Crowd Favorite. Ajaxy Twitter-like P2. Facebook-like BuddyPress. New cool plugin overview. 42% WordPress downloads outside the US – dotSUB for subtitling WordPress.tv videos. Localization/translation of plugins. Blackberry application coming, along with an iPhone app update. Announced that WPMU and WordPress.org code bases are merging. WordPress.org profiles coming (integrating BuddyPress functionality), including WordPress service provider marketplace.

I’ve got to say, by the way, that the WordCamp organizers are really spoiling us with the grub and swag. Omnivores enjoyed barbecue, while we veggies got grilled veggies, collards and mashed potatoes and cornbread. Got great swag, including a blue WordCamp American Apparel t-shirt, buttons, pens and decals galore, and a temporary tattoo. Keep in mind the conference registration cost $20!

Q&A with Matt:

• glotpress.org – open-source translation framework, better porting into plugins and themes
• Blogger import feature does exist to pull in Blogger blogs into WordPress (at least for the content)
• which Ajax library are you using? Started with Prototype and Scriptaculous; now using JQuery, very happy with it.
• anti-plagiarism: plugins to detect? Not yet (but report to WordPress and Google to take down or remove from index)
• plugins for WordPress.com blogs: plugin integration across 5 million blogs tricky. WP team does try to develop towards parity between the .org and .com platforms. Some plugins developed for VIP clients like CNN.com might be released to the .com blogs as options.
• Intense Debate: how do you decide what goes into core? Answer: What is fast, secure and what can we commit to update forever?
• PHP5 over 80% now (~20% remaining PHP4, still supported)
• using WP as a CMS for larger purposes: probably won’t scale up to the level of functionality like Drupal or Joomla because want to keep the code base light. Possibly spin off to CMSPress?
• improving search functionality. Sphinx-based technology might be a solution; in the meantime, Google search is even used on Matt’s blog.
• Revision post & versioning: can customize this via config file. Possible future improvement might be more efficient storage, even though text-heavy revision storage is fairly trivial nowadays

paidContent’s David Kaplan shares Bernstein Research’s updated Ad Tracker, which, for the first time since it began in 2003, showed a decline (-4%) in online ad spend in Q1. Just in case you suspected a particular weakness with online relative to its more traditional brethren, the 18.4% drop in non-online advertising should put that to rest.

What many are, no doubt, wondering is if this past quarter’s drop indicates the nadir of online advertising fortunes, or if there’s more room to fall. The Ad Tracker doesn’t have data before 2003, so it misses the dot-com bubble pop and its effect on ad revenue during 2000-2002. Although there are several reasons why the online advertising market is generally better positioned today than it was 9 years ago, the graph to the right suggests online advertising will continue to be dependent on overall ad spend, and for the latter to grow, we’re all still waiting for an economic recovery.

Google has just opened up a substantial swathe of inventory for AdSense, most of which will be filled with local advertising. AdSense has just announced the Maps Ad Unit for mashup developers using the Google Maps API.

The default implementation serves up 2 AdSense text ad units in a box somewhere along the perimeter of the map; tweaking a parameter in the code can serve up only 1 ad unit instead (for smaller maps). You can see an example of the 2-unit at ZipMaps, and a 1-unit at Acme Mapper. In the example to the right, we’ve pinpointed YieldBuild’s ZIP code; the ad served up is to Roy’s, a Hawaiian restaurant not even a block away.

Google Maps mashups are popular—1688 using the API at last count—and are probably a great way to build local advertiser inventory when mobile map advertising, where the real money is, becomes viable.

My favorite iPhone app, surprisingly, is the New York Times app.
I know, I know.
It’s kinda boring and marks me as a fuddy-duddy.
Which I am.
But it is a great little app. It’s well organized, fast and very usable.  And it has some of the better iPhone app ads that I have seen.

These little ads slip up from the bottom of the article viewer and tend to be on the cleaner, less obnoxious side—low use of images, heavy on the branding, and unobnoxious colors.  IMHO, they do it right.  When you click on an ad, it keeps you in the app—it simply takes you to another page still contained within the app and its controls, so you can go back to what you were just reading.  What would be bad is if clicking on an ad opened a webpage; this would close the app down and launch a browser window.

As some of the more creative ad network players out there like AdMob and VideoEgg dabble with various models such as Cost Per Engagement (CPE) and begin to evolve their offerings, it makes me wonder how much the success of advertising on the iPhone depends on the evolution of the system and not just the networks.  The evolution of the iPhone and its app platform will certainly impact the effectiveness of these ads.  Click metrics and performance measurement capabilities of iPhone ads are certainly two vectors that will change as the system and platforms evolve, but also what an ad and its creatives can do and can be will change.

A new app SDK is coming out in a few weeks rumored to offer microtransaction capabilities in it, and the new iPhone and software release are due out sometime this summer, rumored to support background processing for apps.  This will change what the user can do with ads and likely bring the user app experience to a whole new level.  If a browser can be launched without shutting down the app (and, even better, if it can “pause” the app) that’s a whole new set of advertising opportunities.  If an ad can offer something that you want to buy right there, tempting you to burn a few of your digital dollars on an MP3 or video, or whatever—and if it can do so through a seamless microtransaction payment to your cell phone bill—that’s frictionless, fast and awesome.  Now my head is swirling with ideas like a QVC app, or an auction app that connects with in-app advertising, but alas, that’s crazy talk at this point.

Now if I could only get my iPhone to not drop calls, and deliver me voicemails within 6 hours of when people leave them, I would be a happy boy.

In today’s performance-focused ad market, CPC, CPE and CPA pricing models have dominated as marketers have striven to justify ad spend in a down economy. Display’s value in promoting brand awareness and presence has been something advertisers have invested relatively little lately; better to focus spend on consumers further in the sales cycle, instead of casting such a wide net.

However, recent research released by iProspect suggests that advertisers shouldn’t dismiss the value of those visitors who view a display ad but don’t click: many of them will still be impacted enough to actively search for more information on their own.

For those respondents who said they had seen display ads over the past 6 months:

• 31% said they had clicked on a display ad
• 37% said they hadn’t done anything
• 27% said they had done a search on the company, brand, or product

I have to admit personally that I fall into the third category. Often because I don’t want to disrupt my browsing experience, or because I want to know about the company before looking at a specific promotion, I’ve made a mental note about an intriguing product or ad and searched later. I’m currently in the market for a new car, but don’t want to see a flashy splash page for a car I hadn’t thought about—but I do want to learn more about it.

If advertisers can believe that CTR doesn’t capture the full value of a specific online display campaign, how can they measure its impact? Considerably difficult, but such is the case when advertising to early prospects no matter what the medium. Brand awareness studies are probably the best indicator of a campaign’s effectiveness at lining up future potential customers.

Advertisers might also be interested to know that display advertising working in concert with performance-based ads tend to boost the effectiveness of the latter. A few days after I saw an ad for the VW Rabbit, I filled out a lead form on Autobytel to get a quote from a dealer; I never clicked on the ad.

YieldBuild will be exhibiting at SES San Jose this coming August 10-14 (booth #516).

If you’re attending and are looking to save some money, feel free to use the following discount/promo/priority code when you register: 20YIHU

You’ll get a 20% discount on any conference pass!

I’ve attended SES for several years now, and found it to be a great show for its sessions, exhibitors and networking opps. It really is the definitive SEO conference series.

San Francisco startup SocialMedia has launched three new social media ad formats that portend what is likely to come, provided users are comfortable with the amount of personal information the ads share.

• Twitter Pulse integrates a live feed of tweets that match the advertiser’s filters, and also allows users to tweet their own. The ad unit can be integrated with a larger-form microsite, and targeted ads.
  
• Friend to Friend ads are similar to the “Your-friend is a fan of…” ads you might have seen on Facebook, which is where the data is drawn from. A product gets a picture and an endorsement from one of your Facebook friends.
  
• Community Poll and Community Stream prompt visitors for an opinion on a product or question, and either shares the community’s responses in the form of percentages, or a friend’s response to the same.
  

It’s not hard to imagine that the ads will perform well. Seeing a friend’s picture or name and implied endorsement of something has been the key to Facebook’s apps’ virality. Given social media users’ aversion to anything other than something bearing a friend’s face, and the explosive popularity of Twitter (thanks, Ms Winfrey), the new ad formats exploit novelty and social graph data to drive attention and engagement.

But are all visitors going to be enthralled? Some are likely to quickly draw some conclusions that they hadn’t anticipated: what I write on Facebook and Twitter isn’t limited to my friends and followers. The next question will probably be: who else has access to this data and what are they doing with it? And the next thought could be: how do I change my settings? or I’m never using Facebook/Twitter again or How do I contact my Congressman?

Maybe an exaggeration, but we all remember the uproar of Facebook Beacon, and in that case, we knew who had access to the data (Facebook only), and the data was shared within the private confines of one’s social graph on Facebook. My suspicion is that many don’t know that the Twitter firehose is publicly available, and that Facebook shares activity data with advertising partners. We’ll see how discomfiting users find this, and whether this is just another form of targeting that raises the ire of Washington.

Sanford C. Bernstein analyst Jeffery Lindsay has increased his price target 30% for GOOG to $600, on the back of increasing RPCs (revenue per click) that it expects to dovetail with the recovering economy. He estimates Google’s growth to reach 7% for 2009, almost double that of Reuters Estimates’ aggregate analyst prediction of 4%.

Lindsay, in a note to his clients, expects advertiser competition–reflected in RPC–to remain weak through the second and third quarters, but he expects a healthy rebound that will boost Google’s YOY revenue growth to 14% in the final quarter. His estimation completely depends on the recovery of the economy and advertisers’ zest for online advertising to grow their businesses.

Google’s ability to develop inventory has sustained through the downturn–click volume grew 17% YOY in Q1 2009. The weakness has been in RPC, which has taken the steam out of Google’s search revenues.

The market, maybe a bit hungry for some good news from The Google, increased $5.89 in afterhours trading from a Thursday night close of $396.61 to a Friday morning opening price of $402.50. At the publication of this post, GOOG is trading at $407.98 (a 20 minute delay, naturally).