The personal finance site started to cut down the number of ads, especially the low-performing ones, and increasing its click-through rates, according to AdAge. SmartMoney cut the ads at the bottom of a page and the number of available units on other pages.

“There’s only so much focus that a reader can have on a page,” Bill Shaw, publisher of SmartMoney and SmartMoney.com, told AdAge. “You have three ad units, but a reader’s only going to click on one.”

Advertisers, such as Scottrade and Options Express, came back after the site saw a 21 percent increase in aggregate click-through rates. The site was sold out in the fourth quarter, though the trend hasn’t continued in this quarter. SmartMoney said it lost about 30 percent of its ad inventory, ending up down 12 percent in total impressions. The site’s traffic was about 800,000 unique visitors in December, down from more than 1.2 million a year earlier.

Of course, maybe sites should just go after the stimulus display ad business.

– Express your opinion, comment below.

hakia said it has added more than 10 million abstracts from PubMed – a medical database maintained by the U.S. National Library of Medicine and the National Institutes of Health. The company said it hopes to benefit medical researchers, doctors, students and consumers by helping them reach more relevant info even more quickly.

“Non-semantic search engines often deliver incorrect information because they rank their findings by popularity,” Dr. Riza Berkan, hakia’s CEO and a former nuclear physicist, told ADOTAS. “Typically, about 90% of searchers stick with the first page of a search engine’s findings and the results are often wrong. We’ve been developing ontological technology since 2004 that processes Web pages and data in a way that will match what the searcher is looking for through conceptual means, not by popularity, so the results are more accurate.”

Berkan argues that semantic search will be a boon for interactive advertisers as well. “When we deploy our semantic ad system, the same principles will apply – our system will detect content on Web pages and match ads with a much higher precision, resulting in higher click-through rates.” hakia is in the process of developing and launching its ad system, so it does not have ironclad projections on how much higher those click-through rates will be.

The company was founded in 2004; so far, hakia has received about $21 million in funding from an international base of private investors.

For starters, many mobile gamers hit the demographic sweet spot – 75% of users fall between the ages of 18 and 34. Sixty percent of Greystripe’s gamers are men and 40% are women.

The data also shows that 90.2% of gamers exposed to ads on its network make purchasing decisions for their families, an obvious win for advertisers. Click-through rates are impressive – about 10.1% worldwide, about six times higher than the 1.5% seen in traditional mobile ads.

The typical user’s profile is interesting as well: about 33% of users drink one or more diet sodas a day; 79% who use the mobile Internet more than once a day go to the movies twice or more per month and 40% drive SUVs.

In March, Google changed its AdWords algorithm, which means that some advertising are paying much higher rates … yet their conversion rates have hit the skids.

“If it were just a rate increase, I would have tolerated it. But my ad rates have doubled and I’ve got no business,” an anonymous tipster told Wired.com.

Google, for its part, says that its drop in paid clicks is … intentional. The Web titan justifies the higher ad rates, saying that serving fewer, but more relevant ads more than makes up for the lower conversion rates.

But advertisers ain’t having it, Wired reports.

“I am seeing large-scale advertisers whose general cost per clicks is trending up … and they’re seeing impressions go down,” Jeremy Chatfield, an analyst at Web marketing firm Merjis, told Wired.com.

They also found that 68% of online marketers worldwide didn’t know if they could trust the visitor/traffic profile online media owners and publishers claimed. Other concerns: click fraud and uncertainty about where ads actually landed.

The report finds that “despite today’s buzz on all things digital, despite global interactive advertising being forecast to reach $147 billion by 2012 from the current $45 billion, and despite three online media platforms making it to the Fournaise 2007 top 10 marketing Effectiveness Ranking in the day-to-day reality of generating incremental customer demand for their products or services, marketers seem to have a major trust issue when it comes to the overall reliability and credibility of online advertising.”

“Across the thousands of online campaigns we audit track for our clients worldwide through our independent WebAnalyser and its 5-t Audit Tracking methodology, we have been observing consistently poor results: Click Through Rates have fallen as low as 0.15% (sometimes even lower), Conversion Rates are barely reaching the 3% average, and as far as Returns on Marketing Investment are concerned, our clients are most of the time flirting with the sub-30% numbers,” Jerome Fontaine, CEO and chief tracker of The Fournaise Marketing Group, said in a release.

There is a light at the end of the tunnel though: marketers want independent auditing of what media owners and publishers claim and independent auditing of the results of individual campaigns. With these changes in place – they are the norm for print and broadcast ads after all – Fournaise predicts that online media platforms will surpass their already impressive rates of growth.

With the new deal, Ringleader’s third-party interactive advertising network will make an additional 50 million impressions per month for brands who want to break into mobile advertising. Local Wireless users will be able to access news, streaming video, weather, sports and more from more than 140 local affiliates.

“With Ringleader Digital’s ability to integrate with existing online ad campaigns, rolling out multi-channel campaigns locally through mobile advertising is now a one-step process for advertisers,” said Bob Walczak, CEO of Ringleader. “And, through our relationship with LSN, our ad network now includes access to the most watched media in local markets nationwide. Our rapidly growing list of premium brands can finally leverage some of the most desirable ad inventory in local advertising.”

The industry is seeing a significant increase within the industry in mobile advertising – and Ringleader says its technical capabilities have solved many of the initial mobile advertising barriers and problems, helping to boost click-through rates.

“In 2005, the typical mobile purchase was only $5,000 to $10,000 per campaign,” said Mark Pearlstein, vice president of business development at Ringleader. “However, as of last year, it increased from $50,000 to $100,000. Now in 2008, we are seeing mobile click-through rates at two to three percent, and advertisers are taking notice with campaign proposals in the seven figures.”

The company’s mobile advertising network works with publishers, carriers and ad agencies to extend the interactive experience to mobile. It has created a device-agnostic network so that ads can appear on any mobile network.