The deal with Marchex sees WidgetBucks powering local, debt/ finance, and pay-per-call advertising across Marchex’s local content network. WidgetBucks’ ad widgets will be integrated into hundreds of sites across Marchex’s content network.

Since launching in October 2007, WidgetBucks has seen some amazing growth rates. The service is now delivering over 700 million impressions per month and is projected to grow to 2 billion a month by the end of the year. Since launching, WidgetBucks has served over 3.5 billion impressions from 20,000 active publishers. According to comScore, 70 million unique users saw WidgetBucks ads in March 2008, and as we’ve previously noted, WidgetBucks is now ranking in the Top 10 list for niche ad networks.

There are a ton of shopping product search engines out there right now. It’s a crowded space and to distinguish themselves companies have been focusing on advanced features such as deep product feature search (Retrevo) or price trend tracking (Mpire) to stand out. There’s The Find, Mpire, Crowdstorm, Bountii, Retrevo, SmartShopper, Pricefight, Ugenie, and many more. Google had it’s own notable stumble in online product search as well.

Of the engines, Twenga is most like “The Find”. Search results are returned as a wall of product images and can be refined by price and features. It also has several advanced features include price tracking and user reviews. This allows the engine to run more complex searches properties such as a 10% price drop. It also focuses on Europe and comes translated in an impressive six different languages (French, German, Italian, Polish, Spanish, and English). The network reached 7 million visitors in November 2007 and indexed over 40 million offers from 25,000 merchants

With so much choice, there’s no excuse to not get the lowest price on your Christmas gifts.

Bloggers can customize what kinds of consumer items they want to appear in the widget (books, movies, computers, musical instruments), then they grab some code and put it on their blog. Or they can let Mpire serve up contextually relevant ads based on the topics they write about. WidgetBucks scans your site and tries to match ads to the keywords it finds. The widgets tap into merchandise from 30,000 retailers, including Amazon, Shopping.com, Target, Best Buy, Wal-Mart, and the Gap. WidgetBucks shares the cost-per-click revenue with bloggers, promising the equivalent of $3 to $6 CPMs (cost-per-thousand views). Mpire is also working with RockYou to create a Facebook app. Yeah, schlocking your Facebook page is going to make you real popular.

Here is what one of the widget ads look like:

It’s a crowded space. On Sunday Michael Arrington described it well with a post aptly titled “The Attack of the Advertising Widgets“. A natural first reaction is what? more widgets!

I caught up with Mpire CEO Matt Hulett and Co-Founder Dave Cotter earlier in the week and it’s a question I had to ask. After a decent 30 minutes I found there was a lot to like about Mpire’s new widget offering, and some great potential. Yes, more widgets, but these ones are different.

The defining feature that makes Mpire widgets stand out from the crowd is dynamically grouped content. The widgets incorporate Mpire’s meta-shopping data, creating shopping trend results across 15 categories, including entertainment, sports, fashion, technology, games and youth/teens.

A widget can list and link to the top searches at eBay for a particular topic, for example Baseball. A widget covering fashion can provide a dynamically updated price watch chart. For lovers of Second Life, one widget provides updates of Linden Dollar average sales prices from eBay.

The new widgets have been in private beta testing prior to today’s launch and can boast of some significant results. On average in testing, CTR rates with Mpire’s widgets were up to 5 times higher than a comparable banner or Adsense unit.

The new widgets are completely free, and surprisingly do not require registration (although it is an option). Affiliates simply insert their affiliate code when setting up the widget and get to keep 100% of all profits made. There’s no revenue sharing model and affiliates deal directly with eBay and Amazon for payment.

I asked Hulett and Cotter the obvious question: where’s the return?

We’ve covered Mpire previously here and here. As well as offering an on site shopping comparison service, Mpire also have a browser plugin that provides comparative shopping data.

The aim of the widgets from a corporate view point is to drive awareness and traffic back to the core product.

What better way of getting your name out there than having thousands of people running widgets that include your company name and link in the footer!

The only draw back I could find from a publishers view point was a lack of dynamic contextual delivery. Much like AuctionAds (a TechCrunch sponsor), the widgets are delivered contextually only to the point of the topic placed in the code. For example a Digital Camera site would code the widget to run digital camera data, but the widget doesn’t pick up if the particular page is about a specific item, say a Panasonic DMC FZ 50, my own particular camera of choice. A fully fledged contextual version is something Mpire is considering for development at a later date.

John Cook at Seattle PI has more coverage.

The revamped site features a cleaner layout along with the same Farecast-style price tracking of the old one, but now includes Amazon and Epinion reviews along with coupons and deals embedded in the search results. The new Shopwave site is a work in progress that tackles the lack of innovation going on in online shopping visualization. We’ve talked about a couple new visualization ideas before. Mpire’s Shopwave doesn’t have as extreme a layout as BrowseGood’s treemap visualization, or as customizable as Like.com’s color and shape driven engine. It instead takes a window shopping approach, where you know what category you want, but maybe not the exact product. If you don’t know exactly how to describe what you’re looking for, Mpire’s new image previews may be worth the thousand words you can’t find.

Today’s new Mpire product is a browser plug-in that pops up when looking at an item on any of several hundreds of 3rd party shopping sites and provides you cross-retailer data, related deals and coupons around the web and a fetching graph of eBay final auction sale prices rising or falling for your item over time. The screen shot following this post is fuzzy and small, click on it to open a full sized version in a new window. The plug-in, which will be available later this afternoon, is for Firefox only right now. Hopefully they will be able to offer an IE version as well. Update: It’s available now.

A browser plug-in may be the missing ingredient to drive substantial use of this very interesting product; a destination site was far more inconvenient to use. Beside the full display on the bottom of your screen, the plug-in also displays new and used prices for an item on supported sites right next to the site’s native price display. Damon Darlin of the New York Times was disappointed in Mpire’s search results in an article last week; good search is part of the challenge but making a comparison shopping tool easy and compelling to use is a huge challenge as well. I think Mpire has done a very nice job of that.