• by Gavin O'Malley  @mp_gavin, March 11, 2008

Ready to invest further in measurement and marketing initiatives, widget maker Gigya has raised another $9.5 million in a series B round of financing. This round was led by Mayfield Fund, and included additional funds from existing investors Benchmark Capital and First Round Capital.

"We're not ignoring publishers, but our biggest priority is getting advertisers to adopt widgets," said Gigya CEO Eyal Magen. "With advertisers in mind, we're investing in more recording and analytics tools, sales and account management services, and marketing."

In April of last year, Gigya launched its Wildfire technology to track how users interact with a widget's features and functionality. The technology is now used by top brand marketers, including MTV, Sprint, and Toyota, and tracks over 3 billion widget impressions per month.

The company's investors credit Gigya's rapid growth with the rapid adoption of widget technology along with its Wildfire technology, which also promotes viral distribution by allowing users to grab and share widgets via social networks, e-mail and bookmarking sites.

"Since investing in Gigya 18 months ago, we have been astonished by the company's rapid growth," said Michael Eisenberg, General Partner, Benchmark Capital.

Widgets, YouTube videos and social networking groups--opt-in distribution networks popular among young consumers--are becoming standard for online marketing campaigns, according to a report recently released by Forrester Research.

"The social technology world is evolving at a faster pace than any other technology market we've ever encountered," according to the Forrester report.

Widget ads, meanwhile, are expected to help boost social network advertising by 70% to $1.6 billion in 2008, according to a recent report by eMarketer.

Among consumers, nearly 586 million individual Web users viewed a piece of widget software in November of last year, according to recent comScore data provided exclusively to BusinessWeek.com.

In January, Gigya launched an ad network for delivering and tracking widget ads on social networks, blogs and other sites. Gigya's ad network appears on top social networking sites including MySpace, Facebook, Xanga, Black Planet and Freewebs.

The network is going head-to-head with a number of rivals, including Google's Gadget Ads and Clearspring's widget ad network.

According to Magen, however, Google is taking a different approach to widget marketing.

"Google Gadget Ads are more focused on running widgets as ads, while we're focused on getting users to install widgets on their personal pages," Magen said.

Advertisers in the Gigya network only pay if someone actively installs a widget on their profile page, blog or Web site, in which case Gigya and the widget publisher each get a share of the revenue.