Google Enables Larger Ads on Smartphones

The smartphone market, despite being the center of attention on the mobile front, is still very small compared with the mobile market as a whole and the revenue from apps and services targeted at smartphones, though increasing exponentially, is still rather insignificant overall. But there are those who are looking at the potential there and Google is one of them. The company has just announced a new ad unit for mobile phones boasting a full HTML browser allowing publishers to display specific ads targeted at these devices.

“With the growth in popularity of high-end mobile phones with full (HTML) Internet browsers, like the iPhone and phones running Android, advertisers are increasingly extending their campaigns to mobile devices,” Danielle VanDyke, the Google software engineer behind the new ads, wrote. “Today we're launching a new feature for AdSense mobile publishers that will allow you to take advantage of the high-end mobile phone browsing experience. This feature offers publishers the ability to run larger AdSense ads visible on high-end phones. Before this launch, AdSense mobile publishers were only eligible to serve smaller text and image ads on their website content.”

The new ads are specifically designed for these types of mobile phones and are optimized for performance and latency. Publishers will be able to deploy the new ad types with a new JavaScript snippet, which will also allow them to choose from several sizes from the AdSense formats. The new, larger ads should be able to make better use of the larger screens and resolutions made available by high-end phones.

But, interestingly, Google is also enabling the new ad sizes for publishers, even if they don't specifically target smartphones or are unwilling or unable to implement the new code. Google will automatically detect if the user is browsing the websites with a more powerful mobile device and will serve the larger ads rather than the WAP version.