Google Beefs Up Mobile Ad Offerings For Brands With New Formats & Tools

As Advertising Week in New York City kicks off, Google is introducing new mobile display formats and tools that will roll out over the coming months. The push to make it easier for advertisers to run campaigns on the mobile web and in apps — with creative units that perform better than traditional banners — is being made across the Google Display and AdMob Networks as well as DoubleClick.

For brand advertisers, new mobile lightbox engagement ads dynamically resize to fit any ad size across devices. Existing ads can be turned into engagement ads in HTML5. Advertisers pay when users engage with the ads to expand them. This ad type will be available soon in the AdWords Ad Gallery for Google Display Network (GDN) campaigns.

Below is a Google-provided mockup of a mobile lightbox engagement ad for Kate Spade. When expanded, users can click on a video, images and a location finder.

In-app video ads will become available across the AdMob network — Google’s app advertising network — beyond gaming apps where they run now. These are TrueView ads, which YouTube advertisers will be familiar with.

The final new mobile ad update is what Google calls the magazine style text ad format for apps. These are already available on mobile websites via the Google Display Network, now Google is opening up inventory on the AdMob network. On the Web, these ads are rendered like display ads (and compete in the auction with display banners). On AdMob, the magazine style text ads display as an interstitial, as opposed to the traditional banner-like anchor ad format.

Source: Google

As hinted at above, Google is also going to be rolling out tools to convert existing advertising assets to the formats that will work across devices and screen sizes.

An auto-resizing tool will automatically generate new image ad sizes for mobile on the GDN. For browsers and devices that don’t support Flash (i.e. Apple products), a Flash-to-HTML5 conversion tool will be available for GDN and DoubleClick Campaign Manager. Google will automatically display HTML5 versions of ads will be shown when Flash is not supported.

In DoubleClick (which faces new competition from Facebook’s newly relaunched Atlas ad serving platform), Google now offers 29 HTML5 and in-app formats in DoubleClick Studio Layouts, “a tool that lets you upload your existing creative assets into a pre-built rich media ad template to quickly create rich ads that work on smartphones and tablets”.

These new formats and tools to lure — or push — advertisers (both performance and brand) to mobile follow on new offerings for app marketers, including ad formats for search and YouTube and analytics tools. Earlier this month, the company said it would begin changing the way mobile search ads display to increase click-through rates.