The next step in mobile advertising has arrived with Google launching their own mobile display ads through their Adsense network.

The ads will be sold on a PPC basis and come in a few different sizes. They are, of course, small, and only one keyword-relevant ad will be served per page. Each ad must link to a mobile web page. Here’s a demonstration of the ad size:

According to Google, early clickthrough rates have been “good,” whatever good means. It’s hard to believe a lot of people will click on these ads unless they are relevant and local–but that is the great hope of mobile advertising and may make mobile ads far more effective than web ads. Besides, there is still branding value on banner ads that aren’t clicked. I think in my entire life of web surfing, I’ve never actually clicked on a banner ad. I may be making that up, but I can’t remember ever having done so, but I’m sure the billboard aspect of the ads has crept into my cerebral cortex in some way.

The fact that there will only be one ad per page doesn’t hurt, but this is understandable considering the small size of the browser. Those who already are using text ads can jimmy their code to run both display and text, with Google deciding which ad is most relevant to a situation.

This entry was posted on Thursday, April 24th, 2008 at 11:02 amand is filed under Search Engine Marketing, Social Media. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.