Two of these new products are meant for display ads while the third is for sponsored search ads.

Search Retargeting

Search retargeting allows advertisers to display ads to their target audience, based on the user’s search activities. For e.g. when a user types in the keyword ‘Sandals’, the advertiser can display ads for different types of footwear, encouraging the user to make his purchase online.

According to reports from the University of Phoenix, Search Retargeting allowed them to reach their targets at 50% lower costs than required in regular display retargeting efforts.

Enhanced Retargeting

Enhanced retargeting enables the advertiser to put up dynamically generated display ads across the entire Yahoo! network, depending on the user’s activities on the advertiser’s site. For e.g. when a user visits a page on the Yahoo! network, looking for details about flights from one destination to another, the advertiser can make a personalized offer to that customer for that specific flight.

A leading online travel company reported a 230% increase in the total bookings and a 651% increase in the click through rate with enhanced retargeting, compared to the traditional retargeting methods.

Enhanced Targeting

This is a combination of ad scheduling and demographic targeting within search. With this product, advertisers can control where and when the ad is shown, at the campaign as well as ad group levels. They can decide the time of day and days of the week when ads should appear. Advertisers can also decide the demographics (gender and age group of the user) that their ad should reach. The advertisers will be able to vary bids according to the different segments to increase the ability to reach a desired audience.

These announcements were made at the Interactive Advertising Bureau’s annual conference, as part of Yahoo!’s keynote presentation. During their presentation Yahoo! urged advertisers to stop the “artificial boundaries” being put up between display and search ads and make optimal use of search targeting products reach maximum users.

AdWords Display Ad Builder should be especially useful for small businesses and smaller advertising agencies. It facilitates the progression from simple text based advertising to display ads. At present the tool is only available to advertisers in the U.S. and Canada.

Presently the display ad builder contains forty templates that have been categorised as business, movies, games, travel and so on. AdWords account holders can click ‘Display Ad Builder’ on their ‘create an ad‘ page to access this new tool and make new ads or even to modify ads that are already loaded onto the system.

Ads will be charged in the usual manner, on a PPC or CPM pricing format, and will have contextual and placement based targeting options.

View the Display Ad Builder tutorial

While the launch message does not say anything about Google’s real motivation behind this, it is obvious that the Display Ad Builder has one purpose, that is to drive smaller businesses to use the content network even more and to improve Google’s position in the display advertising market.

Interestingly, Google is not the first to launch such a tool. MySpace beat them to it by just a few days when they introduced a similar tool called MyAds. The beta platform lets marketers bid between $25 and $10,000 for performance-based display ads on MySpace.

This information, however, does not apply to clicks on paid search links. People that typically click on display ads are not representative of the total US online population. It should be further noted that most heavy clickers on the net, are not very likely to provide much revenue generation for the advertisers as data reveals that these people are generally in the low income range (below $40,000 per annum), They are usually between 25 and 44 years of age and spend a lot of time on gambling and auction sites; in other words they do not seem to have much work to do.

It was found that more clicks on an ad do not necessarily imply that there is better awareness of that brand. A high click rate does not necessarily mean good performance by the ad.

Some advertisers may already be aware of these drawbacks of the pay per click display advertising system. What is important is that they should start focusing on other aspects like actual sales generated, or brand awareness created through the ad campaign, rather than worrying about how many clicks their ads receive. Based on the findings of this study, advertisers would be better off investing in CPA (cost per action) bidding rather than CPC.

Erin Hunter, executive VP at comScore says, “while the click can continue to be a relevant metric for direct response advertising campaigns, this study demonstrates that click performance is the wrong measure for the effectiveness of brand- building campaigns.”

Read the full press release from comScore

Ad Serving By Region

Indian mobile users were served the second largest total of impressions on AdMob’s network, after the USA. This surprising statistic could be due to a higher level of market penetration achieved in the sub-continent compared to other places such as Japan, the UK, France and Spain. North America and Asia were also the most popular regions as seen in the chart below:

Source: AdMob Network Metrics

AdMob served 85 million ad impressions in the UK, making it their fourth largest market, after the United States, India and South Africa. While these numbers are obviously skewed due to AdMob’s own market limitations, they are by no means insignificant and demonstrate the size of many non-European mobile Internet markets.

Popular Handset Manufacturers

The report also provides data on the top mobile handsets based on percentage of ad impressions served by AdMob, as seen in the chart below.

Source: AdMob Network Metrics

The most interesting statistic that can be found from these numbers is the worldwide increase in popularity of Smartphones. Three of the top five devices used in the USA are smartphones. 74.6 percent of mobile phones on AdMob’s worldwide network were found to support polyphonic ringtones, 81 percent support WAP push messages and 59.2 percent were able to download video clips.

In the UK, the most impressions were delivered to Nokia (32.6% impressions), Samsung (27.9% impressions) and Motorola (20.7% impressions) handsets. The Motorola V360 (12.1%), Samsung E250 (6.5%) and Nokia N70 (4.0%) were the most popular handsets.