Google to launch Graphic ads

Google announced that it is going to launch a new kind of ads, graphic ads. Google has now realized that graphical banners as opposed to the small text advertisements can attract more attention from users.

Graphic Ads on AdSense web publishers

The graphic ads will not come up on www.google.com. Google is essentially an advertising broker and it is the fast growing part of Google's business. These ads will only be available on Google's partners that registered to Google AdSense program.

This program is for web publishers who want to make revenue from advertising on their site. AdSense delivers Google ads that are relevant to what your readers see on the web publishers' pages.

The Graphic Ads

At this time, image ads are available in the following four formats:

• leaderboard (728x90)

• banner (468x60)

• skyscraper (120x600)

•medium rectangle (300x250)

Moreover, animated images are not allowed. Google image ads are limited to 50KB in size, and should have a minimal effect on load time for most sites.

Generate more clicks?

It might be a good opportunity for advertisers to deliver relevant, contextually targeted image advertisements to users, in addition to their text based ads. Google will run graphical ads, which will probably generate more clicks compared to text ads.

However, the advertisers will have no guarantee that the graphic version will be shown. If the image ad is more relevant, it will appear. If not, the text ad may come up in its place. In fact, Google's technology analyzes a publisher's page to figure out the best set of keywords to match its meaning and it will determine which ad, text or graphical, will receive the most clicks, based on bids by advertisers on payments per click. This targeting model is supposed to ensure reaching prospects with the most effective ads.

With this targeted policy, Google wants also to improve the CTR of the banners. Today, the vast majority of display banners, skyscrapers, buttons, etc. are run-of-network ads (the ads are independent to the topic of the page) , and their CTR is very low compared to text ads (Doubleclick reports the average banner CTR as 0.44% while Google Adwords says that its CTR across all keywords system wide is about 2%)

Experience will say if it's a good move and if Google's technology will achieve its goal to provide more efficient ads, as text-based ads are known to deliver a better CTR than banners.