Google advertising formats for mobile websites and native apps

Google is one of the most innovative companies on the planet. Each year it launches dozens of new products, some of them seemingly aeons away from what could be considered a monetizable service. It now has four advertising models to monetize mobile formats: ordinary banners, interstitial ads, native advertising and video formats.
3 min reading
Business development / 23 February 2017
Google advertising formats for mobile websites and native apps
Google advertising formats for mobile websites and native apps

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Google is one of the most innovative companies on the planet. Each year it launches dozens of new products, some of them seemingly aeons away from what could be considered a monetizable service. It now has four advertising models to monetize mobile formats: ordinary banners, interstitial ads, native advertising and video formats.

Google is one of the most innovative companies on the planet. Each year it launches dozens of new products, some of them seemingly aeons away from what could be considered a monetizable service. 

The sector from which Google obtains the most revenues is still digital advertising. This is without question the goose that lays the golden eggs. And that’s why they do so much to nurture their relations with their partners and to look for new forms of monetization that are more respectful with the user: they want to take care of the product in the long term. 

The data confirm some interesting outlooks for the search engine in terms of spending on digital advertising and the habits and needs of the users that will affect how the different mobile products are monetized. According to a study by App Annie and IDC, advertising on mobile apps is expected to increase by 3.2 times between 2014 and 2018, whereas there will be 2.6 times more mobile website displays in the same period. In contrast, advertising on desktop websites will remain unchanged, largely due to the unabated growth of content consumption on mobile devices. Hence, Google prefers revenues to be dependent on advertising rather than on models where they are mainly related to in-app sales.

Google’s monetization platforms

There are numerous reports forecasting advertising revenues on mobile devices. This study by eMarketer reveals some interesting figures: spending on mobile advertising will reach 167 billion dollars in 2018; the figure for the American market alone will be 57 billion dollars; spending on mobile advertising in a country like China will reach 40 billion dollars; average growth in revenues from mobile advertising will be 3 billion in 2018; and revenues from in-app advertising in the US will hit 9 billion dollars in 2018.

In the specific case of Google, the search engine has two major platforms for monetizing mobile digital products: DoubleClick Ad Exchange, a solution that allows premium editors to monetize their advertising spaces with the ads served by Google itself; and AdMob, a monetization platform designed essentially for developers of mobile apps focused on sectors such as videogames and income generating activities such as mediation and gamification.

Advertising formats for mobile products

Google has several advertising formats for monetization, from mobile websites to native apps. The different types of ads available from the giant search engine can be divided into four large groups: banners, interstitials, native advertising and videos. This is a brief description of the most common types in each one:

● Banners: first there are the widely used traditional banners such as the 300×250 (known as a medium rectangle in the sector), the 320×100 and the 320×50 formats. Larger formats like the half-page ad (300×600) are not monetized by Google. In addition to the more traditional formats, the search engine incorporates some more recent ones such as the adhesion banner, the auto-close interstitial, the image carousel, the pull banner, the expandable banner and the rotatable banner. All of them are rich media creative formats.

● Interstitials: you might ask how Google can continue marketing this format which, when poorly used, can generate penalties in mobile searches. The reason is not so much the format, but the use that’s made of it. For Google the problem arises when the content is served first, followed by the interstitial. If the ad is preloaded and served before the content, it generates less friction and frustration for the users because the advertising doesn’t prevent them from reading the content. Google markets several types of interstitials: image interstitials, app download and magazine interstitials, rich media and video interstitials. The search engine also offers its partners the option of customizing their interstitials through HTML5 for both Android and iOS apps.

● Native advertising: the growth in this type of advertising is practically unstoppable. This model is based on flexible components which are laid out separately within a creative which depends on the editor, and always adapts to the styles of the medium (website or app) where it is to be integrated. In no case is this creative served directly by the advertiser or the media agency. Google has several different native publicity formats: native image ad, click-to-download, text ad, deeplink and to/within app.

● Videos: there are various types of different ads for videos, from interstitials, native videos for app installations, the same format but with interstitial, and TrueView video.

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