The Clickable Search Engine Marketing Blog

For most advertisers, “search marketing” usually means text ads appearing on search engine results pages (SERPs), and maybe a few ads appearing in a search engine’s contextual network. But while text ads account for the vast majority of ad spend and ad revenue, the variety of formats available to advertisers is much wider.

Beside text, the most common search marketing ads are image ads: everything from the “banners” and “leaderboards” across the top of an online magazine’s homepage to the “skyscrapers” running down the side of a blog. Those ads are familiar to most Internet users, but others may not be, including video ads (Flash or “click to play”) included on Web sites or incorporated into YouTube or other free videos. (Of course, not all of these formats work: after trying to automate radio advertising for over two years, Google pulled out of that business last week.

In order to help you take advantage of these formats and expand the reach of your campaigns, Clickable has recently introduced tools to help you create and manage three emerging Google ad formats, image, local business and mobile ads.

Image Ads
Image ads are graphical advertisements that appear on websites in the Google Network. Unlike older “Display” models, Google Image Ads are pay-per-click, making them a cheap way to push your brand and drive potential traffic, rather than an expensive way to pay for “impressions.”

Local Business Ads
Local Business Ads appear on Google Maps pages, and they’re a great way to make your listing more prominent when a user searches for something you have to offer in a specific location.

Mobile Ads
Mobile ads appear on users' cell phones, smart phones and PDAs. Most of us have been in the search marketing business for a number of years, and we can’t remember a year that wasn’t called “The Year Mobile Advertising Breaks Through.” Well, we think 2009 may very well be the year that mobile advertising breaks through. What’s changed? The popularity of a certain Apple product released in a new version last year...

In the next few weeks, we’ll be publishing a series of tutorials on ways that you can use these formats to expand the reach of your advertising campaigns. Of course, these formats are new to everybody ― from advertisers to AdWords to us at Clickable ― so we need your feedback more than ever. Have you used these formats before? What works? What doesn’t? What else can we do to help?

We’re looking forward to the discussion.

Hanny, Clickable SEM Guru

Note: Clickable employees volunteer several hours a week to helping other search marketers succeed. "Clickable Gurus" participate in numerous online search communities to provide straightforward answers to numerous questions, and, each week, one of the gurus posts a search marketing tip to the Clickable Blog.

In the past few weeks, we’ve introduced support for Image Ads (and other emerging ad formats )