AdSense for Mobile optimized for high-end phones

Monday, October 5, 2009 | 6:19 AM

(Cross-posted on the Official Google Blog)

High-end mobile phones, like iPhone, Android-powered devices and the Palm Pre, continue to grow — Gartner estimates that global sales of smartphones will soar by 27% in 2009, to 177 million units. Naturally, as a result more and more people are browsing the web on the go.

Because these devices offer a browsing experience that is similar to desktop computers, advertising on smartphones is a natural extension for any AdWords campaign. However, it's not always been easy for advertisers to reach people on smartphones. That's why we're investing in new high-end mobile advertising products such as our search ad options for high-end phones and AdSense for mobile applications. We hope to make advertising on high-end mobile devices as intuitive, effective and user-friendly as our existing AdWords tools.

Today, we're excited to announce a new feature for our AdSense mobile publishers that enables them to serve text and image ads on their sites — specifically on these high-end smartphones. This helps mobile publishers earn revenue and fund more mobile-specific sites and web content.

New features like this help to nurture the smartphone ecosystem by encouraging the creation of more mobile content and by helping advertisers to grow their businesses by reaching new audiences. Our users' experience is also improved, with increasingly relevant and device-optimized mobile ads that load faster and fit better on small screens.

For more info about this feature, check out the Inside AdSense Blog.



1 comments:

Unknown said...

The latest modifications to how Adsense sends ads to "High End Phones" (when back-end code for "All Phones" is used), results in the Google Mobile Adsense server sending malformed code to iPhone/iPod Touch browsers, and likely all devices Adsense considers to be "High End Phones".

When using an iPhone, the Adsense code received from the Google ad server is enclosed in its own < HTML > element that also includes its own < BODY > element. Doing so results in mobile pages having nested < HTML > elements and nested < BODY> elements declared which is not valid in XHTML, causing the browser to report an error with the page if the mobile web page has a content-type of "application/xhtml+xml".

Furthermore, the malformed ad code results in web pages displaying these ads becoming inaccessible, due to the browser's XML parser throwing an error .

Additionally the in-line/embedded javascript that it is also sent from the Google ad server contains unencoded ampersands (&) which is not permitted in XHTML as the ampersand is a special entity. This also causes the browser's XML parser to report an error with the page.

The google ad server should instead put all of the javascript code in external javascript files for the iPhone browser to download.

Lastly, even if/when a mobile web page has a more common content-type of "text/html", the advertisement is placed at the top of the page, regardless of where the back-end code (PHP, ASP, etc..) is supposed to display the ad. In the end, this results in the web site admin having no control whatsoever as to where they want the ads to placed on their web page.

Please fix these issues.

I incorporate Google Mobile Adsense into my mobile discussion forum software, and unless this issue is addressed, I will likely have to instruct my clients to disable Google Mobile Adsense on their mobile forum since many of their end-users with the iPhones and other high end mobile devices will not be able to browse their mobile forums due to the malformed ad code.