It’s not just about making more ads, its about making existing ads more valuable as well, and as the king of online advertising, this is something that Google knows all too well. What’s funny is that sometimes Google doesn’t even need to do anything to make its ads more valuable, sometimes the market does that on its own. A good example would be the popularity of large-screened smartphones, which apparently makes ads more valuable.
Growth in the use of mobile devices has surprised even Google, but its lucrative advertising machine is healthy and handling the transition, advertising chief Sridhar Ramaswamy said Thursday. “There are a lot of positives going for the ad business,” Ramaswamy said in an interview with The Wall Street Journal at the ad:tech conference in San Francisco. “There’s a tremendous momentum in mobile search and mobile YouTube. We continue to make monetization on search and YouTube better.” The average price of Google search ads has been falling as more people use smartphones, because it’s harder for users to complete a purchase on the smaller screen; that makes advertisers less willing to pay up for ads. Google is tackling this in several ways, including sharing more data with advertisers about how their mobile search ads spur visits and purchases in physical stores. Ramaswamy said the rising popularity of larger smartphones also helps.
