Google Lets Advertisers Target Tablets Beyond the iPad (Watch Out for Increased Costs)

As one of about a hundred announcements from the company today, Google said it is developing new targeting options for advertisers, including a way to target tablet users. In a post on Google’s ...
Google Lets Advertisers Target Tablets Beyond the iPad (Watch Out for Increased Costs)
Written by Chris Crum
  • As one of about a hundred announcements from the company today, Google said it is developing new targeting options for advertisers, including a way to target tablet users.

    In a post on Google’s InsideAdwords blog, Nathania Lozada writes, “In the next couple of weeks, the ‘Networks and Devices’ section of your Settings tab within your AdWords account will include a new targeting option titled ‘Tablets with full browsers.'” While you’ve been able to specifically target Apple iPad devices in the past, the new capability will enable you to easily target your ads to the entire tablet device category.”

    “In addition, you’ll be able to select more precisely the types of devices and operating systems on which your AdWords ads will show,” adds Lozada. “For example, to display your ads on the Apple iPad, you’ll be able to choose ‘Tablets with full browsers’ as your device targeting setting and ‘iOS’ as your operating system setting. Tablet targeting will be available initially for Apple devices only, but we’ll expand ad serving to other specific devices in the near future.”

    Ads will automatically start running on tablet devices, once the option becomes available in advertisers’ accounts. Google warns that if you were targeting iPads before, you might start seeing more impressions and costs as they include more tablets in the serving options, so if you don’t want ads to appear on other tablets, you’ll have to go into the settings and specify this.

    How good of them to note.

    Only standard text and image ads can be shown on tablets at this point. Nothing fancy for your landing pages either, because Google will limit the ads it shows on tablets if the landing pages have significant amounts of Flash and can’t render properly on the devices. Here is what Google recommends for mobile landing pages in the help center:

    • Task-oriented, simple site design
    • One-column layout
    • Compatible browser plug-ins. For example, Flash is currently not supported on iPhones and has only limited support on Android and other high-end mobile devices.

    According to Google, 165 million tablets are expected to ship over the next two years. Google will certainly be doing everything it can to fuel that with Android. Just today, the company gave all attendees of its sold-out Google I/O conference new tablets to play with.

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