26th April - Web giant Google has stepped up its plans to dominate the advertising space on the mobile, enhancing its ad platform to deliver image-based marketing to mobile devices.

To date, mobile advertisers have only had the option of serving single or double stacked text ads. This latest development means advertisers can serve similar images to those that appear on the desktop but scaled down for the smaller screen size.

As with ad words, all mobile image ads are keyword targeted, and priced on a cost-per-click basis.

Alexandra Kenin, product marketing manager for Google Mobile Ads, said that mobile image ads have shown to have good clickthrough rates, and the platform will benefit advertisers because the company will only show one image ad per mobile page.

Google also says it can dynamically return the ad that it expects will perform best at the time the ad is shown.

Mobile image ads are currently available in Australia, China, France, Germany, India, Ireland, Italy, Japan, Netherlands, Russia, Spain, the UK, and the US.