Google launched a new tool today that allows customers to create professional-looking display ads for their products and services on their own, without having to spend money hiring the services of a professional designer.
AdWords Display Ad Builder should be especially useful for small businesses and smaller advertising agencies. It facilitates the progression from simple text based advertising to display ads. At present the tool is only available to advertisers in the U.S. and Canada.
Presently the display ad builder contains forty templates that have been categorised as business, movies, games, travel and so on. AdWords account holders can click ‘Display Ad Builder’ on their ‘create an ad‘ page to access this new tool and make new ads or even to modify ads that are already loaded onto the system.
Ads will be charged in the usual manner, on a PPC or CPM pricing format, and will have contextual and placement based targeting options.
While the launch message does not say anything about Google’s real motivation behind this, it is obvious that the Display Ad Builder has one purpose, that is to drive smaller businesses to use the content network even more and to improve Google’s position in the display advertising market.
Interestingly, Google is not the first to launch such a tool. MySpace beat them to it by just a few days when they introduced a similar tool called MyAds. The beta platform lets marketers bid between $25 and $10,000 for performance-based display ads on MySpace.
