Google has acquired AdMob (www.admob.com), a popular mobile display ad company, for $750 million.

Google has already built their own platform for AdSense on Mobile devices, but this acquisition gives Google access to AdMob’s more than 15,000 mobile Web sites and applications.

There are more details about this acquisition at google.com/press/admob.

Here is the email AdMob sent their publishers and advertisers:

Google to Acquire AdMob November 2009 Today we announced that AdMob has signed a definitive agreement to be acquired by Google for $750 million. We are extremely excited about this new partnership and what it means for our advertiser, developer and publisher partners.

AdMob’s people, products and tools will continue to work to deliver successful campaigns for you and to effectively monetize your mobile traffic – no interruptions. Our product and engineering teams will keep building great products for our customers. Our sales team will keep working with our thousands of advertisers to deliver successful campaigns. Our business development team will keep working to maximize ad revenue for the more than 15,000 mobile Web sites and applications that make up AdMob’s publisher network.

After our deal closes, AdMob will work with Google to accelerate the pace of innovation in mobile and do an even better job for you. We believe this deal will benefit our advertisers, developers and publishers by:

*Increasing our investment in building innovative and engaging ad units across platforms and to further improve targeting and tracking.

*Building even more powerful relevance and optimization capabilities, and more powerful technology and tools to monetize mobile traffic.

*Increasing the effectiveness of display advertising on mobile devices by leveraging Google sales team, infrastructure and relationships.

*Improving the already high level of service and support we deliver to our advertisers, developers and publishers.

You can read more about this deal at www.admob.com/google.

Omar

Postscript from Greg: I was able to speak to Google and AdMob CEO Omar Hamoui briefly today. The acquisition puts Google at the forefront of mobile display advertising and instantly brings Google a great deal of sophistication in the segment that it previously did not have. In fact that’s one of the things that Google emphasized in the discussion: they get a team that has been working the space and thinking about mobile display for four (or more) years.

Google also alluded to a potential for “holistic” approaches to display advertising when I asked explicitly about whether there was going to be some future cross-platform ad buying capability.

Though perhaps the most visible, AdMob is not the largest mobile ad network. According to an August compilation of Nielsen data by Mobile Marketer, here’s the reach of each of the top mobile ad networks (monthly unique users):

1. Millennial Media: 45.6 million
2. Yahoo!: 36.1 million
3. Google: 31.9 million
4. AOL/Platform-A’s Third Screen Media: 28.6 million
5. AdMob: 25.7 million
6. Microsoft: 25.4 million (doesn’t include the new Verizon deal)
7. Jumptap: 23.4 million
8. Quattro Wireless: 23 million

I asked Nielsen to confirm these figures and they declined to do so. But if they’re correct it would make Google the largest of the mobile ad networks, when combined with AdMob’s reach. In the $750 million all-stock deal, UBS analysts estimate that Google “could have paid 8-12x 2011 revenue for AdMob.”

Justin Uberti, Google’s tech lead who I believe leads the Google Talk team, posted on his blog that Hulk Hogan visited Google’s Kirkland office. Hogan made his visit on Tuesday, November 3rd, as a signing event for his new book, My Life Outside the Ring.

Here is a picture from Justin:

I too grew up during the “Hulk-O-Mania” period, so it is cool to see him at Google. Also, big happy 35th birthday Justin!

In this week’s Search In Pictures, here are the latest images culled from the web, showing what people eat at the search engine companies, how they play, who they meet, where they speak, what toys they have, and more.

Random Halloween Pictures from the various search engines:

This May Not Be Halloween Related:

The Twitter Blog has a short blog post mentioning that they have added technology “to show higher quality results for trend queries by returning tweets that are more useful.” Clearly, this is Twitter’s first step in improving Twitter Search by adding relevancy and search quality factors to the search algorithm.

Currently, Twitter Search returns results based on keyword match and the most recent tweet. Trending Topics is the first of Twitter’s search areas to get the relevancy filter, to reduce the “noise” that Twitter Search has. We knew Twitter was working on adding relevancy factors with linkage data, and I assume this is the first signs of it. In the Twitter blog post, Twitter said it might be very noticeable right now, but they hope to improve it over time.

You can test it out for yourself at Twitter Search and clicking on one of the “trending topics.”

In other Twitter news, Twitter is experimenting with adding retweet buttons to some user accounts. There seems to be a lot more buzz around the “retweet” button then around the Twitter Search relevancy addition.

The Google AdWords blog announced they have made it easier for advertisers to add and track the conversions for their search ads. Google has added to the AdWords interface sections for (1) Conversions, (2) Webpages, and (3) Code.

The Conversion page shows you the conversion actions you’re tracking. Web pages shows the web pages you are getting conversions for. Finally, Code is where you get the code to add to your web pages. You can learn more details about tracking conversions over here.

Here are some pictures of these pages:

Google AdSense announced today at the CRS Conference that they are currently testing a new interface for the AdSense console. The beta is currently being tested by few publishers, but Google promises to allow “thousands of publishers” to test this out “over the coming weeks.”

Here is a picture of one of the screens:

Features include:

• More detailed performance reports
• Enables you to view daily stats in graphical formats
• Additional metrics such as the amount you’ve earned from various ad, targeting and bid types
• More options to manage the ads that appear on your site
• cleaner interface that makes it easier to find and review them within the Ad Review Center
• A streamlined AdSense interface to simplify common tasks, such as making a change to several ad units simultaneously
• Added more relevant help on every page, a message inbox for tips from our team, and alerts with important account related notices

Today is the 40th anniversary of Sesame Street and the 20th of Wallace and Gromit, the two beloved children shows. For the special day, Google has several logos (doodles) up at the various Google properties, depending on the local preference of show.

Big Bird is the most noticed one and it is featured in the US and on 21 regional versions of Google:

Wallace & Gromit is featured in the UK and on 7 regional versions of Google:

This Sesame Street logo is on Google.be and Google.nl:

This one on Google.co.za:

This one on Google.co.in:

This one on Google.com.mx:

This one on Google.co.il:

Postscript: The Google Blog posted about this logo just minutes ago.

Postscript #2:

On November 5th, Google continued the anniversary celebration by showing off Cookie Monster:

Then on November 6th, adding a third day by showing Ernie & Bert:

Both Bing and Google have updated their maps imagery. The Bing blog announced an additional 9,460 square kilometers of imagery added to Bing Maps. Not to be outdone, Google announced that not only are they updating their imagery, but they will increasing the frequency of those updates.

In addition, Google Transit recently added more partners, including coverage of Bordeaux, Tuscany, Reggio Emilia, Brescia and more.

A year or two ago, Google hosted a webmaster chat even every few months. They were designed to allow webmasters to see presentations from Googlers on web search and SEO topics and then ask questions to Googlers, who would answer those questions in real time.

The Google Webmaster Central blog announced the first new live chat event in over a year. This event is named the “Holiday Webmaster Webinar” and takes place a week from Friday, November 13th at 10:00 am, Pacific Standard Time (GMT -08:00, San Francisco). Again, this is the first one since October 2008.

This meeting is hosted by Senior Search Quality Engineer Greg Grothaus, and AdWords Evangelist Fred Vallaeys. They’ll be discussing a range of webmaster best practices and useful Google tools followed by a Q&A session to make sure you and your site are well primed for the holiday rush.

The meeting number is 574 659 815 and the password is webmaster. To access the event:

1. Go to https://googleonline.webex.com/googleonline/j.php?ED=133402392&UID=0&PW=db339c4e641e0f525412171e5646
2. Enter your name and email address.
3. Enter the meeting password: webmaster
4. Click “Join Now”.

To join the teleconference only call-in toll-free number (US/Canada): 866-469-3239 or call-in toll number (US/Canada): 1-650-429-3300.

The Google AdWords blog announced that the Sitelinks within AdWords, which we saw in August, is now officially available for some advertisers.

A Google AdWords ad can have up to four Sitelinks in the ad. Google named them “Ad Sitelinks” and are similar to the organic Sitelinks. Google said these ads give users “more options, you can create richer, more relevant ads that improve the value of your brand terms and other targeted keywords.”

This option is only available to advertiser “whose ads meet a certain high quality threshold.”

How do you add these ad sitelinks?

1. Log into your AdWords account
2. Click on the Campaign Settings tab and go to the “Show additional links to my site” section under “Ad extensions”
3. List the names and URLs of up to 10 internal links (prioritizing the most important links first)
4. Click “Save” when you’ve finished adding your links
5. If a user search triggers your ad to run with Ad Sitelinks, our system may include up to four of your additional links on your ad, along with the main landing page link

For more details, see the FAQs.

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