Google: Mobile Search Ad Requests Doubled in 2011

In the immediate wake of our report on Google mobile ad revenues, TechCrunch reports today that the search giant saw a 2x year-over-year increase in mobile search ad requests (the largest source of its mobile ad revenues) in 2011.

Our friend Surojit Chatterjee, Google’s lead product manager for mobile search ads, attributes this growth to the improved quality of search ads. This results directly from the new search ad formats that we walked through one by one, on stage with Chatterjee at ILM West.

In addition, mobile Web optimized sites are now ranked higher, resulting in not only more relevant results (in the traditional sense) but also ones whose links point to actual mobile pages. This has led to a 50 percent jump in AdWords advertisers with optimized sites since August.

Click-to-call also continues to grow since we first covered its introduction two years ago. Specifically, Chatterjee now reports more than half a million active advertisers and 10 million calls per month for click-to-call ads.

Next up is developing unique ad formats and metrics that are specific to a tablet-based search experience. We touched on this during the ILM West interview, but there is clearly a lot more to come, and to be examined. We’ll be all over it…