Go Mobile! Series: Your ads on the iPad

Like many of you, we’re excited about the upcoming release of Apple’s iPad and the promise of tablet computers. Innovative products like the iPad are on the cutting edge of a whole new class of devices that promise to make accessing information and content easier and more fun.

Over the past year, we’ve been working to make sure that our advertising products work well on a different class of exciting new devices - mobile phones with full Internet browsers like the iPhone and those running Android. These mobile devices have exploded in popularity, and have allowed advertisers to achieve incremental reach and great results. With these high-end phones making up 50% of mobile search queries, it’s highly valuable for advertisers to connect with these users.

In many ways, an iPad is more similar to these mobile devices than to desktop and laptop computers. It runs on a mobile operating system, has a touchscreen, runs mobile apps, and is highly portable, suited for on-the-go browsing. For this reason we’ve decided for now to include the iPad as a mobile device in AdWords, which means that as AdWords advertisers, you can easily extend the reach of your current ad campaigns to these new types of devices.

To ensure that your ads appear on new mobile devices like the iPad, simply make sure that you have “all mobile devices” selected in your campaign settings under the “Networks and devices” section. You can also use the default setting, "All available devices."

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If you want to target the iPad specifically, our engineers are busy at work doing the final testing on an option to enable you to do just that. It will appear in the coming days when you choose to “target only selected mobile devices”. And don’t worry - if you’ve already changed your AdWords settings to not appear on these mobile devices, your ads won’t appear on the iPad.

Of course, the world of devices like the iPad is in its infancy, and these devices may evolve in ways that we haven’t anticipated yet. So we’ll continue to watch the space and ensure that no matter which direction the devices go in next, we'll make sure to give advertisers the reach, control and features they’ll need to get great results from their ad campaigns.

Posted by Paul Feng, Group Product Manager for Google Mobile Ads