Google Adwords has seen many developments lately. From the adwords video to adwords express.

If you check your Google mail account you see adwords ads in gmail on top of the menu bar and on the right hand side of your opened message. Up until very recently, those ads were only text based. Well this has now changed. Adwords has now gone graphic in Gmail.

The new AdWords image format appearing above the text ads in the right sidebar includes

• an image,
• a headline
• lines of text,
• next to an envelope icon, the advertiser's name
• clicking the ad will take the user to an e-mail message.

A Google spokesperson said, “the ads are designed specifically for Gmail and look and function a little differently from regular text ads and the ads are being shown to “a small number” of users in the U.S. and testing began in July.”

We are yet to be informed on:

• which advertisers are testing this new feature - we read that Groupon is part of the test group - 
• how do advertisers pay for these ads
• how these ads are targeted

It will surely increase adwords click through ratio in Gmail