Google launches AdSense Labs, first options are showing fewer ads and adding mobile inline ads

Google today announced the launch of AdSense Labs, a new part of AdSense where users can explore experimental features for the website advertising system.

Google has populated the new section of AdSense, which is under the Optimization tab, with two features to start — although in some cases certain experiments may not show up, depending on the nature of the website it’s working with.

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The first one is interesting — you’ll be able to actually tell AdSense to display fewer advertisements on your site.

“Show fewer ads cuts down the number of ads that are shown to your users in exchange for a negligible drop in your revenue,” Google software engineer Emma Burrows wrote in a blog post. “It aims to remove at least 10 percent of the ads served on your site (1 percent or less of your revenue), by preventing low value ads from being shown to your users.”

The other experiment automatically drops 320×100 ad units into mobile websites.

“With this new ad format you’ll no longer need to write the logic to dynamically insert ad units on your page, we’ll handle all that for you,” Burrows wrote.

There are alternatives to AdSense, but the scale of advertising behemoth Google is worth considering, and Google has plenty of experience testing and tweaking experimental features. Gmail and Google Maps have both had their own Labs sections. Even Google itself once had Labs. So for marketers this is probably a program worth keeping an eye on.