Google launched a new tool now that allows customers to make professional-looking show ads for their products and services on their own, without having to dip into the marketing budget hiring the services of a professional designer.

AdWords Show Ad Builder should be especially useful for small businesses and smaller advertising agencies. It facilitates the progression from simple text based advertising to show ads. Currently, this tool is only unfilled to advertisers in the U.S. and Canada.

At the moment, the show ad builder contains 40 templates that have been categorized as business, travel, movies, games, and so on. AdWords account holders can click ‘Show Ad Builder’ on their ‘make an ad‘ page to access this new tool and make new ads or even to modify ads that are already loaded onto the system.

Ads will be charged in the standard manner, on a PPC or CPM pricing format, and will have contextual and placement based targeting options.

While the launch message does not say anything about Google’s real motivation behind this, it is evident that the Show Ad Builder has one purpose: to guide smaller businesses to use the content network even more and to improve Google’s position in the show advertising market.

The fascinating thing is, Google is not the first to launch such a tool. MySpace beat them to it by just a few days when they introduced a akin tool called MyAds. The beta platform lets marketers bid between $25 and $10,000 for performance-based show ads on MySpace. So…are you ready to “pimp out” your ads?

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