Google Map Ads Showing Up On Merchant Circle

I was just looking at this page on Merchant Circle and noticed ads showing up on their Google Map!

I am sensing a trend.

In October TechCrunch noticed that Google had turned on text ads in Google Maps.

In January Matt McGee and Greg Sterling noted that Google had introduced some nifty new advertiser features for Google Maps.

In February Mike Blumenthal discovered that Google had started showing ads within the listing tab.

This makes perfect sense, particularly as Google tries to monetize high bandwidth applications.  Not sure what the deal is on these but I am betting that the ecpm off of these is a lot better than your typical adsense for content deal.

Anyone else see these out in the wild?

Note to Google Maps Team: You may want to tweak the targeting a bit.  Not sure how many people are looking for Myrtle Beach hotels in Menlo Park 🙂