Discussing the cornerstone’s of Google’s business objectives, Marissa Mayer said, “If you think about the web, there are four key platforms: search, video, mobile, and social.” That third category of mobile has been an astounding success story for Google (and we’ll just be nice and not talk about the fourth item on the list). Thanks to the Android operating system, now the dominant player in smartphones (and a visible, if still struggling, presence in tablets) Google has a huge foothold on the mobile market. That wouldn’t be possible, however, if it wasn’t for their strong mobile advertising capabilities – many of which came from the acquisition of AdMob last year.

That year has been astonishing for AdMob, with their overall network size almost quadrupling, 80,000 mobile apps or sites now using AdMob, and nearly three billion ads being served each day. These numbers are continuing to grow alongside increased sales for both smartphones (300 million sold in the last year) and tablets (20 million sold in the last year), and may even exceed total mobile platform growth thanks to the increasing market share of AdMob; tablet presence, as one example, tripled since the Google acquisition.

There’s plenty to celebrate on their first anniversary with Google, but AdMob has decided to throw some new features around rather than wasting confetti. These features are:

• New ad formats designed for the tablet environment (including support for HTML 5, improved screen resolution, larger screen size, tablet-specific user inputs, etc.).
• An improved “house ads” program that allows for access to new ads, targeting, and campaign management. “House ads” is a tool for app developers that allows self-promotion through internal ads.
• Ad mediation, slated for a release this Summer, which will evaluate ads in numerous competing networks to find the best ad for each app.
• Support for DoubleClick and DoubleClick for Publishers advertising analytics tools.