Google at its I/O developer conference back in May took some time to discuss improvements it was making to its Play Store for Android devices. Of those, one area in particular the company touched on was improving the discoverability of apps through better categorization and the ability for developers to A/B test their listings to find which combination of titles and screenshots would lead to the most downloads.

Another way the company has been working to help developers drive awareness of their apps has been through testing Play Store search advertisements, placing a developers’ app at the top of search results against specific keywords. The ability to purchase these placements is starting to roll out today.

Google announced today on its AdWords blog that it will be rolling out new mobile display ad formats and tools for advertisers in the coming months. Google is hoping the new ads, which will be available through the Google Display Network, the AdMob Network and DoubleClick, will help advertisers increase engagement with users on mobile devices.

The ad types include “Mobile lightbox Engagement Ads” that will dynamically resize to fit any ad and device size, TrueView video ads that will roll out more broadly in apps through the AdMob network, as well as an anchor ad format for mobile web apps and magazine style text ad formats that will expand into apps instead of just on mobile websites. Google also announced a number of new tools coming for advertisers to help improve the experience with mobile campaigns:

• Automatic mobile sizes for your image ads: The auto-resizing tool for the Google Display Network will automatically create new sizes of image ads, including mobile-specific ad sizes.

• Interactive HTML5 backups when Flash isn’t supported: The Flash-to-HTML5 conversion tools for the Google Display Network and DoubleClick Campaign Manager will automatically create an HTML5 version of your Flash ads. When these ads are served on a device or browser that doesn’t support Flash, the system can show the interactive HTML5 ad instead of a static image backup.

• HTML5 and in-app rich media ads built in minutes: There are now 29 HTML5 and in-app formats available in DoubleClick Studio Layouts, a tool that let’s you upload your existing creative assets into a pre-built rich media ad template to quickly create rich ads that work on smartphones and tablets.

Google says the new ad formats will roll out to its various ad networks in the coming months.

Google today announced that it is launching a public beta for its new Web Designer tool that allows users to build interactive ads and other HTML5 content. Google says that with HTML5 ad spend expected to overtake Flash spend within the next two years, it’s aiming to provide easy-to-use tools that will allow publishers to quickly and easily create and publish HTML5 ads:

We’re working hard to solve this development challenge by offering agencies powerful yet easy-to-use tools for HTML5 production. In this vein, we announced DoubleClick Studio Layouts for HTML5 back in August, which lets you create HTML5 ads in minutes, and last week we announced Ready Creatives in AdWords, which creates HTML5 ads for you in seconds. Today, we’re excited to announce the public beta of Google Web Designer, a new professional-quality design tool that makes HTML5 creative accessible to everyone from the designer to the dabbler.

Google walked through a few of the features of Web Designer in its blog post:

1. Create animated HTML5 creative, with a robust, yet intuitive set of design tools.
2. View and edit the code behind your designs and see your edits reflected back on the stage automatically.
3. Build ad creatives seamlessly for DoubleClick and AdMob, or publish them to any generic environment you choose.
4. Receive updates to the product automatically, without having to re-download the application.

It also noted that access to Web Designer will be free for all, at least for the time being.

The Web Designer beta is available to download on Google’s website. Google has a getting started guide here, and high-speed demo of an ad being created in the Web Designer beta is below: