• by Laurie Sullivan  @lauriesullivan, May 28, 2015

Google announced Thursday a new set of AdMob tools to help mobile app developers better segment and target advertisements. The news was made public at the company's I/O 2015 developers' conference.

The new AdMob features mean that Google has improved on its Audience Builder Tool still in beta. The tool allows app developers to segment users based on how they interact with an app. The update allows developers to serve ads only to particular segments, while hiding the same ads from others. A brand might show ads to casual users, but hide the ads from highly engaged users who love sharing your app with their friends on social networks.

Google also announced a service to help mobile app sales teams. AdMob Reservations enables sales teams to take ad campaign bookings from advertisers directly, upload creative pieces to the ad, and manage their campaigns for free -- using the AdMob platform. Google believes AdMob Reservations will help fast-growing apps quickly scale their global reach. Etermax, creator of the game Trivia Crack, became an early tester last week.

To support the more than 650,000 apps running across the AdMob platform, Google said that in the coming weeks it will introduce a custom native ad that will more easily match the content of the app. With this feature, advertisers can define the style of your ad using CSS, and AdMob serves the ad following specific specs. Developers can update the ad’s appearance on the fly by adjusting the CSS, so there’s no need to change your app’s native code when you want to test a different look.