Google is taking a look back at 2011.

First at how the world searched in 2011, and now at how consumers and businesses engaged with online advertising.

Given the size of its business — Google is the leader in both the U.S. search and mobile advertising markets, and somewhere between first and third in display.

Google’s online advertising figures stand as a decent benchmark for trends in the industry.

As with Black Friday and Cyber Monday, mobile was the big story for Google this year.

Smartphone and tablet use accelerated rapidly: Google saw a 440% increase in traffic from tablets on its AdMob network between Dec. 2010 and in Nov. 2011, according to stats posted on the Google Mobile Ads Blog.

The use of mobile in physical retail environments was particularly interesting: In a study conducted with IPSOS earlier this year, eight in 10 smartphone owners said they use their devices to help with shopping, from locating retailers to running price comparisons — a trend Amazon smartly capitalized on this December by offering consumers a discount for running a price comparison on its Price Check App. A full 70% of smartphone owners claim to use their devices while in stores, and 77% have used their phones to contact local businesses.

It wasn’t just the numbers that improved: the technology underlying mobile advertising improved too, thanks to new standards such as HTML5 and MRAID (Mobile Rich Media Ad Interface Definitions). Many retailers also redesigned their websites to optimize them for tablet and smartphone use.

Below, an infographic highlighting some of Google’s online advertising benchmarks in 2011, as well as some successes from individual brands.

Source Information: Google

Return to top: Infographic: In Online Advertising, 2011 Was the Year of Mobile [Google Benchmarks]

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