If you have looked in your Gmail promotions tab in the past few hours, you would have seen that Google has completely redesigned the look and feel of the ads that Google displays above emails in the promotions tab.

Here is how they look now.

As you can see, they are now sporting the yellow “Ads” tag that people are familiar with from the regular Google search results.  So this change is actually bringing the Gmail ads in line with regular AdWords ads.  And while they do resemble regular emails, they do stand out quite a bit as advertisements with the new yellow Ad tag.

It is also similar to how they look on mobile devices, so again, Google is making the experience between mobile and desktop the same.

And here is how they appeared earlier on Wednesday.

They were highlighted yellow with a small “Ad” notation.  The highlighted aspect of these ads set them quite apart.

It will be interesting for those advertisers who run ads through Gmail to see if the change increases or decreases CTR and ROI with the new look.  They blend in more with emails, but that yellow Ad tag really draws the eye – so whether that will be good or bad for advertisers remains to be seen.

It seems to be a change for everyone using Gmail although it is possible it is rolled only to only a percentage of users.  It showed up for me through multiple browsers and browser sessions, and after logging out and back in.

Another change they have made unrelated to the ad one is that read emails are now shaded according to your theme preferences.  It doesn’t seem as though this change is optional.