Ad Formats: “Dress” your ads for success!
How would you like your ads served? Banners? Skyscrapers? Rectangles? Squares? What about borders and background colors? The choices can be overwhelming. Many people let Google decide for them- preferring to stick with the default settings. Big mistake! From my own experience I can tell you that it’s like swapping a hundred-dollar bill for a ten-dollar one. For almost one year I settled for just a tenth of what I could have been making — just because I didn’t bother to control the looks and placement of my AdSense ads. The various ad formats, colors and their placement on the web page can be done in thousands of combinations. You can literally spend hours every day experimenting with every possible combination. But you don’t want to, do you? Let me give you a few ‘ground rules’ that have sky-rocketed the CTRs on my top-grossing pages:


Don't "Look" Like An Ad

People don't visit your website for ads. They want good content. If you make the ads stick out with eye-popping colors, images or borders, that makes them easy to recognize as ads — and people work extra hard to avoid them.
The same goes for ads that are tucked away in the top, bottom or some other far corner of the page. So easy to ignore!

If you want people to click, make the ads look like an integral part of your content. Today's visitors are blind to banners, mad at pop-ups, weary of ads and skeptical of contests and giveaways. So how do you win their confidence? Simple. Don't make your ads look like ads! Let’s begin by reviewing each of the different types of ad available from AdSense and explaining their uses... then I’ll introduce you to a few simple choices that zoomed my CTRs to incredible heights.

Text Ads — Google’s Finest

Text ads are probably the types of ad that you’re most familiar with. You get a box containing one or a number of ads with a linked headline, a brief

description and a URL. You also get the “Ads by Google” notice that appears on all AdSense ads. (Google changed this notice recently and it now blends in much better than it used to.) There are eight different types of text ad. The most popular is probably the leaderboard. At 728 x 90, it stretches pretty much across the screen and while it can be placed anywhere, it’s mostly used at the top of the page, above the main text.

That’s a great location. It’s the first thing the reader sees and it offers a good selection of ads to choose from. When you’re just starting out and still experimenting with the types of ads that work best with your users, it’s a pretty good default to begin with. Of course, you can put it in other places too. Putting a leaderboard ad between forum entries for example can be a pretty good strategy sometimes and definitely worth trying. On the whole though, I think you’ll probably find that one of the smaller ads, such as a banner or half-banner might blend in more there and bring better results. And I think you can often forget about putting a leaderboard at the bottom of the page, despite what Google’s samples show you. It would certainly fit there but you have to be certain that people are going to reach the bottom of the page, especially a long page. You might find that only a small minority of readers would get that far, so you’re already reducing the percentage of readers who would click through. Overall, I’d say that leaderboards are most effective blended into the top of the page beneath the navigation bar and sometimes placed between forum entries.


Banners (468 x 60) and half-banners (234 x 60) are much more flexible. Like leaderboards you can certainly put these sorts of ads at the top of the page, and lots of sites do it. Again, that’s something worth trying. You can put up a leaderboard for a week or so, swap it for a banner for another week or so, and compare the results.



But at the top of the page, I’d expect the leaderboard to do better. A banner or a half-banner would leave too much space on one side and make the ad stand out. It would look like you’ve set aside an area of the page for advertising instead of for content. That would alert the reader that that section of the page is one that they can just ignore. When you’re looking for an ad to put in the middle of the page though, a half-banner can be just the ticket. While a leaderboard will stretch over the sidebars of your site, just like the navigation bar, a 234 x 60 half-banner will fit neatly into the text space on most sites.

This sort of ad should be your default option for the end of articles and the bottom of blog entries. But for the most part, stay away from the 468 x 60 banner ad block! One of the first things people do when they sign up for AdSense is to grab a 468 x 60 ad block. Big mistake. I have a theory about why they do this. It’s the same theory that explains why the 468 x 60 block does not entice clicks. Most site owners have the mindset that when they put Google ads on their site, they must place the code that conforms most to traditional web advertising. And that would be...? Yup, the 468 x 60, the ubiquitous banner format that we have all come to know and love and... IGNORE. Everyone is familiar with the 468 x 60. And that’s exactly why the click-through rate on this size is very low, even among advertisers who use images on their banners. The 468 x 60 blocks screams, "Hey! I am an advertisement! Whatever you do, DON'T click me. In fact, you should run from me as fast as you can!" In all but a few special cases, I have found the 468 x 60 ad block to be completely ineffective, and recommend ignoring it the same way your visitors do. Now, that doesn’t mean you can never use it. You just have to know what you’re doing and do it smartly. You have to do everything you can to make sure that that ad block looks absolutely nothing like a traditional banner ad. At my site, WorldVillage.com, I’ve done that by surrounding the ad with text. Because there’s no border around the unit, the ads blend into the text and look almost as they’re a part of the article. If I had left that unit in the middle of some empty space — at the top of the page for example — it would have looked exactly like the sort of banner that users have trained themselves to avoid. It wouldn’t have picked up any clicks at all.

While this use of a 468 x 60 works for me — and it can work for you too if you blend it into the page properly — I’d stick to other formats, like the, half-banner if you’re not 100 percent sure that you can pull it off. When this ad unit fails, it can fail big. Google also offers six different kinds of rectangular ads: buttons (125 x 125), small rectangles (180 x 150), medium rectangles (300 x 250), large rectangles (336 x 280), and two sizes of squares 250 x 250 and 200 x 200. In fact, all of the rectangles can be slotted into the same spots on the page... with the exception of the button.

Second best is the 300 x 250 rectangle




This ad block size is really useful when you want to have two sets of ads side by side. They fit on most web pages just perfectly.

Buttons should generally be used in a different way to other rectangles. Like the half-banners, they’re distinctive for their small size. While that means you could slot them in anywhere, I think they work best when slipped into the sidebars. For example, you might have a list of links to frequently-read articles or other sites on one side of your page. Putting a button ad at the end of a list like that could help it to blend in well. The final types of text ads are those that run vertically. These come in three sizes: skyscraper (120 x 600), wide skyscraper (160 x 600) and vertical banner (120 x 240). Clearly, these are useful options for filling up the sides of the page. I would also recommend using the 'wide skyscraper', text-only ads on the right hand edge of the screen — in conjunction with the 3-Way Matching I discuss later in the book. If you think about it, nearly all PC users are right handed (even left-handed people like me control their mouse with their right hand because it's how we were 'brought up' to use a mouse.) By placing the ads on the right hand edge it's psychologically 'less distance' between your right hand and the screen.

Image Ads — Built To Be Ignored

Text ads should always be your first pick when you start to load up your site. Image ads should always be your last choice. A text ad offers many advantages over image ads:
A. With the right formatting, a text ad 'blends in' with your site content. An image ad will not give you the same freedom with its appearance, as the only thing you can play with is the size and positioning.
B. You can squeeze more text ads into the space that a conventional banner takes. People love to have more choices!
C. Properly formatted text ads don't look like clutter. Banners do!
D. People hate banners and avoid them at sight. Many tests confirm that people are much more receptive to text ads related with your content.


Video Ads

There is however, one type of image ad that you should welcome on your website: Google’s video ads. These are an excellent addition to Google’s inventory and for sites that get them, they can bring very impressive returns. Instead of receiving the sort of static image that just gets ignored, you’ll receive the opening still of an online video. The video is stored on Google’s servers so your download times won’t be affected, and it only plays when the user clicks the Play button, minimizing distraction to the user. That’s a good thing. If a user’s eyes keep drifting to a moving image when he’s trying to read your content, he’s going to get pretty frustrated and not want to come back.

If you’re getting a video ad, track how long it appears on that page and compare the revenues it brings with the days on which no video ad appeared. You should expect to see a spike in earnings. If you don’t see that spike, you can always opt out. Unlike text or image ads though, there’s no guarantee you’re going to get a video ad. To qualify, you have to be opted in to receive image ads on an ad unit in one of these sizes:

● Medium Rectangle (300x250)
● Large Rectangle (336x280)
● Square (250x250)
● Small Square (200x200)
● Leaderboard (28x90)
● Skyscraper (120x600)
● Wide Skyscraper (160x600)

(It’s worth noting that with video ads, the bigger the format, the better the results). If you’re receiving those kinds of image ads and AdSense has a video ad to match your content, you might receive one. But what if you don’t? You’ll be receiving the sort of image ads that earn a poor clickthrough rate. That would cost you money. There are two things that you can do to minimize any losses from fishing for video ads and not getting them. The first is to stop fishing fast. If a week has gone by and your image ad unit hasn’t acquired a Play button, it’s probably not going to. So turn that image ad back into a text ad. The second is to follow the strategy I use at DealofDay.com. I’ve placed two rectangular ads at the top of the page to make them unmissable but one of them is an image ad. Google no longer allows publishers to place related images right next to ad units to draw attention to them but you can put an image ad next to a text ad. If that image ad becomes a video ad, you’re going to earn more money. If it stays an image ad, it’s going to pull eyes into your ad zone. This is about the only time I can think of when an image ad might be better than a text ad.


Link Units — Great Little Stocking Fillers

An ad format that has already proved its worth, when used correctly, is link units. If you’ve ever bought Christmas presents for children, you’ve probably bought stocking fillers. You dole out hundreds of bucks on some state-of-the-art electronic gizmo, toss in a couple of toy cars that cost a dollar each just to fill up space and give the kid more to unwrap... then watch him spend 90 percent of his time playing with the car that cost 10 percent of your total gift budget. Ad Link units have the potential to be equally profitable. They’re very small, almost unnoticeable... but when used well, they can be extremely effective. Ad Link units let you place a box on your site that contains four or five links. They come in sizes ranging from 20 x 90 to 200 x 90, and are really meant to be placed on a sidebar. Because you can place both Ad Link units as well as other ad units on the page, you might find that the choice helps: if a user doesn’t spot something interesting in one type of ad block, he might spot it on another.

Seasons Greeting With Themed Units

There is one more type of ad unit that you can use on your site. You just can’t use it all the time. Every time a holiday rolls around, Google brings out new ad units with seasonal themes.
The designs themselves vary according to season and location (users in Europe, for example, won’t see Thanksgiving ads).
In general, I always say that your ads should be unobtrusive but I like these themed ads. They’re eye-catching without looking like banners. When it’s holiday-time, it’s always worth checking out the format page again and seeing what’s available. To sum up the different types of ad format then...
• Leaderboards are best at the top of the page;
• Squares and rectangles can be embedded into text itself;
• Vertical ads and buttons should slip down the side of the page;
• Vertical link units should be placed next to link lists;
• Horizontal link units can go at the top of the page, between blog entries or above and below directories;
• Image ads should rarely be used at all;
• Themed ads can be slotted in at holiday time;
• And Video ads should be used whenever possible.
Those are the general rules governing ad formats. They’re worth knowing because they’re a good place to start. They’re also worth knowing because you can’t break the rules until you know what they are... and that’s when the fun really begins

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