Unit size is an important consideration when starting out on your experimentation with an Ad Program. Large and prominent would be the obvious way to go but as mentioned in my previous Ad Formatting post (of which this is an extension), subtlety can be more productive.
You should also consider how well your chosen ad units fit into your blog design, which is ideally something to ponder during the inception phase. However, I am also of the view that to get too hung up on ad size/placement at the expense of good design can be folly. It’s striking that all important balance.
So which ad sizes should you choose? Well in my opinion, there is no holy grail but some formats certainly receive more plaudits than others. These include:
Although they maybe considered a more contentious choice, I have certainly seen the following unit sizes also perform well in certain circumstances, particularly situated below content.
Allowing for the subjectivity of this topic, there does appear to be only one principle of any significance when it comes to unit size, and that is wider appears to outperform taller (certainly Google seem to think so). This concept makes sense to me in as far as the human eye tends to prefer skimming across the page in sweeps as it would do with normal content. Trying to absorb a small snippet then moving down just doesn’t seem to be as viewer friendly in my opinion.
During my analysis of over 500 A-list blogs, ad sizes were not looked at, however I would hazard a guess that out of those sites utilizing an ad program, approximately 80% – 90% would have been employing one of the unit sizes outlined above. It’s not conclusive and nor should it be a principal factor in your final choice, but it is just something to consider.
Ad Link Units
As far as AdSense is concerned there is also the option to incorporate link units onto your page. This relatively recent innovation works on the same algorithmic principles as other Google Ads, with the difference that it presents a list of topics associated with your content rather than specific ad units. Options exist to display link units either vertically or horizontally.
Again, as per the normal ad units, there does appear to be a general preference for displaying horizontally at the top of a page and this is certainly what I tend to veer towards. If your interested in keeping the profile of your ads to a minimum then link units can be an excellent option. They are innocuous and unobstrusive to the viewer whilst leaving open the option for a user to investigate further should the need arise. As far as revenue returns are concerned, they tend to under perform normal ad units for me, but there is certainly plenty of anecdotal evidence of them working excellently on other blogs.
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