We’ve compiled the following information and advice on choosing AdSense formats, formatting their background color and border styles, and other tips and caveats. Naturally, every site is different and there likely to be substantial opportunities for AdSense optimization even after applying these guidelines, but based on our experience working across a large number of sites, these should get you pretty far (although you should consider using YieldBuild to do a more rigorous optimization automatically).

AdSense Sizes

Google offers a wide variety of AdSense ad unit sizes, shapes and formats: Google AdSense Sizes.

However, you’re generally going to want to concern yourself with the three most popular format sizes:

• 300 x 250 (”medium rectangle”)
• 160 x 600 (”wide skyscraper”)
• 728 x 90 (”leaderboard”)

Since you are limited to 3 ad units per page anyway, you might as well go with these three. Why? First, all three sizes can display text, image and video ads, giving Google more room to find which of these three formats will work best. Second, they’re popular so there is more ad inventory, among advertisers that use “placement-targeted” (site) buys. Third, they simply tend to perform well–YieldBuild, which tests all ad unit types that can fit on the page, often hones in on these three across disparate sites and page templates.

Where should they go? We’ll delve into that more deeply in another post, but in short:

• 300 x 250  - embedded in content (as in flush left or right next to the page content, between blog posts, etc.)
• 160 x 600 - either to the left or right of your content, where you have room (typically to the right for this reason, but performs well if flush against your navigation column if that’s in your left rail)
• 728 x 90 - either right below the header (preferably near navigation) or embedded in content right above the fold; the latter tends to work great, but can require a little finesse to make sure it doesn’t get pushed below the fold on your visitors’ screens

AdSense Background and Border Colors

The general rule here (and there are many exceptions) is to blend in with your surroundings. So:

• if your page background is white, try a white-background ad; if your background is dark blue, try a dark-blue background ad
• you can also try a slight variation on the background color, just a shade darker, so a very light gray or pale yellow for white-background pages, or a slightly darker blue on a page with a light-blue background
• for embedded ad units (most typically a rectangular unit like a 300 x 250), the ad unit above the fold should blend, while any embedded ad units below the fold should use highly contrasting colors.

AdSense Border Styles and Colors

• two types tend to work better here - either “borderless” or rounded borders. Rounded borders tend to perform better than those with right-angle corners.
• for ad units that perform better by blending, choose a borderless border style.
• for ad units that have a different color than the page (either a subtle difference or a highly-contrasting one), try a border color that either matches the background (making it look borderless), or is just a shade darker

AdSense Text/Font Format

Again, the key is blending into your site. Currently, most publishers can not select a font or choose whether the link is underlined or not, but you can choose the font color.

Whatever font color you use generally on the page should be used here, unless the ad unit is in a highly-contrastive color, in which case you should choose a color that is highly readable against that background.

Final AdSense Format Tips

• try to get all of your AdSense units “above the fold” (above the viewing area on most of your visitors’ screens). This might require you delving into your visitors stats to see what platform and browser they’re using, but the general rule is to get your ad units visible for most of your visitors before they begin scrolling (mostly because some of them don’t!)
• make sure to enable all 3 ad formats (text, image and video). Google will optimize on its own and determine which performs best for your site from among available inventory.
• consider changing your navigation buttons and columns to match your ads units in border and color; putting an ad unit that is green and has rounded corners will probably do better if it is flush against navigation buttons that are also the same shade of green and have the same green corners.

Many thanks to Chris Gathright and Jay Reitz for contributing to this article.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, May 28th, 2008 at 4:08 pm and is filed under Online Advertising. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.