3.1 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:
3.2 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.
3.3 Meet the AdSense Family
Google serves its ads in several flavors, with each of those flavors coming in a range of different shapes and sizes. It is very important to understand the differences between each of these ads. Some are ideal for particular locations. Some should never be used in certain locations. And some should be used very rarely—if at all.
The sample page at www.google.com/adsense/adformats lets you see all of the different kinds of ads at once. It even has links to sample placements that demonstrate how the ads can be used.
For the most part, I’d recommend that you ignore those sample placements.
I’ll talk about location in more detail later in the book, but for now just bear in mind that many of the ads in the samples are just too out of the way to be noticed.
You can use them as a starting point if you want but you’ll save yourself a lot of time — and money — by taking advantage of the experience of myself and others, and following the recommendations here.
3.4 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.
Fig. 3.1 The leaderboard.
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.
Fig. 3.3 A banner and a half-banner.
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.
(Note, I could probably have used a half-banner here too but in general, I like to give my users as wide a choice of ads to click as possible.)
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.
Fig. 3.4 Banner ads at WorldVillage.com. Note how the ad links come immediately after an article link so that the ads look like part of the site.
Probably the most common use of rectangles is at the beginning of articles. You can wrap the text around the ad, forcing the reader to look at it if he wants to read the article. That’s very effective.
But you can really put these sorts of ads anywhere on the page. On my site, DealOfDay.com, I’ve put two rectangular ads right at the top of the page so that they take up the bulk of the space the user sees before he starts to scroll. That’s a very aggressive approach that might not work on every site. It’s worth trying though because if it works for you, you can find that it brings in great revenues.
If you’re wondering which size of ad would be best for the position you’ve got in mind, my advice is to start with the large rectangle, the 336 x 280.
Fig. 3.5 Small, medium and large rectangles... and the square.
Why should you choose the 336 x 280 ad block? Simple. It gets the most clicks! My studies have shown that this format looks most like real content added to a page. I’ve dabbled with every size Google offers and this is the size that consistently has the best results. Other people have told me the exact same thing. That’s all I need to know!
Second best is the 300 x 250 rectangle.
Fig. 3.6 A typical use of a rectangle embedded into the text at www.joelcomm.com...
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. Fig. 3.7 ... and an atypical use of two rectangles at Dealofday.com.
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.
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.
This 'closeness' in my opinion makes the user feel more comfortable and therefore more likely to click through to a link. They feel more in control of their visit experience.
On the whole, you can often divide sites into those that have plenty of content at the sides (especially on some blogs), and those that have nothing on the sides (like at JoelComm.com).
I think putting vertical ads in space so that they form the border of the main text makes the page look a lot cleaner. But that doesn’t necessarily mean that they’re going to get more clicks. If you’re putting a vertical banner in an area where you have other content then just make sure, as always, that you blend them in well so that they look like the rest of your content.
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