Wednesday, March 12, 2008

Which AdSense Rectangle Ad Performs Best?

Here’s a quick AdSense tip that could make you some good money.

AdSense offers two rectangle ad unit sizes - 300×250 pixels and 336×280 pixels.

These are both great ad units to use on your blog because they are not only available as text based ads but also image and video ones. Setting your ad units to show all formats of ads increases the potential number of advertisers that will ‘bid’ for your ad unit which drives up the potential CPM of the unit.

So which is best - 300×250 or 336×280?

One might think that the larger the ad the better it’s earnings will be - I mean having more of your screen real-estate dedicated to an ad increases the chances of it being clicked doesn’t it?As a result many bloggers go for the 336×280 ad.

However it can be well worth your while to test both ad unit sizes because there’s a good reason why the smaller ad unit can perform better for you - it’s more popular with advertisers.

336×280 might be bigger and increase the chances of being noticed - but 300×250 pixel ad units are more popular with advertisers wanting to run image/banner ads. It’s a standard size that many of them (particularly larger advertisers) produce (along with 728×90 sized ads) for online advertising. I spoke to one advertising agency representative recently who says that they’ve never made a 336×280 ad for any of their mainstream advertisers.

Split Test Your Ad Units

Of course it’s worth keeping in mind my regular advice of ‘ever blog is different’. I do have one blog where the larger rectangle ad unit out performs the smaller one. This blog doesn’t attract many image ads for some reason (I think it’s because it has a more local market with less advertisers) and the larger format works better for it with text ads. The moral to the story is to test both ad units and go with the best performing one.

source : Problogger