More or Less Large Rectangles Units?

Are large rectangles killing your website

[blueheaven123]

For my site my clickable rate has risen by having two large rectangles ad units, but thinking about it, its not very pretty having two of these monsters on each of my pages.

It could be that they could deter many users from visiting again.

Would I be better off with going for the two small ad units instead, whats everyone been experimenting with and what are your conclusions on these monsters.

[ken_b]

On most of my pages I use a single large block. I've tried every size block on these pages.

The big block works best for me.

Next best, for me, is the 250x250.

I haven't used multiple blocks on any pages. Well, I did try 2 120x600s on a very long page, but Google couldn't fill both blocks. So I only left the page up like that a short time (hours, not days)

[alika]

Large rectangles work best for us -- and they are in every single one of our article pages (5,000+ of them) -- both at the center of the article and at the bottom of the article. No complaints whatsover from users. Traffic is increasing and retention rate keeps improving. This is also the ad format that has given us the best performance in terms of revenue and CTR. We decided on the large rectangles after experimenting with the other formats (sky, leaderboard) and found it to increase CTR by as much as 5 times.

Large rectangles are definitely not killing our website. If anything else, they are part of the reason for the continuing growth of our Adsense revenues every single month.

[Buzliteyear]

I also use, almost exclusively, the large rectangles.

I place them in articles usually just below the 2nd or 3rd paragraph. Generally, readers lose interest after just the first paragraph. However, if they get that far, they will see my AdSense.

Also, no other distractions. Save pictures for later in the article, or use them at the very top to draw interest to the article, but keep them out of the body if you want AdSense hits.

On the rectangle, border and background both white, the same as my pages.

I only use one ad per page though. Two rectangles gives readers 8 ads to choose from. The last 4 are usually significantly less valuable then the first 4.

[annej]

I'm curious, why the large rectangle and not the medium as it shows the 4 ads as well.

[JohnKelly]

Has anyone noticed a difference between the 300x250 medium rectangle and the 336x280 large rectangle ads - either in EPC or CTR? They look the same to me....

[taps]

JohnKelly: Yes I noticed a difference of two percent in clicks - the biggest ones are best for us.

When playing around with adsense ads I noticed for the first time in my career how important colors, borders and links are.

[sportmanagement1]

Use a skyscaper on the left hand side where you would put a navigation bar and place your navigation links on the top of the page using Java if possible...people read from left to right...if your ads are the first thing they see, they will be the first things they think to click...

[annej]

I'd been using the skyscraper to the left for a long time and thought it worked pretty well for a while but I think my readers are getting so they don't notice the ads there anymore so I want to try something new on some pages.