Comparison of ad formats: space per ad

can vary by a factor of two!

[danny]

In practice you should choose the Adsense ad format which fits your site layout best, of course. But it's interesting to compare how much space the different format ad blocks take up, both absolutely and per ad. The "densest" ads occupy half the space of the sparsest!

Sizes below are in thousands of pixels; the bold number is the space per individual ad. I think I'm right about which ads have larger link and text fonts.

Banner (468x60): 28/2 = 14 - larger link
Vertical Banner (120x240): 28.8/2 = 14.4
Button (125x125) 15.6/1 = 15.6
Leaderboard (728x90) 65.5/4 = 16.4 - larger link
Skyscraper (120x600) 72/4 = 18 - larger link+text
Medium Rectangle (300x250) 75/4 = 18.8
Wide Skyscraper (160x600) 96/5 = 19.2 - larger link+text
Square (250x250) 62.5/3 = 20.8 - larger link
Large Rectangle (336x280) 94.1/4 = 23.5
Small Rectangle (180x150) 27/1 = 27 - larger link+text

(Sorry about the formatting, I just couldn't work out how to do a table.)

[Jenstar]

Excellent information, Danny. I find it interesting the ads that have larger links and/or text. I wonder if there is a noticeable CTR difference between the ad formats that are larger compared to the ones that are not.

Has anyone noticed any difference with CTR when regular sized ad units are compared to the ones that have larger link and/or text sizes?

[danny]

I'm not sure my attributions of larger links or text are correct - looking at some ads on live pages, rather than on Google's samples page, suggests that it depends on the browser to some extent!

Can someone check them all in IE 6? (I have a Linux box and a Mac handy at the moment.)

[TheDave]

My ads display as follows in IE6:

Ad format, Title size, Text size
Leaderboard, 8px, 7px
Banner, 8px, 7px
Button, 8px, 8px
Skyscraper, 10px, 10px
Wide Skyscraper, 10px, 10px
Vertical Banner, 8px, 8px
Medium Rectangle, 10px, 10px
Square, 10px, 10px
Large Rectangle, 10px, 10px
Small Rectangle, 9px, 9px

[danny]

That's strange. In Mozilla the Medium Rectangle definitely has smaller text than the Skyscrapers.

[cyanweb]

336x280 is performing well for us - 3x results over 468x60

Haven't tried others...

[annej]

I wonder if there is a noticeable CTR difference between the ad formats that are larger compared to the ones that are not.

I had the same thought. It may not be best to have the ads crammed in the least space.

Once our stats can differentiate between domains I'll be able to tell more as I'm using different ad formats on my two sites. One is a more professional information site and I feel I need to keep the ads subtle while the other has a more playful and colorful layout where I feel the ads can be more prominent.

[danny]

TheDave, where did you get those font sizes from? Looking at the actual iframe source, I'm seeing the following font sizes (link/text):

Leaderboard: 11/10
Banner: 11/10
Wide Skyscraper: 13/13
Medium Rectangle: 11/11

(Anyone have figures for the other formats? Those four are the only ones I'm currently using.)

[TheDave]

Ahh well it seems my inadequacies at measuring font sizes are becoming apparent. I used zoom and measured the height of a capital N using a measuring tool. The view source didn't work for me, how did you do it?

[danny]

In Mozilla, right-click on the ad, select "show only this frame", then "View Source", and wade through a mass of style information to find the relevant <font> tags...