New rounded ad units - feedback?

[AdSenseAdvisor]

The team is hoping to get some feedback on our new round-cornered ad units:
[adsense.blogspot.com...]

We've heard from publishers that the square corners don't always complement the look or feel of their sites, so we're hoping this new option will allow for greater flexibility and blending on a wider variety of pages.

Let me know what you think,
-ASA

[iwannano1]

thanks just added to one of my site. Looks good man. I will update post with result later on.

[zett]

It would be great if we could set the style on "Auto Pilot" (strictly optional), so that Google tries out different styles (cornered, slightly rounded, very rounded) and settles for the style that performs best.

I'd at least try such an "autopilot" option (though I think that the cornered style works best).

[incrediBILL]

ASA, I would ask the people complaining about the square corners why they didn't just use a transparent border and supply their own rounded corners! But that would probably assume they could actually design a web page in the first place...

The slightly rounded look good but your text placement is too close to the edge in the very rounded corners and looks off, like it was bad design.

[farmboy]

Let me know what you think,

The rounded corners provide a much "cleaner" appearance. I like it.

The slightly rounded look good but your text placement is too close to the edge in the very rounded corners and looks off, like it was bad design.

As a test, I briefly put three leaderboards on one of my pages, one with each corner style. They all look crowded, but the rounded corners don't look any more crowded than the square corners.

I left the very rounded corners style in place.

FarmBoy

[moTi]

round looks better, very round looks best, but as ibill said, text too close to margin.

anyhow, for me, a custom border with transparent gifs as round corners does the trick. especially, if you scroll on a different colored background. the ad border is set to transparent - so you can design your own border with shades and whatnot.

so this basic approach is no improvement for me here.

side note: what i'd like to see is..

- iframe allowtransparency="true" (that would be really great!)
- selection of font styles

[Januuski]

Cornered, slightly rounded, very rounded...

As long the ads inside these boxes are not targeted and we do not have tools to control what is displayed inside these boxes the new shapes are irrelevant.

[subway]

Personally I’m a Square Corner Man. However, it’s good to see that even Google can’t stop their rounded corners from looking blurry and slightly off colour in comparison with the rest of the border.

[sem4u]

It is good to see Google offering more options like round-cornered ad units to publishers, but I think I will stick with having ad units with borders the same or similar color to the background.

[justgowithit]

But that would probably assume they could actually design a web page in the first place...

I'm not sure, but I think I sense a bit of sarcasm ;)

I had rounded corners in place using my own images/css but I can now remove the code needed to acheive the affect in place of Google's out-of-the-box option. I like anything that allows my to shrink my source code. Works for me.

[ebound]

I would also have to agree with bill's feedback. The first thing that I saw was how crammed the text is to the left border.

[FridayNight]

the problem is that Google played Mr.Niceguy and they demanded that ads don't stand out. That was years ago when Adsense ads were something new and people noticed them so Google got enought clicks.

Today, people don't notice Adsense boxes anymore, ratio impression/clicks is lower thatswhy G had to cut down affiliate earnings. Now things got pretty serious at the same started to happen what we saw in good old banners rotators - people don't click them anymore. So G had to do something - first colors, then graphics google logo, now rounded corners. In a year they will have to use very bright color schemes, they will be adding nice graphics headers to ads, maybe some cartoon characters.

The goal is to make ads stand out again!

That's the whole point!

[bose]

adding nice graphics headers to ads, maybe some cartoon characters.

You mean like those "Punch the Monkey" Ads?

Where have you been, FridayNight? Google already offers them -but only to Premium Publishers. ;)

j/k, of course.

I too find the text a little too close to the edge, but I am sure things will evolve for better over time...

[celgins]

Very flexible and a good look.

Like others have mentioned, maybe 1 or 2 pixels of additional padding inside the borders will help with spacing.

[carguy84]

Nice to have options, but irrelevant to me as "no border" increased CTR 33%.

Agree text is too close to the lines though.

[bbd2000]

I like the rounded corners also.

One great improvement for my sites would be the allowtransparency option already mentioned. It would help tremendously with ad blending.

[netmeg]

They look ok. I do my own (or leave off borders altogether) though.

[maximillianos]

I don't use borders at this time, but I can see this option being useful down for folks that do. Particularly folks who use rounded cornering throughout their site, which is a common design.

[gamiziuk]

Thank you for trying out new things for us publishers.

How about a partial border? Lets say, a line on the bottom and right side of an ad - while the top and left side are "blended" (no border). You can experiment with this, but I trust you get the idea.

[carguy84]

gamiziuk, you could pretty easily do that with CSS on your own if you wanted to.

[guru5571]

I like slightly rounded the best. To me very rounded feels so 2 years ago.

[nippi]

We set our backgrounds and borders to same colours as the div/table cell behind... and add whatever corners we want to the design using css.

Not much point adding round corners unless you can set the roundedness to match your other rounded corners, add drop shadows etc,

[gamiziuk]

gamiziuk, you could pretty easily do that with CSS on your own if you wanted to.

I can do lots of things pretty easily on my own. However, I am giving feedback to "AdsenseAdvisor."

[fredw]

Interesting beneficial side-effect of the new rounded corners: On one of my adsense sites, I have a tower-board with no border and a background color that ALMOST matches the textured background of that part of the page. Changing this ad unit to rounded corners makes the ad unit stand-out from the background just a tiny bit less than it did before.

[Forest Dweller]

How about some options to pretty-up the link units too? A border that goes all the way around with rounded corners would look very nice on those, too.

[edited by: Forest_Dweller at 8:57 pm (utc) on June 28, 2007]

[fischermx]

Bah!
I've been using rounded corners for years using rounded corners!

[cma01]

I like them. If I start running blocks with borders I'll definitely use them.

[Car_Guy]

Compared to other issues that include the constant onslaught of ads pointing to junk MFA sites, the inadequate capacity of our ad filters, and Google's horrible AdSense customer service, rounded corners are pretty trivial.

[chikung]

Thats pretty but I use the ads without borders. That suits my site.

[potentialgeek]

Did anyone put rounded borders in their Adsense Wish List? Haven't seen any call for it. Never thought of it. Maybe the folks in Texas will like it? :/

Seriously, I think the only time round borders are likely to help any site are if the site already uses them in layout, and so it unifies the page design.

However, the number of sites doing it are so, so small, the demand will be extremely small. It takes extra graphic design time and/or css work.

ASA, get your engineers to extract the data from the MP Bot which gives Adsense ad unit code background color and page background color. If they automate a comparison between the two, you can find out the percentage blending. From that you can find out the demand for borders (nobody will use borders if they are blenders). I'd guess it's upwards of 80% blending.

p/g