Pick your own fonts!

You asked for it, you got it.

[AdSenseAdvisor]

More ad control in general, and choosing your own font in particular, is something you've been asking for [webmasterworld.com].

Well, check out the AdSense Blog, where we just announced that you can now choose the font for your ad units. You can find specific instructions on the blog post, but we're encouraging publishers to use channels to test the performance of different fonts on your sites.

Or you can just choose your favorite font [en.wikipedia.org]. :)

ASA

[purplecape]

Whoa, this could be very cool...

[koan]

As Miss Hilton would say, that's hot. Let the testing begins.

[rocker]

Thanks for the heads up ASA. I just made some changes with the Manage Ads feature :)

[johnnie]

Yay!

[HowYesNo]

Trebuchet MS please :P

[signor_john]

Just avoid Captcha Bold. :-)

[Marcia]

Favorite font: Verdana, the default. But no Comic Sans. :-(

My very first website used Comic Sans. It was the "in" font - everyone I knew was using it. It also had an animated dove and background music, and said "Welcome to my Web Site". For real.

[jcmiras]

Georgia is the best font for me. :)

[Robert Charlton]

Here's the permalink to the Adsense blog article...

Inside AdSense: Fontastic new options for your ad units [adsense.blogspot.com]

[2clean]

And they're under starters orders, in the left lane we've got Yahoo offering pictures and video links in ads....but hold on, in comes google with font options.

[onboxes]

it is true?

[koan]

in the left lane we've got Yahoo offering pictures and video links in ads

You mean that service for americans only that's still in beta after all these years? I've heard of a few people using it. Maybe they're adding fluff to compensate for their reputed terrible targeting?

[nonanet]

Hmm.. Google is doing a lot of such moves recently.. Enabling Adsense for Domains for everyone, allowing to change fonts... I wonder whether this is due to some "pressure" from reduced revenue?

[2clean]

I think the other players in the search market are enjoying not being in the spotlight to build something different

[anand84]

Google is under serious crunch, I see... ;)

[farmboy]

A while back some people here noticed Google was testing some different fonts. Several complained about seeing Comic Sans. I think that was the only time I've ever seen an ASA respond to something that fast and tell everyone that Comic Sans was no longer going to be considered.

Wouldn't you know it - the one time they acted fast in response to complaints and it was something I actually wanted!

I have a couple of sites where Comic Sans would be welcomed. I have affiliate text links I've put on those sites with Comic Sans font and they perform well.

FarmBoy

[Rosalind]

The ability to specify negative keywords for each page is still more important to me.

[robzilla]

Excellent! The ads match my sites much better now. Thanks for the heads up, ASA.

[sonjay]

Another "thanks" from the peanut gallery. Very happy to have this option.

[grelmar]

One more thing to customize...

I'm beginning to miss my green screen. All you had to worry about was layout and which BBS had the coolest animated cursor.

_{Sorry. I'm in a grump today. Blew the first few hours sorting out internal network issues before I could even start working on actual paying stuff.}

Actually, this is probably a good thing. Now we just need to get all the computers on the net to have a common font libraries.

Dream the dream.

[Lagonda]

Time's almost unreadable...

[edited by: Lagonda at 4:26 pm (utc) on Feb. 20, 2009]

[CWebguy]

It's about time, haha.

[AdSenseAdvisor]

Thanks for all your enthusiasm.

I've shared this thread with the team that's been working for a while on building out this feature. Your comments are making some awesome engineers very happy.

ASA

[robho]

Still no option to choose font size? Even a small range of "standard, larger, smaller" would be nice (with less ads per banner for the "larger" size).

I have several sites aimed at an older audience, where I use clear, readable fonts. Apart from the skyscrapers, most of the adsense units use a font that is way too tiny in comparison.

[annej]

Font choice is a nice addition but it is so minor compared to my greatest problem. I need to be able to block broad topics like "online dating" ads that lead to things like this. [webmasterworld.com...]

[koan]

annej, I understand and agree that there are more pressing issues but we'll welcome any type of improvements, right? New stuff is new stuff, how about being happy about it in this thread, or give feedback about that particular new feature, and discuss the other requests in the other threads. Google has been testing the new fonts for like, a year, before allowing them as options.. things do take time.

[true_INFP]

ASA, I'd like to thank Google for having introduced the ability to control the font family. However, could you please support the code model that was used in 2003-2007? Could you introduce a new ad parameter like:

google_ad_font_face = "Times"

This would allow us to perform A/B testing with different fonts. I really don't have time to convert our hundreds of ad codes into the new "managed" code.

Also, let us prevent Google from increasing the font size without our permission. It is unprofessional and very disruptive (btw, Verdana looks awful at higher font sizes, unlike Arial).

Thank you.

[Khensu]

You could partially thank me for that one folks!

I lobbied every contact I had with them for that.

Now where is the other one?

Choose how many text ads per adblock.

[Jaideemaak]

Sorry if this has been covered elsewhere but being able to specify our own fonts seems to be a way of increasing the ability to blend ads and content.

At one time this approach seemed to be favoured and encouraged by Google but then some threads started appearing saying that blending is bad.

It's obviously wrong to blend in such a way as to trick visitors into clicking but having ads with the same font and colour scheme as content does look a lot better.

What exactly are the guidelines?