What's The Effect Of Going Responsive Ads

Good, Bad or Indifferent?

[IanTurner]

Having started to do some mobile friendly layouts I thought I'd give responsive ads a tryout.

So far I'm seeing some bugs when a mobile goes from landscape to portrait format, which then messes up my mobile layout.

On the revenue front the responsive ads are generating about half the revenue of standard ads.

I'd like to know if others are seeing similar results.

[jinxed]

Higher CTR but lower CPC for me.

I plan to do some testing with reverting back to non-responsive ads for some slots.

[ember]

The vast majority of my pages/ads are non-responsive. The few I've converted over to reponsive are not doing as well as they were when they were non-responsive. So I am in no hurry to go all-responsive.

[not2easy]

I've backed off of using "Responsive" ads because they are the least responsive of formats. They set a size and by gum, they ain't gonna change it, no matter what the user sees. They insist on reading all the css only to ignore what it is doing. The only thing that works for me has been the small 320 x 60 ads in non-responsive format, but even those have too much of drag on load time compared to other 3rd party ads. The 3rd party ads conform to the container's size as you would expect an image to do. AdSense ads are getting to be last choice.

They wanted better visibility so I put that small size near the top of the sidebar where it prevents scrolling until everything has loaded. On a small screen, that sidebar becomes full width. Any other width of AdSense ad, such as a 728 x90 or even 350 wide gives me a scrollbar as it breaks the layout, while below it, in the footer is a nicely responsive leaderboard size 3rd party ad gracefully downsized to fit just fine. Both ads are in the same container with the same css settings, the G properties ignore/override the css. I have been weeding them out. Visitor browser performance is more important than 35 cents a week or whatever they're paying now.

[avalon37]

My pages that I converted to responsive have declined significantly in terms of earnings. There is not as strong a pool of advertisers for responsive ads. Wish I had not make the change.

[tangor]

Similar to not2easy, on the few sites that I still have adsense AND have done responsive ads, that is not working out too well.

I have two sites in the same basic niche, but different regions and converted both to responsive some time back. Adsense incomes tanked, as much as half. Though while not true a/b testing, I took one of those two sites and remove responsive ads (returning to previous) and saw a major recovery, though it never got back to where it had been originally. This effect has been noted elsewhere:

The more I do, the less it works
[webmasterworld.com...]

[netmeg]

I haven't had any problems with them.

[IanTurner]

Has anyone seen revenue increasing as the ad units get some history?

[netmeg]

Yes, but I can't pin it on the ad unit, as I got significantly more traffic across almost all sites as well.

[Yayabobi]

Responsive ads are good for user experience not monetization. Best thing to do is create a different page setup for mobile

[IanTurner]

@Yayabobi I had created a different page set up for mobile which was why I implemented the responsive ads - i.e. for best display on different mobile devices.

[martinibuster]

There is not as strong a pool of advertisers for responsive ads.

From an article published yesterday in State of Digital, Apps Really Are Transforming The Future of Search [stateofdigital.com], Jonathan Allen outlines why the mobile web is not meeting expectations.

While the amount of time spent on mobile devices continues to grow, mobile activity itself has become increasingly unbalanced. A recently updated annual study by Yahoo & Flurry [yahoodevelopers.tumblr.com] found that browser-based activity only accounts for about 10% of mobile usage, while users spend the remaining 90% of their time using apps.

The author quotes Simon Khalaf, Yahoo’s Senior VP of Publishing:

“In the world of mobile, SEO, SEM and blue links are gone because people are not using browsers."

All of that taken together must be taken into consideration when deciding how to implement responsive ads.

I encourage you to read the rest of the article here [stateofdigital.com].