New text ads on mobile ignoring style/color settings

[Peanut45]

I notice that Google just announced a redesign of text ads for mobile platforms:
[adsense.blogspot.com...]

Looks good, but now I see that I'm getting what looks like entirely preset colors for the ad components - i.e. White background, black text, blue headers and button. (..when viewed on an iPad, from a laptop nothing has changed)

I'm using the ad on a site with a dark color theme - needless to say, it looks terrible.

Oddly enough, on a smaller sized text ad, I'm not seeing this (maybe not enough space to contain the enhanced ad components).

Anyone else seeing this or could confirm that it may be related to this new format?

[RedBar]

I've seen all kinds of variations with colours on mobile, some good, some utterly ridiculous, since they always seem to be testing something are they actually saying they are standardising something? Nah ... wait until next week for an alternative.

[RedBar]

FWIW I just checked my phone and the ads are running as per their example, they look ok.

[avalon37]

Yep the new mobile text ads are performing horribly for me. I should know this, but is there a way to set specific ads for mobile? For example, I want mobile users visiting say page /cars.html to only see image/rich media ads whereas I want visitors from computers/tablets to the same page to only see text ads. Can that be done? If so, how do I do it?

[Peanut45]

@RedBar yeah the default looks fine if you have a light/white background page, but looks terrible against a dark background (I realise this will be a minority of sites, but still a non-insignificant minority).

Actually after posting that I noticed that according to the Google blog post, these ads should only be displayed if you're opted in to "Display/text-ads" on that ad unit. But they were still displaying on a large rectangle sized text-only unit.

@avalon37 I think the easiest way to do this is on the server side. If you're using PHP for example to serve the page, you can include something like [mobiledetect.net...] to first get the device type. Then just switch the ad code that you output based on the result. I think it should also be possible to have a Javascript-based redirection depending on device type.

A Javascript solution may be a bit more of a grey area in terms of the Adsense ToS, since you're probably not meant to mess around with ad code after the page loads, so it might need to first sniff the device type, then redirect to another page which is either the text ad or the image ad version.

[RedBar]

but looks terrible against a dark background

Yep, I can imagine so ...

<slightly off-topic> I did a lot of testing, a serious amount of testing for months, with different layouts and colours when I converted to html5 responsive and, without doubt, for mobile a dark page background with lighter text is usually absolutely horrible to try and read outside in daylight, indoors it is usually ok.</>

[avalon37]

Thanks Peanut45.