How Ad Sizes Affect AdSense Earnings

If you have been working with websites for some time, it shouldn’t come as a surprise that the ad sizes you choose to display on your site can have a dramatic impact on AdSense earnings.

Depending on the layout of your site, performance of different ad sizes can vary greatly. Generally speaking, AdSense has a few ad sizes they recommend that are most effective. They are as follows:  336×280 large rectangle, the 300×250 medium rectangle, the 728×90 leaderboard, the 300×600 half page, and on mobile the 320×100 large mobile banner (not pictured here). 

*You can review the complete AdSense guide to ad sizes here.

Tip: It’s better to add one recommended ad unit than two smaller ad units next to each other.

Another rule of thumb to keep in mind is that vertical ad units usually perform better than horizontal ones. This is simply due to them staying on the screen longer. While the sizes mentioned above should have the biggest impact on your AdSense earnings, you should also consider viewability rates by ad size –

Other ad sizes/techniques you can consider using are responsive ads. Google now offers responsive AdSense code, meaning you can equip your site to dynamically change the size of ad units displayed based on the user’s screen. You should also try out Mobile Anchor Ads. AdSense now offers mobile partners a “mobile anchor ad” that sticks to the bottom of a screen when a user scrolls.

To summarize, the ad sizes you choose can have a huge impact on your AdSense earnings, so choose wisely 

This brings up a whole, new topic. When you are choosing ad sizes, keep in mind not to focus on a single ad size on a single page that is performing really well. Even though it may be earning you a lot, it may be driving your users away or causing fewer page views which could end up costing you more than it’s making you. That’s why you should test your ad sizes.

Testing Ad Sizes

Okay, so far we’ve covered the basics on the most effective ad sizes that can impact your AdSense earnings. Now, taking it one step further – AdSense users can give more flexibility to ad units, allowing different sizes to appear in one location. The best strategy is to allow multiple ad sizes for your ad units. How do you do this? You may want consider doing doing Split Testing or A/B Testing with your ad units.  This will give you an idea how one ad size performs compared with another.

While measuring how different sizes perform on your site could be the key to unlock the site’s true revenue potential – manual tests are difficult and take a lot of effort. Furthermore, the revenue from your site will often vary greatly by time of year, time of week, time of day as well as traffic source and geo-graphics. To effectively compare different ad combinations, you need to use split testing and/or account for outside variables. Hence; continuous, multivariate testing is the way forward!