Publishers, Size Matters.
Optimizing your ad placement affects impressions, clicks, and user experience.
Once you’ve ensured quality ads are hitting your site, maximize viewability!
For most publishers, ad revenue is vital, as it feeds the budget required to deliver quality content to users.
Unfortunately, publishers under pressure to demonstrate measurable returns on ad placements along with the desire to increase ad revenue has led to aggressive ad placement strategies.
These strategies destroy user experience and trigger the adoption of ad blockers.
While creating ad placements, ad viewability and user experience should be the center focus.
We all know ads contribute to user experience.
Some placements will disrupt users, particularly if they’re covering content. And others will fail miserably as the user never see them.
For instance, how valuable is a banner below the footer?
Image: Google Support
Ad Viewability
To create a concrete standard of what is considered a ‘viewable impression’, the Interactive Advertising Bureau (IAB) and the MRC collaborated to develop an industry standard.
The simple IAB and MRC definition of viewability?
A minimum of 50% of the ad is in view for a minimum of one second for display ads or two seconds for video ads.
Recipe for Success
Finding the best ad placement is all about personalization.
Start with a traffic analysis! Choosing ad placements requires some data and research to determine where your ad inventory will best perform.
STEP 1: Understand Your Audience
It’s vital to monitor your site’s traffic and audience with a particular focus on device type and geography!
Google Analytics and similar tools arm you with much-needed data, including how many clicks a page gets, how long users stay on the page, along with other essential site details.
STEP 2: Understand How Users Interact With Your Site
Once you know who your audience is, understand how they interact with your site.
A heat map tool gives you top-secret access to your user’s behavior. Specifically, Heatmaps allow publishers to discern where the highest concentration of activity lies on their sites.
Image Source: Crazyegg
STEP 3: Once you have insight into how users flow through your site, start testing placements!
Now on to size, Which size should you use?
Google’s ad size guide has provided the list of best performing ad sizes and their placements, including all of the regional ad sizes related to geographical locations.
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300×250- ‘Medium Rectangle’ performs well when embedded within text content or at the end of articles. View size
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336×280-‘Large Rectangle’ performs well when embedded within text context or at the end of articles. View size
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728×900-‘Leaderboard’ performs well if placed above the main content. View Size
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300×600- ‘Half Page’ is one of the fastest-growing sizes by impressions, offering a visually impactful size. View Size
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320×100- ‘Large Mobile Banner’ offers twice the height of our standard “mobile leaderboard”. View Size
The Bottom Line
User behavior changes from site to site. One size certainly does fit all when it comes to selecting ad placements.
Success requires constant testing to pinpoint prime ad placements specific to your site.
SO what’s the bottom line? Create ad placements, test them, go with the highest-performing placements. Repeat!
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