I was spending some time on a new forum the last few days and came across a thread of somebody asking for a site review for content, ad placement and such things. I look at the site and it was noticeably lacking in content, but that is common with new sites, hopefully the intention is not to leave it like that but grow, so I leave that alone and say it doesn't break any terms of service or anything like that, but breaks a few design "rules".
I was surprised to see others comment on their "good placements". Their ads were almost completely covering the first fold. There was the site header, then the next few inches were covered with two 300x250 rectangles and a 160x600 skyscraper.
Sure, this is "good placement" for CTR I suppose, but it is horrendous in terms of usability and design. If your one and only goal is click through rate, with no regard for user experience, return traffic, or visitor retention, perhaps that is a good strategy, but, if you are wanting good traffic, repeat traffic and a good surfing experience for your visitors, you really need to balance placement and user experience. Nobody wants to come to a site and see nothing but ads on the first screen.
Friday, January 4, 2008
Theory vs Reality in Ad Publishing
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6 comments:
Hi DB,
Is there such a thing as a "standard" width for ads? I've seen 160px, 150px, 145px, 197px among others. The reason I ask is to be able to design sites for easy placement of ads into the layout.
Thanks.
Good question, and yes, there absolutely is. Skyscrapers are generally 120px or 160px wide...160's always perform better, they are both 600 px long.
Leaderboards are the ol' 468x60 (horrible, ineffective choice) and the 728x90.
Lastly, rectangles, which are very high performing typically are commonly 300x250.
There are various sub sizes...there are smaller skyscrapers, 120x240 for example, 125x125 is another common size.
Those are the most common, what I would call "standard" sizes.
That's helpful info. Thanks.
I haven't used ads yet. I was planning on starting with a column (160px wide, maybe), and placing a few small rectangles (160x300, maybe).
But that may need to be adjusted, it sounds. On one site I have a weather.com link that s 175x270: http://image.weather.com/web/services/oap/magnet_vgeneric.jpg . So for that one I might make the columns 175 wide.
The short of it is, I'm wondering what width to use for columns where ads will go. 180px?
I noticed your blogrush/blogoshere image is 179px wide, so maybe the ideal column width is 180px. That would accomodate things like the 179px blogrush ad, the 175px weather.com object, and standard 160px ads.
I for the, 180, yes...if only one element is pushing you to 180, I'd suggest sticking to 160 and finding a different spot for the weather thingy. They aren't really playing inside advertising norms there.
Yeah, the Blogrush thing pisses me off being a stupid size, but I wanted to try it, and actually, it does bring some traffic in...not much, but some.
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