Responsive advertising sounds like a great idea and there are some helpful tutorials on how to set it up with AdSense. The only problem is that it doesn’t work. Not in the sense that you can’t get the ads to show up at the right size for the screen, but in that none of the advertisers have inventory for those ad sizes. Here’s how it breaks down.
The idea is simple, for a small screen serve a small ad, for a large screen serve a large ad. In this way the advertising is responsive to the user’s screen size the same way the website is. For a look at the code head over here. This sets up the following AdSense types:
- Leaderboard (728 x 90)
- Banner (468 x 60)
- Large Rectangle (336 x 280)
- Medium Rectangle (300 x 250)
- Square (250 x 250)
- Ad Link Unit (200 x 90)
If an ad fits on the screen then it gets served, if it doesn’t then the next size down that does fits gets served, this way you can always include the right size ad for the screen all the way down to a 200 pixel wide link unit (the small text ads).
The key is to compare these sizes to what Google recommends.
- Medium Rectangle (300 x 250)
- Large Rectangle (336 x 280)
- Leaderboard (728 x 90)
- Wide Skyscraper (160 x 600)
The overlap between the two is limited and more importantly the the order in which the original script decides on ads will always favor the 468 x 60 banner over the medium or large rectangle. The banner has very little inventory so the prices paid will be low.
To make the responsive ads actually perform it would be better to serve fewer types of ads that are smaller than the screen but favor the types of ads that have inventory and are recommended by AdSense.
That would make the list more like this:
- Leaderboard (728 x 90)
- Large Rectangle (336 x 280)
- Medium Rectangle (300 x 250)
- Wide Skyscraper (160 x 600)
However, not all sites will want a wide skyscraper since they’re so tall. If most or all of the mobile traffic that a site gets is from devices wider than 300 then leave off the last wide skyscraper. The most narrow smart phone in popular use is the iPhone and those are 320 pixels wide. Looking at this site’s visitors since January 1st we see nearly zero (there are a few) traffic from browsers less than pixes wide.
It will require changing the script linked to earlier a bit to put the right size on the screens but that’s a trivial task.
Image: Wikimedia Commons
