3 Best Ad Formats for maximum CTR

This is the second article in the CTR Wednesdays series. You can find all the articles in this series here: CTR Wednesdays

Why would your users ever click on an ad? The answers that just came to your mind includes – the ads are targeted, they are looking for more information and so on… Right?

Now tell me what good is laser targeted ads for if a user is not going to see it? If the user is going to ignore it completely?

Can you do something about it?
Yes! You can. You can do a variety of things to make your ads get noticed (be sure that you don’t end up doing any of these things that can get you banned). Among these, we will today discuss Ad Formats.

The most read tip on this topic would be to use wider ad formats.
Now, why should you use wider formats? Is it because Google said you so? Ever thought why does Google say that?

They have done extensive research on it and found that readers absorb information in thought units (that is, several words at a time) and the wider format lets them comfortably read more text at a glance. Many of them won’t bother to fully read an ad with 5 line breaks. By now you know that to generate interest in a user to click, they should first read the ad!
Also, wider formats are not fully avoided by users.

Hope this gives you enough reasons to include the wider formats. Now let’s see what the wider formats that are supported by Adsense are.

336x280 Large Rectangle
300x250 Medium Rectangle
160x600 Wide Skyscraper

When the space available is limited, link units come handy. Thoughtfully placed link units can get you a lot of clicks. In fact, they can be money mills.

That said; use only ad formats that go along with the design of your site. Don’t try to squeeze large formats where they can’t fit well and finally don’t clutter your site with ads and ads alone!

Apply this to your blog and see the results for yourselves, it will start to show almost immediately.

Stay tuned for the next post in the series - What CTR is good?