What Google has been doing with their AdSense service lately is pretty impressive. They have introduced several things in this year, responsive ad units and new text ad design being the most waited features for the publishers.
And now Google brings the feature of creating custom sized ad units for publishers.
The Premium publishers had all these features which made me want it so badly but that requires millions of page views and few other factors, but anyways, these new features give you the flexibility of almost like a Premium publishers as you have more text fonts choices, more ad sizes to make the ads blend with the design of the website perfectly.
How to create a custom size ad unit
You need to log into your AdSense account and create a new ad unit from My Ads tab. In the dropdown you will find the custom ad size option. You will be able to set the width and height of the ad by yourself.
There are however few limitation to the custom sized ads, which is,
- Limited inventory as the advertisers currently have fix sized banners for the existing fix ads sizes
- Only one dimension can be greater than 300 pixels
- Width must be between 120 and 1200 pixels.
- Height must be between 50 and 1200 pixels.
Despite of all the ,imitation mentioned above, you can will take advantage of this feature and create ad units that blend perfectly with your website design and convert as well.
Here is an example of a Custom Sized Ad unit I have used on my blog.
I used a 600×280 sized ad unit where it shows a 336×280 ad at the center. Because it is the only biggest ad unit that could fill into 600×280 size.
If the custom ad size was 600×250, then the 300×250 ad unit would be the best image ad for this ad unit.
But the text ads take up the entire area of 600×280 custom ad unit, which looks nice to the design.
This means, if the text ads work well for you then this feature is perfect for you to create nice ads for above or below the post area.
Custom Sized Ads for Responsive Design Websites
If you have a responsive design on your website, these custom sized units may not work with the fluid design on your website. But you can use this trick to use custom sized ads for your responsive website.
You may want to create a large sized ad unit for your desktop website but the other fixed sizes available would be more suitable for the Tablet and Mobile version of your website and serve the ads according to where it has been opened.
Here is the code to serve different ads on different devices.
<script type="text/javascript"><!--
google_ad_client = "ca-pub-xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx";
if (window.innerWidth >= 500) {
google_ad_slot = "xxxxxxxxx";
google_ad_width = 600;
google_ad_height = 280;
} else {
google_ad_slot = "xxxxxxxxx";
google_ad_width = 300;
google_ad_height = 250;
}
</script>
<script type="text/javascript"
src="http://pagead2.googlesyndication.com/pagead/show_ads.js">
</script>On line number 4,5,6 you have to put the ad_slot number, ad_width and ad_height respectively. On 8, 9 and 10, you have to add the other ad when the browser window size goes below 500px, that is, on Tablet PCs and Mobiles.
This trick works pretty much the same as AdSense responsive ad unit just that it loads different ads units for different sized browser windows. .
