AdSense in All its Forms

When AdSense started it only came in one flavor: as content ads that placed
text ads alongside search results and articles. Now Google comes in a variety
of different forms that allow publishers to place AdSense units on a range of
different platforms.
That provides for a huge amount of flexibility, and a great deal of
opportunity. Some of those forms you will certainly need to understand and
use if you’re to maximize the revenues your site can earn.
Other forms you might never use, but they’re still worth knowing just in case
the opportunity arises.
And some of those forms come in a number of different sizes, shapes and
formats.
Putting the right ad type in the right place on the right platforms is the key to
earning money with AdSense।
AdSense for Content
AdSense for Content is the richest of the different AdSense products both in
terms of the size of its ad inventory and in terms of the range of different ad
types available to publishers (not to mention the wealth it provides to those
publishers.) These are the ads that run alongside content — the articles and
copy that appear on your Web pages. Targeted by Google’s clever software,
they’re unobtrusive, distinctive and they appear to add information to a page
rather than get in the way of the user experience.
They can come in the form of text ads, link ads and display ads।
Text Ads
Text ads are the type that users are most familiar with. They take the form
of a box containing one or a number of ads with a linked headline, a brief
description and a URL. You also get the “Ads by Google” notice that appears
on all AdSense ads. (Google changed this notice recently and it now blends in
much better than it used to, sometimes disappearing to a single letter.)
There are now twelve different types of text ad. They include horizontal units
and vertical units, square units and rectangular units, large units and small
units.
You won’t use all of them but you will need to know which units deliver the
best results for the way your website is laid out. While that will vary from site
to site, there are general guidelines that you should know when you start
your testing.
One of the most popular formats is the leaderboard. At 728 x 90, it
stretches pretty much across the screen and while it can be placed
anywhere, it’s mostly used at the top of the page, above the main text।

That’s a great location. It’s the first thing the reader sees and it offers a good
selection of ads to choose from. When you’re just starting out and still
experimenting with the types of ads that work best with your users, it’s a
pretty good default to begin with।
Of course, you can put it in other places too. Putting a leaderboard ad
between forum entries for example can be a pretty good strategy sometimes
and definitely worth trying. On the whole though, I think you’ll probably find
that one of the smaller ads, such as a banner or half-banner might blend in
better there and generate more clicks.
And you can often forget about putting a leaderboard at the bottom of the
page, despite what Google’s samples show you. It would certainly fit there
but you have to be certain that people are going to reach the bottom of the
page, especially a long page.
You might find that only a small minority of readers would get that far, so
you’re already reducing the percentage of readers who would click through.
Overall, I’d say that leaderboards are most effective blended into the top of
the page beneath the navigation bar and sometimes placed between forum
entries।

Banners (468 x 60) and half-banners (234 x 60) are short versions of the
leaderboard and much more flexible.Like leaderboards you can certainly put these sorts of ads at the top of the
page, and lots of sites do it. Again, that’s something worth trying. You can
put up a leaderboard for a week or so, swap it for a banner for another week
or so, and compare the results.
But at the top of the page, I’d expect the leaderboard to do better.
A banner or a half-banner would leave too much space on one side and make
the ad stand out. It would look like you’ve set aside an area of the page for
advertising instead of for content. That would alert the reader that that
section of the page is one that they can just ignore.When you’re looking for an ad to put in the middle of the page though or if
you’re using a narrow text area, a half-banner can be just the ticket.