An issue that faces a lot of website owners is their template. Quite often a website will start as a hobby or niche type website (with either a nice template or a custom template) and somewhere along the way you would have decided you would try to cover costs by implementing Ads on your website. This can be a very tricky issue and getting your template right will hugely improve your chances of better results with ads when Click Through Rate (CTR) is concerned and also keep your website traffic. If your template hasn’t being created with the idea of the “Best Template Size for Ads on a Blog” and therefore optimized ad placement then you will need to change your template. Attempting to fit ads around your template won’t work, especially when set sized ad blocks are being used (such as the case with Google Adsense). Forcing ads to your template can look messy and yield some horrible results not to mention potentially a loss in website traffic.
This article will talk about some basic sizing that will help you on your way to getting correct sizing on your template and therefore the Best Template Size for Ads on your Blog or website.
Why is sizing of your template important when it comes to adverts on your website?,
For Adverts to work well on your website it has being proven they need to fit within your website template. This is to make sure they don’t mess up or clutter your website and also to help make the Ads blend in with the content of your website. If Ads blend in with your website they are more likely to be noticed by your web traffic, if they stand out to much or look cluttered they will lose their appeal. The key is also not to trick a user into clicking ads since that will only make people dislike your website, rather place them in areas which may be helpful for a user. For example if you have an article on lets say “Good Fishing Lures”, after reading your article a user may be interested in where to find these fishing lures. A good ad placement would then logically be at the bottom of the article just after the content. If this ad fits the template of the bodycopy then it would naturally flow on well from your content, like it was the ending of the article.
What is the Best Template Size for Ads on a Blog Page?
If we keep to the Fishing Lure article example mentioned above, imagine if the written content was inside a 600px width column and you placed at the bottom an ad block that was 728px (such as Google Adsense Ad) then that would not fit well inside that template and would overhang over the sidebar. So you maybe left with having to use an ad block like a large rectangle (336px) with text. Although this isn’t a bad ad size to have at the bottom of the content, what happens if you need to place the 728px ad block within your content of your blog? With that in mind I would recommend with Blog Posts you make sure your content box is 740px wide. This allows you to use the high performing 728px width adsense block within your content. I would then suggest that you add a sidebar which fits the largest skyscraper ad block (160px w by 600px h) with regards to Adsense Adverts. This is because the Skyscraper is the other high performing ad block when it comes to the blog post page. I would make the sidebar around 200px wide. If you add padding and margins around both the main content and also the sidebar then you will be left with a total website width of about 950px or 980px. You may also want to add the 4 “advertise here” ad blocks for self paid advertising. If this is the case then you can make each ad 100px wide which will fit into the sidebar nicely.
If you are new to Blogging or Ad Placement I suggest you start your theme using these dimensions and keeping it basic to begin with. With this layout I would recommend an Ad Block 728px wide (if you are using adsense) under the title of your blog post and also a skyscraper on your sidebar. If you are writing about a subject that you may have product suggestions at the end (like the example of “fishing Lures” above) then I would suggest adding another Ad Block at the end of your content. Don’t clutter your posts with to many Adverts, well placed ad block will get better Click Through Rate and also won’t distract from your content.
Good Blog Post Page Ad Template Layout