Recently I read an interesting research report on Marketing Charts about the effectiveness of various online ad sizes. This report revealed that smaller ads are much more effective in click-through-rates (CTR) than large banners. I was in disbelief when I read this report because we were taught not so long ago that larger ad formats actually improve CTRs – at least that’s what Google (and AdSense gurus) taught us when it sold the AdSense best practices and heat map to us.
On further reading on the web, I figured out that there’s a need to distinguish between ad sizes based on the program. For example, if an image ad is effective on a particular size and aspect ratio, it does not mean that an AdSense text block of the same size is effective.
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