The downside of AdSense's automatic ad size optimization

One new AdSense featured announced in early August was automatic ad size optimization. Where before the text ads shown in an ad unit always had a fixed size, now AdSense will vary the number and size of the ads within the unit. For example, a standard 468 by 60 banner ad normally consists of two equal-sized text ads, but AdSense may instead use up the entire width with a single ad.

I have mixed feelings about this optimization. On the one hand, there would occasionally be times when there weren't enough ads to fill the ad space completely and so you were left with empty space at the end of the ad unit. If you were using blended ads (no borders, same colors as the rest of the page) then this wasn't normally obvious, but if you had borders then it would be very obvious. So in that sense the size optimization is good. That said, I always found that having empty space in my ad units was incentive to either rework the page so more ads were shown or to change the ad formats I was using to reflect the reality of the smaller ad pool.

If you're running one of those sites that uses cleverly-positioned images above ads to subtly draw attention to the ads, you'll really dislike the resizing, since your images won't always line up nicely with the ads anymore. Also, I find that some of these extended ads just look worse than the smaller-format ads.

Hopefully Google will give AdSense publishers the option to turn this automatic sizing off and let them do their own optimization if that's what they want.

— Eric Giguere is the author of Make Easy Money with Google: Using the AdSense Advertising Program

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