Google (News - Alert) Ads is widely considered to be one of the biggest forms of online advertisement right now. One of the main reasons for the popularity of Google Ads (or Google AdWords, as it was previously called) is the sheer number of supported Google banner sizes to cover a lot of different situations and use cases.

To be able to advertise your product or service properly, you have to have an abundance of knowledge on the subject – including which display ad types are better for your specific brand and advertisement type. Trying to cover each and every possible ad type in existence is counter-productive and extremely expensive. This is where the knowledge of different display ad types comes in.

Speaking of display ads, it won’t hurt to also go over what a display ad actually is. A display ad is a piece of advertisement that you can see alongside any other content on the internet, and display ads usually advertise products or services that you have not been looking for specifically. This is where the “display” part of the definition comes in since such advertisements are “displayed” together with the actual content of the page you’re scrolling through.

Google also offers two different types of display ads within Google Display Network – static image ads and responsive display ads. As the name suggests, static image ads are fairly rigid and represent the outdated approach to display ads in general – with no ability to adapt to different advertisement slots. This is the main reason why static image ads are not the default recommendation of Google Display Network in general.

This is where the default display ad type of Google Display Network comes in – in the form of responsive display ads. Responsive display ads are capable of adjusting themselves to fit a lot of different advertisement placements and dimension combinations, bringing utility and versatility to a previously fairly rigid ad structure.

Still, it is quite important to know about the different ad size combinations when you have to work with display ads. Differences between these ad sizes are going to be the main topic of this post. However, it is worth mentioning that other specifications of display ads are fairly simple and straightforward – a file size limit of 150 KB and one of the three image formats – JPG, GIF, and PNG.

As we’ve mentioned earlier, Google can offer a lot of different display ad sizes, from extremely small to impressively large. However, due to the fact that the whole market of online advertising has evolved several times already since it was created, and continues to evolve to this day, the efficiency results for all of these ad types tend to vary greatly, depending on a large variety of factors.

Some of these ads are more effective if put on the top of the page, others perform at their best when placed at the very bottom, and some have the highest performance ratings when used in-between of the content itself, acting as an unusual page break.

The list of display ad types that are available with Google Ads includes, but not exclusive to: 

• “Banner”
• “Square”
• “Billboard”
• “Leaderboard”
• “Portrait”
• “Wide skyscraper”
• “Large rectangle”, and so on.

Most of these ads, both small and large, have performance issues of a variable degree – this mostly comes from a limited supply of such display ads in general. Other factors are more case-specific, like the small size of some ads being barely noticeable at the modern world screen definitions (“Button”, “Small square”, etc.).

There’s also a somewhat unique group of ads that are region-specific and perform well only within a specific country or geographical location, such as:

• “Vertical rectangle” (240 x 400 px) is an ad size that is surprisingly popular in Russia;
• “Billboard” (750 x 100 px), “Double billboard” (750 x 200 px) and “Triple billboard” (750 x 300 px) are three of the most well-performing ad sizes in Poland;
• “Triple widescreen” (250 x 360 px) and “Panorama” (980 x 120 px) are relatively popular in the country of Sweden, and so on.

Another somewhat unique group of display ads is focused mainly on mobile devices – as such, all of the display ads in the group are relatively small. It’s possible to split this category into two parts: universal and mobile-specific.

Universal ads can be used for both desktop and mobile devices, and are just generally small. There are three ads that we can note in this category – “Square” (250 x 250 px), “Small square” (200 x 200 px) and “Medium rectangle” (300 x 250 px).

Alternatively, another small group of ads can only be applied to mobile device users – this group includes “Large mobile banner” (320 x 100 px) and “Mobile leaderboard” (320 x 50 px).

While we talked about the effectiveness of display ads before, we’ve never mentioned the ones that are considered the most successful – and this is what we’ll be doing now. According to Google’s own data, there are five examples of the most successful advertisement types out there:

• “Medium rectangle” (300 x 250 px), the only contender that can work with both desktop and mobile devices.
• “Large rectangle” (336 x 280 px), a slightly larger version of a well-known “medium rectangle”, works at its best when put at the end of the page.
• “Large mobile banner” (320 x 100 px), the most successful mobile-only advertisement type, it is more suitable for modern-day smartphones and tablets.
• “Leaderboard” (728 x 90 px), a relatively new ad type, is considered a successor to a previously well-known 468 x 60 ad type.
• “Half page” (300 x 600 px), one of the biggest participants on the list, offers the most impressions in the same amount of time.

Conclusion

That is the basic information about many different display ad types that Google Ads can offer to its users. While this might seem complicated at first, it’s still essential information for successful advertisement via Google Display Network.