I recently noticed that Google have started offering responsive advert blocks in AdSense and so I created a few responsive AdSense blocks and put them around this site.
I’ll write more about the responsive ad’ units after some testing but here’s a brief introduction for now.
There seem to be 2 types of responsive ad’ units.
- A smart sizing advert unit that changes shape depending on the resolution of the browser and available space on the page. The only variable that can be changed in the AdSense code for smart sizing adverts is for displaying the shape of adverts namely, automatic, horizontal or vertical.
- Advanced sizing advert unit where you can display specific advert sizes based on specific resolutions of the browser using CSS3 media queries.
On first impressions, the smart re-sizing advert units work but can leave a cream background around the advert on some browser resolutions when the advert block that is served is not the full width of the available space. For web designers and brand managers this could be a major issue.
Even though the smart sizing adverts effectively display an appropriate sized advert based on the resolution of the screen and available space for the advert on the page, when changing browser resolutions, for example on a PC using the mouse to re-size the browser, the ad’ units themselves do not resize. When re-sizing the browser from a high resolution that displays larger smart size adverts, on lower resolutions the larger sized adverts remain and can be too large for the display size and produce more horizontal and vertical scroll bars.
I haven’t yet tried using the advanced ad’ units with CSS3 media queries, but that may be next to test.
If you have tried the new Google AdSense responsive ad’ units and have anything else to share then please do so below. Thank you.
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