Banner, leaderboard, skyscraper, small rectangle. Just like for newspapers and print magazines, also on the Web advertisers and publishers have defined over time an official set of “online standard ad formats”. Such ad formats represent the full range of visual and text-ad sizes available for use on public web pages.
If you are a web publisher, blogger or other media outlet on the Internet, and are interested in monetizing your published assets, you may want to familiarize yourself with this illustrated list of standard online ad formats.
By knowing with are the standard ad formats to be utilized on web pages, you can:
- Brief more effectively your web designer when in need of creating new ad areas
- Offer more ad opportunities to your own direct customers
- Utilize the standard “creatives” that your customers may have designed for other campaigns (without requiring them to design custom sized ads for your site only)
- Tap into the opportunities offered by ad networks, who rely heavily on these specific ad formats
The most common online ad formats are banners, flashing or animated ads on the top of the screen, skyscrapers, vertical usually found at the left or right side of a webpage, or the square box, which is found in the majority of Web 2.0 sites like Mashable! or ReadWriteWeb.
Standard ad formats are the heritage of the print advertising medium in which advertising agencies have long established a fixed, common structure for advertising spaces, to manage orders ad productions costs more efficiently.
The main references for online standard ad formats are the IAB’s Ad Unit Guidelines and Google AdSense Ad Formats which have been directly derived from the already existing ones. For online ad formats all dimensions are always measured in pixels and the recommended file weight is about 20-40k.
In this mini guide you can find a visual gallery of all the standard, official, ad formats utilized on the Internet.
This is one of the more common ad formats on the web. Its main characteristic is to be well-integrated into content, associating your message with highly specific site-related articles.
One of the most recent ad formats introduced by IAB, very similar to the banner ad but larger in size.
The classic 468 x 60 pixel banner is the workhorse of web advertising. It is found in the vast majority of sites and is still one of the biggest money makers because of its very popular and effective above-the-fold positioning which provides exceptional visibility.
Leaderboards are very common in sites as they provide very good visibility. Slightly larger than banners ads, normally appear at the top of the page. They allow advertisers to usually use regular-size banners in the same space, so they are easy to work with.
A very high impact ad usually displayed at the right side of the screen. Skyscrapers are becoming more and more common as a less intrusive way to attract users who are annoyed by the banners ads.
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