Google Adsense Custom Ad Sizes – The Good & Bad About this New Feature to Publishers

The Google Adsense team had contacted us a few weeks back and asked to remove the custom js ad units which we were running on our network of blogs. These were the ads which we were allowed to run on a few selected number of blogs depending on the traffic and the demographics. We have been running custom ad sizes on our blogs which generally were the single ad units but with different fonts and sizes and which would not totally look like a advertisement. All of the sudden someone from Google had contacted us with the following email :

Dear Publisher,
We are currently in the process of migrating publishers from Custom JavaScript formats to standard iframes. By moving publishers over, we are able to offer more features, innovating faster and more efficiently. As such your Custom JavaScript publisher features will be turned off on 6th December 2013.

We apologize for any inconvenience this may have caused.

For technical questions and troubleshooting, please send an email to our AdSense support team while logged into your Google account.
Best regards,

We were quite confused and when we got in touch with them, we were told that the results from the custom ad units were not par with the default ad units and hence Google is taking a decision to stop serving ads through this option. This was a kind of shock because we have had done a few tests and found that the custom ad units were generally giving us better results, but now are told that its actually bad for the publishers and hence we should switch back to the default ad units by Dec 6th.

You can clearly see that the revenue’s actually increased after the ad units were switched, this could either be a co-incidence or a truth which the Google representative had mentioned to us.

But this week it was again a surprise to know that the same custom ad units were now available to everyone, which means that anyone with a Adsense account can set the size of the ad units and place them on their web pages. Out of curiosity we are confused on why this major change all of the sudden when Google is very strict about its policies and why does it want people to make their web pages fill with ads in terms of content to ads ratio.

The Good About this : We feel that this new change would allow many publishers to set the ads based on their website design, and make them look better. In short giving them higher CTR because of better placement and some way chances that their revenues can increase too.

The Bad About this : Apart from the regular ad units, now you would find the web pages filled with larger ad units, considering that the new system allows to have one side of the ad unit to have a size larger than 300px, we could see people hosting ad units like 300×800 which is acceptable. A demo of this is partly available on Ezinearticles.com which has been hosting a large ad unit on the sidebar, but what would the look be if there is a similar horizontal ad above the content?

According the Google Adsense team you would get 434216 ad unit sizes which you can host on your websites but personally I feel that this is something they should have offered to a limited number of publishers based on their account authority in terms of how old the account is, the number of issues related to the account and the revenues.

If you plan to use these new ad units, then I would totally recommend you to do a A/B Split Test for a week on your websites by switching to custom units for the first week followed by default ad units the next week and then depending on the revenue reports and the Google analytics you should device whats best for you.

Let us know, how are the results of these new units performing for you.