Adsense Split Testing Results for 250×250 vs 300×250

Posted April 30, 2008
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If you remember back to the post I wrote, Using PHP to Determine Which Adsense Ad Works Best, we explored ways to split test the performance of Adsense with the help of PHP. I had also promised to share the results of my testing for the month of April. Below are my results.

I was surprised to find that on my particular blog the smaller Adsense ad was significantly more effective than the larger 300×250 ad. This is great news for you since there will be less ad space and more content.

Here are my results for the split testing of the two ad mediums.

250×250

 
48.27% of the clicks
.59 CTR
eCPM was 171% higher than 300×250 resulting in 73.03% of the revenue.

300×250

 
51.72% of the clicks
.64 CTR
eCPM resulted in 26.97% of the revenue.

Although the 300×250 ad had a slightly higher click through rate, the 250×250 ad out performed the other ad in terms of net revenues.

Have you split tested your ads? If so please share your results.


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7 Responses to "Adsense Split Testing Results for 250x250 vs 300x250"
  1. Weekend Links - Lightbox Matrix, Performance Best Practices, Processing.js, Adsense Testing, Multibox on May 10th, 2008

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  2. Anonymous on May 21st, 2008

    The larger 350×250 works for me!

  3. Rotate Ads with PHP on May 23rd, 2008

    [...] testing is another great reason for rotating ads. If you remember back to my post about split testing Adsense ads I found there was a significant difference between different the 250×250 block and the [...]

  4. Jordan McClements on June 6th, 2008

    I had tested this a while back and got VERY little difference in revenue between 300×250 and 336×280.. But you have inspired me to test this again for a bit longer.

    Will come back with results in a few weeks hopefully..

  5. Jordan McClements on June 16th, 2008

    OK – after a full week of testing (more than 50,000 page views) – here are the results for Irishviews.com

    300×250 (top of page) earned 84% of what 336×280 earned.

    300×250 (2nd on page) earned 74% of what 336×280 earned.

    300×250 (3rd on page) earned 114% of what 336×280 earned.

    NB – on irishviews.com – there is a fixed layout which means that the smaller adverts are slightly further from the content which may ahve a negative effect on them. If you have a ‘fluid’ layout with text flowing round your adverts you may well find the smaller advert works better…

  6. Mark Sanborn on June 16th, 2008

    Interesting…

    Thankyou for sharing your results. Have you tried 250×250?

  7. Jordan on June 17th, 2008

    Mark,

    I have not tried 250×250 – as they layout of my site is fixed, and 250×250 would be tiny on my pages which were designed for 336×280 from the beginning to be honest…(to much effort / too lazy to change it..:-)