An ad unit is one or more Google ads displayed as a result of one piece of the AdSense ad code. You can create, customize and manage ad units on the Ads page in your AdSense account. Ad units give you control over where ads appear, and our native ad units offer lots of flexibility in terms of customization.
Types of ad unit
AdSense offers several different types of ad unit. If a display ad unit doesn’t meet the requirements of your site, consider using one of our more specialized ad units:
| Ad unit | Description |
|---|---|
| Display | A great all-rounder, these ads work well anywhere.Display ads are responsive by default, which means they automatically adapt their size to fit your page layout and your users’ devices.They can be customized to show fixed ad sizes.They’re also compatible with AMP pages. |
| In-feed | Native ads that flow naturally inside a feed (for example, a list of articles or products) offering a great user experience. |
| In-article | Native ads that fit seamlessly in between the paragraphs of your pages for an enhanced reading experience. |
| Matched content | Recommendations that promote your content to visitors and potentially increase revenue, page views, and time spent on site. |
| Link | Displays a list of topics that are relevant to the content of your page.Link ads are responsive by default, which means they automatically adapt their size to fit your page layout and your users’ devices.They can be customized to show fixed ad sizes. |
Next steps
- Create a display ad unit
- Create an In-feed ad unit
- Create an In-article ad unit
- Create a Matched content unit
- Create a link ad unit
Recommended AdSense Ad Formats
Currently, you have two options to choose the size for your ads when creating a new ad. One is to choose responsive format and other is to choose fixed size. In order to improve your revenue, Google recommends to use the following fixed format ad sizes in conjunction with appropriate placement.
- 336 x 280 – Large Rectangle
- 300 x 250 – Rectangle
- 728 x 90 – Leaderboard
- 160 x 600 – Wide Skyscraper
- Responsive Ads – Automatically fill any of the available ad unit to fit the available size on your page
These ads blend with the content seamlessly and improve the chance of clicking due to larger size comparative to the smaller size ads. Learn more about AdSense ad code. In addition, the larger size ads will automatically accommodate smaller sizes when the inventory is not available. However, we strongly recommend to use responsive ads to auto resize based on the device and browser’s width. Also try to avoid custom ad sizes, since there may not be any available ad inventory to fit that particular size resulting in lower ad revenue.
New ad units with very larger sizes of 970 x 250 and 300 x 1050 are introduced by Google on June 2014. Due to the size of these ads Google restricted one ad unit per page. In addition, Google also had a restriction of placing maximum of 3 content ad units, 3 link ad units and 2 search boxes in a single page of your site. Now, you have no limits on number of ads. However, Google with their AI technology will automatically restrict the ads when the content on the page is much smaller comparative to number of ads.