A Good Theme for Adsense Ads

[mbritt]

I'm hearing everywhere that the best size ad for Adsense is 728x90.  The problem is that I’m finding that most WordPress themes (that I know of anyway) are not nearly this wide in the blog post area.  I'd like to embed an add of this width within the blog post.  Does anyone know of good themes that will accommodate an ad of this width?

 

Thanks!

[cdils]

Hi there,

You could go to a full-width (no sidebar) layout to accommodate on just about any theme. If you're using a mobile responsive theme and keeping your ads mobile responsive is important, you may want to read up on that here: http://www.labnol.org/internet/google-adsense-responsive-design/25252/

If I could just put in my two cents, I'd say that picking a design just to accommodate an ad isn't the best approach. The design should reflect your brand and the style of your content and let the ads fall where they may. I realize there is strategy to consider, but if your overall design isn't built with your audience/reader in mind, they probably won't be there to see the ads anywhere. Just my opinion. 🙂

Cheers,

Carrie

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I host a weekly WordPress-focused podcast called Office Hours. I tweet @cdils.

[mbritt]

You make an excellent point Carrie.  I've been rethinking this idea a lot since posting this.  I do also have to think about responsive design issues as well.  Appreciate your comment.

[jhuotari]

Carrie,

I took a look at your website yesterday and was impressed. I have a question for you if you are able to help.

We're using Google's DoubleClick for Publishers to serve ads. I added a 728x90 ad between the nav bar and content-sidebar wrap yesterday by registering a new sidebar and using the genesis_before_content_sidebar_wrap hook and a tutorial from Nick the Geek. It worked well.

There's just one problem, though. I haven't figured out how to make the 728x90 ad responsive. I don't think the AdSense code you mentioned above applies since we're using DFP. I tried adding the .before-content-ad class to the box-sizing responsive rules (we've added a few to the default rule) that apply to .content-sidebar #content, .content-sidebar #content-sidebar-wrap, etc., but that didn't quite seem to do it. The 728x90 shows up fine, but it's widened the screen so that I need to scroll from right to left on my phone to read everything.

Do you have any suggestions? Our website is Oak Ridge Today. It's at http://oakridgetoday.com.

Thank you,

John Huotari

[cdils]

Hi John,

You're out of my league when it comes to DFP - I haven't read anything about it or worked with it.

Sorry. 🙁
Carrie

---

Have you been helped in this forum? Pay it forward and answer someone else’s question. I bet you’ll know the answer to at least one question. 🙂

I host a weekly WordPress-focused podcast called Office Hours. I tweet @cdils.

[jhuotari]

Thank you for the quick response, Carrie.

All of our other ads are also served with DFP, and they seem to work okay on the responsive site. The DFP code is inserted into text widgets in the primary sidebar and in the content area. Of course, the largest ad size we've run so far has been a 300x250, so it's not clear to me if the ads are actually being responsive or we've just not run into any issues because the ads are small enough.

I'll do some more research and let you know what I find out.

John

[Author]

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