What ad formats should I use?

Hi,

I’m in the process of developing a site and before I progress towards designing the layout I would like to take advertising formats into consideration. I believe I will most likely have 2 ads per page, one being above the fold and the other below the fold. Being that I want the largest possible market for my advertising space I am limiting myself to those formats that have both images adds and textual adds. From your experience which formats tend to perform best out of the following.

Large Rectangle (336x280)
Medium Rectangle (300x250)
Square (250x250)
Leaderboard (728x90)
Banner (468x60)
Skyscraper (120x600)
Wide Skyscraper (160x600)

I know format performance has a lot to do with its placement, but I will get to that when it is time. Generally which of the above mentioned have you had the most success with? If anyone happens to have any real estate related sites, which formats have you found to be most in demand for that industry. Thanks for your help,

 

try to avoid banners and leaderboards, as they have been so over used that surfers are blinded by them now ...

Large rectangles with transparent borders and backgrounds work really well, making the link a dark color in your website's palette

ie: www.dentalhealthblog.com

 

Large rectangles are the best but it acually depends on your site layout.

 

scyscrapers work well when placed in the left column - most surfers are trained by habit to look for site navigation links in that area.

 

Well my site is not going to be a built for adsense site. I will have another revenue stream besides adsence, and my site needs to be functional for users. I believe in my content and sticky features of my site over misleading tactics. I’m against anything like placing a skyscraper before the nav in the left column. I believe the pay in my niches will do more to earn money then accidental clicks ever could. With some overture bids over $5 per click it should be interesting to see what kind of revenue can be generated with the right amount of organic traffic. Large rectangles, medium rectangles, and squares would probably be the easiest to place within content for me. I could incorporate leaderboards pretty easily as well, but they would probably end up floating to the top and bottom of content. I assume you guys would say you have had more success with large rectangles then medium rectangles and squares? If you could please rate the ad formats that I place in my first post from best to worst in your experience that would be helpful. Thanks! One of my concerns with large rectangles is that it is a new format (or at least relatively new to being posted to the format page) in the image-advertising arena. I’m sure demand for this format will grow but at this time I assume most of googles clientele do not already have image banner campaigns established for this format.

 

it depends on site design, but rectangles -espacially 336x280- are better than others..