It seems every food blog template, or site theme is the same. Content on the left hand side and a 160×600 ad on the right hand side. These types of themes being so widely used has created a significant excess of 160×600 ads, causing the size to be considered undesirable by many media buyers.
If you’re creating a new food blog or redesigning your existing food blog, we’ve created a guide to help you create the type of site advertisers love. These tips will help you maximize your revenue and earnings.
What ad units make up the perfect food blog ?
300×250
Some call it the island ad, others call it the MREC, or medium rectangle. Whatever you call it, the 300 x 250 ad unit tends to be the best performing ad unit across Gourmet Ads. The 300×250 brings consistently high click through rates, post-click tracking and post impressions tracking for that ad unit. As a result, this is the number one requested ad size by advertisers. Unfortunately though, the majority of standard food blog designs do not even incorporate this highly sought after size.
If you want to maximize your revenue in a simple, consistent way. we recommend having one 300×250 ad above the fold.
300×600
Much like the 300×250 ad, the 300×600 is also a top performer. Because there are limited advertisers using the 300×600 right now, we suggest designing your food blog to run the 300×600 in the same space as the 300×250 pushing down the content in it is place when it runs. We do this on www.tastydays.com and it has been a very effective strategy in using both sizes concurrently using our ad server. The 300×600 is also one of our highest-priced ad units and, when run across all pages, can provide significant revenue. Once again we highly recommend having one 300×600 sized ad above the fold.
728×90
Our second most requested size, the 728×90 or leaderboard is commonly used on major sites, but has been left out of standard food blog designs for some time. The leaderboard receives strong click-through and is regularly requested by advertisers. We highly recommend having one 728×90 sized ad above the fold.
Background Skin
Not essential, but one of our top earners for Publishers, the background skin is relatively easily to implement. When designing your food blog, either use a background that can be easily changed or have a white image behind all of your content. When running an advertising campaign using a background skin, we simply provide you an ad tag which will require you to add background skins into your site template. Your web designer may need to understand CSS to ensure background skins work correctly, but Gourmet Ads can provide sample code for testing.
Share these tips with your designer
If you’re redesigning your food blog, or creating a new food blog, feel free to send this article to your designer so they can understand, from a revenue perspective, the most important elements of your design. For all ad sizes, Gourmet Ads can provide sample code for testing.
Additional tips
Finally, if you’re running a food blog, make sure that you run on your own domain and not on sub domain of a blogging platform. For more information see this article on how to get your own domain name.
If you’d like to learn more about web monetization strategies, Gourmet Ads has developed a comprehensive revenue maximization guide here.
