Responsive Ad Serving

With the mobile wave becoming more prominent with each passing day if your web site is not responsive you are missing out on a huge piece of your online audience. If your site or blog is already responsive and you are considering monetizing it by serving advertisements, how do you account for serving different ad sizes for different screen sizes. If you are a bit of a programmer you could write your own script to check screen size and write the appropriate ad serving code to accommodate the screen. This article however will focus on the two Google ad serving for publishers solution AdSense and Double click for Publishers (DFP).


1. AdSense
Google has made serving responsive ads with AdSense pretty straight forward.

  • Login to your AdSense account
  • Go to Ad units screen and select “New ad unit”
  • Name your Ad unit and select your ad size. By default Automatic size Responsive should be selected already for you. If not select.
  • You can customize the ads appearance. create a custom channel and set up backup ads. (optional).
  • Select save and get code
  • Paste your code into your web site code where you want the responsive ad to appear.

This ad unit can automatically adapt its size to the space available on the page.


2. DoubleClick for Publishers

Before setting up your responsive ad unit in DFP I would suggest linking your AdSense account to your DFP account. Instructions here.

If you are using a responsive site created with wordppress I suggest installing this plugin: DFP Ad Manager

[dfp_ads id=497]