Google supports more than 20 different template sizes for display advertisements. A general practice for marketers who use this platform has been to design an ad for each of those sizes (in pixels), because they believe that is how their product will gain the most visibility possible.
But what if you only had to do a third of that design work, yet still got amazing results from your Google display campaigns?
Unfortunately, multifamily companies often are limited in terms of marketing capacity. Most don't even have in-house designers. Even if they do, creating 20 or more ads for every digital campaign featuring their apartment communities is a significant workload.
But what if you only had to do a third of that design work, yet still got amazing results from your Google display campaigns?
We analyzed the performance, by size, of our clients’ display ads and learned that apartment communities can earn critical amounts of impressions and clicks by only designing 7 (or fewer) sizes of each ad.
Click here to see the full results of our display ad study.
In this blog:
- A ranking of the best display ad sizes by performance
- The data from more than 23,000 display ads
- Key takeaways from our internal study
Best apartment display ad sizes (ranked by performance)
1. 320x50
Impressions: 13,125,587 (27.8% of all impressions)
Interactions: 63,668
Google calls this ad its "mobile leaderboard". It's optimized for smartphones and typically appears as a banner ad near the bottom of mobile web pages.
2. 300x250
Impressions: 13,625,904 (28.9%)
Interactions: 28,976
Google touts this as one of its top performing display ad sizes, and rightfully so. In our rankings, it came up second as it fell behind the 320x50 ad in terms of total interactions, which is a truer indicator of success. This ad is known as the "medium rectangle" and works best on mobile pages.
3. 336x280
Impressions: 4,877,065 (10.3%)
Interactions: 28,976
This is known as Google's "large rectangle" ad, and works in a similar fashion as the 300x250 size. One significant difference is that this size is only used for image and text ads on desktop browsers.
4. 728x90
Impressions: 4,304,308 (9.1%)
Interactions: 16,605
This is your standard banner-style ad, or "leaderboard", that's usually displayed at the top of desktop browser pages.
5. 300x50
Impressions: 1,223,986 (2.6%)
Interactions: 13,279
This is Google's standard mobile banner ad that is placed at either the top or bottom of smartphone pages.
6. 468x60
Impressions: 1,797,750 (3.8%)
Interactions: 11,829
This banner-style ad fits better in smaller spaces as compared to the 728x90 leaderboard size ad. One key benefit of this ad size is that it's most favorable for web pages on tablets like an iPad.
7. 300x600
Impressions: 2,223,550 (4.7%)
Interactions: 10,544
This is a half-page ad for desktop browser pages. Google reports that this size is trending upwards in terms of impressions because more marketers, especially those repping major brands, are seeking to generate more impact through visuals.
Key Takeaways
1. Mobile performance is pivotal.
The data from our study reinforces the fact that most apartment searchers are actively looking for and discovering apartment communities using their mobile device. The top two display ad sizes are both mobile banners and accounted for 55% of the total impressions of all the 23,000-plus ads.
Digging further, we noticed in a sample from March 2021 that 912,870 of the 1,288,374 total visits to our community websites originated from a mobile device. That's just over 70%! If your apartment community's website isn't mobile-friendly, or you're simply lacking a strong mobile presence with your digital ads, you're missing out on a significant portion of your target audience.
(Note: Mobile, in this instance, is strictly referring to phones and not tablets).
2. Impressions are great, but interactions are better.
As you may have noticed, the best-performing digital ad sizes created a significant amount of impressions. That's great as it confirms that they'll help you gain the visibility you need.
But, ultimately, you should be most worried about interactions. An interaction means somebody clicked on the ad and visited your apartment community's website. That's why we ranked these ad sizes by how many interactions they produced, as that's a truer measure of success.
You can increase your interactions by targeting your ads to the right audience and featuring influential, eye-popping visual content.
3. Designing the most effective ad sizes ensures you're getting more out of your marketing budget.
Not only is having to create just 7 or less ads for each campaign a solution to your problem of limited marketing capacity, you're also guaranteeing that your marketing budget is getting allocated towards ads that are proven to work.
For example, if you've normally been sending Google 20-plus different display ad sizes for each campaign, the amount of money you're spending isn't going to be funneled effectively. In our study, there were some ad sizes that didn't even generate 1% of the total amount of impressions, yet they were still being funded.
Conclusion
Designing display ads is a difficult and time consuming task for in-house apartment marketers. But we've uncovered an easier, more efficient way for marketers to do this.
Our data shows that it's possible to rely on just 7 different ad sizes for each digital campaign, yet still see 90% of the results for only a third of the work.
Another easy solution is adding RentVision to your team. We create and deploy digital ads that drive traffic to your apartment community's website when you need it the most. To learn more, Schedule a Demo.
Continued reading on digital advertising for apartments
- Our complete guide to digital apartment ads is a great place if you're looking to incorporate Google Ads, Meta, or other channels to your multifamily marketing plan.
- Take the next step in your digital advertising journey and learn more about why every apartment community should utilize digital ads.