Guidelines for Mobile-Friendly Affiliate Banners: Types, Sizes, etc

Earlier this month in her FeedFront Magazine article entitled Six Essentials of Creative From Advertisers, a good friend and a fellow affiliate marketer, Kim Salvino, has mentioned something that has inspired this post.

She underscored the importance of diversifying your creative inventory, and not only in terms of shapes and sizes, but also keeping “promotional methods” in mind as they “vary from content to display, email to mobile,” and beyond.

It then occurred to me that while I have a great number of articles on affiliate banners all of them talk about web banners, and up until today not a single one of them was devoted to mobile-specific affiliate banners. Hence, the birth of the post you’re reading now…

Before we get to the sizes, however, it is important to understand how these banners will be used and viewed.

There are two main phone categories that we should keep in mind here: a feature phone and a smartphone. Here are the definitions:

Feature phone — a cellphone that contains a fixed set of functions beyond voice calling and text messaging, but is not as extensive as a smartphone. For example, feature phones may offer Web browsing and e-mail, but they generally cannot download apps from an online marketplace. [source: PCMag]

Smartphone — a mobile phone with highly advanced features. A typical smartphone has a high-resolution touch screen display, WiFi connectivity, Web browsing capabilities, and the ability to accept sophisticated applications. [source: Techopedia]

Due to screen size differences and functionality limitations, we want to ensure we have two sets of banner available for affiliates to use while marketing us via mobile. Here are these sets and respective banner sizes (and their common names):

Feature Phone Banner Sizes

• 120×20 (small banner)
• 168×28 (medium banner)
• 216×36 (large banner)
• 120×30 (small high image banner)
• 168×42 (medium high image banner)
• 216×54 (large high image banner)

Smartphone Banner Sizes

• 300×250 (static interstitial)
• 300×50 (mobile leaderboard)
• 320×50 (static wide banner)
• 320×100 (large banner)
• 300×75 (high image banner)
• 300×160

The above compilations list standard mobile banner sizes. If, however, you’ve seen other sizes work well for you, I would appreciate you adding them through the “Comments” area below.

For samples of mobile banner ads, take a look at these Google AdSense examples as well as this Mobile Advertising Guidelines [PDF] document from Mobile Marketing Association.