IAB New Ad Portfolio Transition Guidance

Implementing and testing flexible sized ad containers

The IAB New Ad Portfolio defines ad units based on aspect ratio and size range. This is a big transition from ad unit recommendations based on fixed pixel sizes.

Flexible sized ad units provide several benefits over fixed pixel ad units.

• Publisher content delivered to multiple screen sizes requires ads that can respond to multiple sizes and integrate with a responsive website design.
• Creative design needs to scale to different sizes without losing its original message and impact.

This project provides examples and techniques for implementing, testing, and adopting the new aspect ratio based ad units. It addresses key aspects of flexible ad container implementation:

• Create an aspect ratio based ad slot that can scale up or down within the size range of the ad unit.
• Maintain an ad slot that helps publishers accept both aspect ratio based ad units and fixed size ad units during the transition period.
• Allow publisher page to pre-define an ad slot size to eliminate page stutter.

The IAB Tech Lab has created an open source project to enable publishers to quickly insert a flexible ad slot on their test pages. It is available here:

Flexible Ad Unit Testing Github Repo