What is a Medium Rectangle Banner

Definition

A medium rectangle banner is a 300 x 250 pixel size banner. It is one of the most popular banner sizes in online advertising, and is considered an essential part of an effective campaign. Due to its shape, size, and placement options on sites, it is very versatile and very noticeable, making it an appealing format for advertisers.

Compared to other ad formats

Along with leaderboards (728 x 90px) and wide skyscrapers (160 x 600px), medium rectangle banners are considered top performing ad sizes, and make up a significant amount of available inventory. This results in generally low CPM rates and wider reach.

Ad-Pixel Size

Medium Rectangle banner: 300 x 250px

Optimal File Size

On the web, smaller is always better when it comes to file sizes, even with today’s fast connections and cheap data. For web banners, files should be kept around 20KB, but no larger than 50KB. Google does not approve file sizes larger than 150KB.

File types:

GIF: Animation, transparency, size PNG: better transparency, size, newer format JPG: Photo, artwork

What does a medium rectangle look like:

This is how the ad looks like:

A live example would be the following:

Live desktop website example:

Live example on tablet:

What’s important for advertiser

With high available inventory, low CPM, wide reach and design-friendly shape and size, medium rectangle banners are of the highest performing banner sizes, especially when placed above the fold. It is considered a must-have for campaigns, and works well on desktops, tablets and some mobiles. The square shape of the banner gives designers a lot of flexibility in terms of creative, however, it is important to create ads that are well designed and contain calls to action.

What’s important for website owners

Medium rectangles are almost guaranteed to perform well, especially when ads are well designed with a clear call-to-action. Due to their fairly modest real-estate and shape, medium rectangles are relatively easy to incorporate into a site on various locations, especially alongside content. This format is very popular among advertisers due to high available inventory and thus relatively low CPM rates.