Banner sizes that actually get trafficked in 2026

1. The short answer

Across the open web — Google Display, DV360, Campaign Manager 360, Microsoft, Amazon — the same handful of IAB sizes win the overwhelming majority of available inventory. If you build these, you have effective coverage:

• 300×250 — Medium Rectangle. The single most important size, by a distance.
• 728×90 — Leaderboard.
• 160×600 — Wide Skyscraper.
• 300×600 — Half Page. High viewability, premium CPMs.
• 320×50 — Mobile Leaderboard.
• 320×100 — Large Mobile Banner, 970×250 — Billboard, and 336×280 — Large Rectangle, for the next tier.

That is the whole priority list, and it has been stable for years. If what you need is the per-platform detail — maximum file weights, animation duration rules, polite-load behaviour, what each ad server will and will not accept — that lives in our banner ad specs cheat sheet, which goes platform by platform. This article is about the part that comes after you have chosen: producing the set.

2. The 23-size display catalogue

When you go past the priority list into full coverage, this is the working set — the catalogue our 1→23 resize tools generate from a single master, grouped the way placements actually group:

3. Why the count is the wrong question

"How many sizes do I need?" is the question everybody asks, and it is close to meaningless on its own. Twenty-three sizes that were all roughly square would be a morning's work. This set is not that.

Sort the catalogue by aspect ratio and the actual problem appears:

No single composition survives that. A layout designed for the leaderboard — logo left, headline centre, CTA right, all on one line — is not a compressed version of the skyscraper layout; it is a fundamentally different arrangement of the same four elements. Attempting to scale between them is where the classic failures come from: the squashed logo, the headline cropped mid-word, the CTA button pushed off-canvas.

This is why serious resizing is a re-layout problem rather than an image-scaling one. Each element — logo, headline, subhead, product shot, CTA, legal line — has to be repositioned and re-scaled independently for the frame it lands in.

4. The four layout families

Sorted by ratio, the 23 sizes collapse into four groups. Within a group the layout logic transfers almost unchanged; between groups it has to be rethought. Designing four compositions rather than twenty-three is the single biggest time saving available.

5. What actually breaks

Five failures account for nearly every rejected or rebuilt banner set. All five are predictable from the ratio table above.

1. The headline stops fitting. A seven-word headline that sits comfortably on one line in 728×90 has to wrap to four lines in 160×600, and simply cannot appear at all in 234×60. Write a short version of the headline before you start production, not after the first size fails.
2. The logo hits its minimum size. Every brand has a minimum reproduction size, and the 50px-tall strips will breach it if you scale proportionally. This is what stacked wordmarks and icon-only marks in the brand kit exist for — use them rather than shrinking the full lock-up past legibility.
3. The CTA loses its tap target. In 320×50 the entire creative is 50px tall. A button with padding, a border and a label does not fit inside that alongside a logo and a headline unless the whole strip is the click area.
4. Legal text becomes unreadable. Terms, disclaimers and asterisked conditions scale down with everything else and land at four or five pixels. They need a fixed floor — around 8–10px — and a layout that reserves space for them, or they need to move to the landing page.
5. The product cutout crops badly. A centre-crop that works on a square frame will decapitate a bottle or a car in a 10.78:1 strip. Cutouts need a defined focal point that the reframe respects, or per-family placement.

6. Social is a different system

Social placements are often bundled into the same request as display, and they do not work the same way. Display is fixed pixels on a fixed placement. Social is aspect ratios re-cropped by the platform's own interface, delivered as high-resolution single assets:

Four of those eleven named placements are the same 1200×628 pixels, and two more pairs are identical. In practice social needs three masters — 1:1, 9:16 and roughly 1.91:1 — not eleven files.

The second difference matters more: social platforms overlay their own interface on your creative. Captions, profile rows, action buttons and CTA bars sit on top of the asset, and anything you place under them is gone. That is a safe-area problem display ads simply do not have — our social ad safe-area checker exists for exactly that.

7. Build in this order

1. 300×250 first. It is the highest-volume placement and the most forgiving frame, which makes it the best place to settle the composition, the copy length and the colour treatment.
2. Then one more per family — 728×90 for the strips, 160×600 for the rails. At that point you have proved the concept across the real extremes, and any structural problem has already surfaced.
3. Then fill each family out. Reflow rather than redesign; within a family this is fast.
4. Then the long tail — 250×250, 200×200, 120×600, 468×60 — only if the media plan actually calls for them.
5. Check weight before you traffic. The set is done when it passes spec, not when it looks right. Weights and animation rules are in the specs cheat sheet; the ZIP optimizer will tell you where you stand.

Frequently asked questions