Novak's blog is about web design, making money, blogging tips, interesting pictures

Here I am with another article about Google’s AdSense advertising program. In this article I will talk about how choosing the right colors can affect your CTR (click-through rate). With these pointers you can at least double your AdSense CTR. To see my previous articles click on these links Get rid of AdSense public service ads and Get AdSense high paying ads on your website.

Remove the border

Ads with borders make your page looks cluttered. They distract the eye from the ad text. Google provides color palette in your AdSense setup area. You can change your ad’s border color to match your website’s background color. When the border blends with the background, it frees up loads of space and the ads look more inviting.

Make sure you pick a matching background color for the ad. The ad must have the same background as page. If you have ads on different places on the page, make several palettes, to style the ads appropriate.

The key is to blend the background and border color with the page, so the text looks like an integral part of your web content.

Font style

Google won’t let you change the ads font style or size. So what can you do about it. If you can’t beat them, join them! The only good idea that I can think of is to change your websites font style and size to match the ads font. Google uses Arial font in different sizes for different ads. You can see some examples for my blog www.novaksblog.com on the picture to the left.

Here’s an example for medium rectangle:

Title text
font: bold 11px arial;
text-decoration: underline;
color: #669933;

Description text
font: 11px arial;
text-decoration: none;
color: #383D44;

URL text
font: 10px arial;
text-decoration: underline;
color: #326EA1;

As you can see, I blended the border and background with the page and changed text colors to match the content. I use blue color for links because blue is default color for links since the beginning of the HTML and because I use blue color for my links in sidebar too.

But will the blue link make visitors click more? Yes! The logic is that users have come to expect links on the websites to be blue. Just as they expect stop signs to be red and warnings signs to be yellow. You don’t have to use default blue link color #0000CC, rather change link color to match your website’s design, but try to make it blueish

As you can see I use different style for my ads in sidebar, because the white background that I use on my content ads wouldn’t match sidebar background.

Hide the URL

If you don’t want to display links, you can always change the color of links to match the color of description text.

Note that the 728 x 90 leaderboard and the 468 x 60 banner do not display the URL line by Google’s design.

Conclusion

Now you know how to style your ads to improve CTR. These methods are tested and proved to make better results, so I would really advice you to implement them in your AdSense ads style.

You can post comments here if you have any questions or if you want to share something about AdSense.

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