AdMoolah News and Views

AdSense allows you to customize the color palette of the ads that are placed on your site. There are five different color elements on each ad: Border, Background, Title, Text and URL. The colors that you choose can affect how often the ads are clicked, which directly effects your earnings.

There are two main schools of thought when it comes to the color palette of ads: 1) make them blend in with your site, or 2) make them stand out.

Blending In

The thought behind blending in ads with your site is that people will not be able to identify them as ads right away and have a tendency to look at them more often. To make your ads blend in, make the borders of the ad and the background color of the ad the same color as your web page’s background. Then make the Title and URL of the ad the same color as links on your page. Finally, make the text of the ad the same color as the text on your page. Doing this will give the ads a very natural appearance on your page.

Standing Out

The other school of thought contends that ads that stand out from the rest of the page will get noticed more often, and therefore they will be clicked more often. There are many ways to choose a color palette that stands out, but it’s usually best to stick with something that is complementary to your overall website design. You don’t want to have an ugly site just for a few extra clicks per day!

I have experimented with ads that blend in versus ads that stand out and found that the ads that blend in had a click through rate of about 30% higher than those that don’t. Not a huge amount, but definitely worth trying out. I encourage you to experiment to see what works best on your site. Use the comments feature of this blog to tell us the results of your own experiments.