Blending your ads

[crick]

If you blend your ads within the content, should you make the ads stand our or should the colour of links be the same or very similar to the colour of text to increase click through rate?

[Fuzzyfish1000]

It's a topic of some debate. Personally, I blend with similar colours to my site. I embed the ads at the end of articles, so the user reads the article, then sees a useful, related ad. To me, that makes good common sense. I think if you make the ad obvious, and stand out, the user is more likely to suffer from ad blindness - recognise it as an ad, and skip over it. I guess it depends on the quality of your content (ie, will the user read to the end of it), and the relevance of our ads.

Just my pennies worth.

[crick]

I find a lot of people saying they get a huge proprtion of their clicks from ads placed near to the top.

I am thinking about blending a small box at the top within the coontent with 2 ads and a large rectange box at the end of an article (totalling 6 or 7 ads).

My question is this, if you blend the ads too well i.e. having the links as the same colour of the text (in most cases it would be black), will people overlook the ads because it does noot like traditional links (which is blue in most cases)?

On the other hand, having blue links against black text stands out, but maybe more of a giveaway as being an ad.

Perhaps a better compromise would be to make the links stand out slightly by picking the link colours a colour that is close to black without actually being black.

[gamiziuk]

I wish I could find a way to display the Adsense Links with a "hover" effect (turn red when you run your mouse over them). I sort of created a compromise - I put two rectangles side by side - one box I will have normal blue links, the other box will have RED links.

This helped my click thru rate. I believe it helps with the "ad blindness" problem.

[Fuzzyfish1000]

I keep the links similar colour, but not the same as the text colour. For instance, one site, we have a dark red as the site colour - used in the nav background, and as part of the logo. I use that red as the link text colour, and use black as the description colour. Those ads are displayed at the end of news articles.

We find that works quite well. Ads above the fold always perform better, but look more spammy. It's a trade-off. If your site is wide enough, embedding large ads directly into the first/second paragraph is a good idea for high-click through, although on thinner, fixed width sites, it looks messy.