Most effective color scheme on white BG?

Chosing the right adsense colors

[paulk]

I was wondering if anyone here is interested in sharing their experiences with color schemes for the adsense banners?

I am currently running white on white with pretty good CTR but not what it once used to be.

Anyone here tried any color scheme over a white background with noticeble CTR increase?

[DennyTang]

The same colour as the regular text you use on your website. If you use blue as your link colour, use blue as the google link colour.

[level80]

I found that the same colour border as the background colour on your site (eg white on white) helped improve CTR.

[Broadway]

Absolutely white on white. Doing this and repositioning the ads from the side of my pages closer to the middle almost doubled my CTR.

[Born_User]

I used to have white/white, but I PROMISE, changing the bg color of the skyscraper to the header color nearly doubled my CTR.

I have a blue header, with white content. I now use a skyscraper ad with the same color blue background and border as my header. With yellow text and white URLs, it really looks like the adsense ads are part of my natural site navigation.

To the less sophisticated users, I am certain they often think it's part of the site navigation. I really try to do that; to make the Adsense layout merge into my site naturally, as though they are to pages within my site.

[morpheus83]

Yes white on white with color same as your text color boosts your CTR. What about using whacky colors what effect it has on CTR? Like black background with Yellow text.

[hunderdown]

I'm not comfortable with the idea of making the ads look like part of your own site's navigation....

What I have found is that a strong contrasting color can help to draw the eye to the ad, though it should fit in with the color palette of your site. You'll need to test on this, but on my site, which is text-heavy and thus displays as black/blue/purple, making one of the three different text elements red increases the CTR.

[AZEvil]

I have found that no matter what color scheme my sites have, these ad colors perform the best (out of about 30 different combinations I've tried...including white border on white background):

border: 333366
background: FFFFFF
link: 000080
url: 008000
text: 000000

They may or may not work as well on your sites as my designs typically have a more subtle color scheme rather than anything that really sticks out. I usually get about a 2% higher CTR with this color scheme than colors that match the site and hide the borders.

[DamonHD]

Hi AZEvil,

Those colours look very close to the defaults to my eye; is this a joke and I'm being slow, or are you saying Google has it very nearly right by default?

(I guess they've spent enough money researching the colours...)

Rgds

Damon

[AZEvil]

It's not a joke...Google isn't stupid ;)

[daku]

When i changed the color scheme to a very contrast one my earning doubled but CTR dropped a little bit.