Getting the colors right with Adsense

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Getting the colors right with Adsense

islandhopper

4:24 pm on Feb 25, 2005 (gmt 0)

I just added Adsense to my site and would like some advice on colors for my Adsense ads. Should I make them blend in to look more natural, as if if they were index items. Or should I keep the colors slightly different so they stand out on my page? I've done the latter thus far and no hits:
<snip>

Any help is greatly appreciated. Thanks

[edited by: Jenstar at 5:59 pm (utc) on Feb. 25, 2005]
[edit reason] No URLs as per TOS [/edit]

GoldFish

4:54 pm on Feb 25, 2005 (gmt 0)

Not commenting on your colors, but I saw that your AdSense block is preceded by the large title 'Useful Links'. This is ver much against AdSense TOS, I'd suggest to remove that title immediately.

islandhopper

5:36 pm on Feb 25, 2005 (gmt 0)

Thanks for the info - I was not aware of this.

fezziwig

5:58 pm on Feb 25, 2005 (gmt 0)

If you have no hits at all so far, I'd have to say that it's a traffic issue. If you have a good level of people coming to the site for a good reason, you'll get a good level of clickthru, no matter the color of the links.

It looks like your site is pretty new. Give it some time and once you have good traffic, you can experiment with colors and all that fun stuff.

hunderdown

6:18 pm on Feb 25, 2005 (gmt 0)

Colors and placement that "work" will vary from site to site.

But before you start experimenting, read and make sure you understand the AdSense TOS. You didn't know that "Useful Links" was prohibited, and that could have got you into trouble. There are other things you need to know too.

islandhopper

3:06 am on Feb 27, 2005 (gmt 0)

Yeah - thanks for the advice again. I went back and read the Adsense Policy. A lot of details but I think I'm adhering just fine to them now. Thanks.

DrGUID

2:41 pm on Feb 28, 2005 (gmt 0)

Some people suggest changing the AdSense links to the color of your site's links, others suggest to leave them blue (i.e. the default/traditional color of links in browsers).

After playing around with this I decided to leave the links blue as they seemed to have a better click through rate than making them red (the links in the rest of the site are red).

One thing that does seem to have a big effect is that making the page narrower (i.e. all content in a 800 or so pixel wide table in middle of page) improves the click through rates for skyscraper ads in a right hand column on the site. I guess people don't like to scroll the mouse too far when they're clicking!? I need to research this a bit more but there seems to be something in it...