How I increased my earnings.

Hopefully this will not kill them!

[OptiRex]

Regular forum readers will know of some of the problems I, and many others, have had recently with the Adwords changes therefore I decided to experiment and make drastic colour changes to my sites.

Why colour changes? Well, it was from an overheard conversation one night a couple of weeks ago between a couple of Joe Public surfers and I just happen to hear one of them say "Click on the blue underlined link, that's the one you're looking for."

Hmmm, I thought, my sites are what I would describe as completely blended, some would probably say maybe too much, with the Adsense links all the same as the site colours and absolutely NO blue hyperlinks.

So I considered a colour re-design and experiment with specific sites to see what happened. I changed the Leaderboard to a red, black and blue and Adlinks solely to traditional blue hyperlink.

The experiment was very encouraging therefore last weekend I implemented it across 110+ sites and the following have been the improvements for seven full days with more or less the same volume of unique visitors.

Impressions +10.39%
CTR +18.18%
eCPM +34.49%
Earnings +48.52%
EPC +17.04%

Let's hope that me posting this doesn't kill off these improvements and it just goes to prove that no matter how much we may think we know that a simple thing such as a traditional blue hyperlink could have such a drastic effect!

[donovanh]

My principle site uses blue links as part of the site.. Has anyone had success in altering their adsense links colours to a colour *other than blue*?

Personally I tried changing the links to the colour theme of the section of the site the user was in, but noticed little or no improvement.

Perhaps blue is best.

[MediaSpree]

Yup, people are conditioned to know that blue=link. Thank you yahoo!

[bts111]

Great idea! Thanks for sharing.

I have to go and change some pages ;)

[mzanzig]

Fully agree, links should be blue and underlined. And visited links should be purple, by the way. This is an old optimization guideline for Web usability, and I use it across my site.

With regards to AS ads, I also recommend to put the text between headline and URL (i.e. google_color_text) to black, even if the complete ad is clickable by definition. But this is something you might want to hide by offering some "calm areas" between the headline and the link.

[Ankhenaton]

Done 0000FF :)

I also removed borders a week ago and it was amazing.. went a bit back now but still an increase.

[r3nz0]

i have another one;

2 block under each other with one blue colored links and the other; Purple, (the standard visited color)

:)

[spaceylacie]

It doesn't work for everyone. I've tried blue links, then changed them all back to red when I started losing money.

[greenway]

I have also tried different colours over 6 months.
I found that with repeat visitors it pays to change the colours every 3 weeks or else the CTR starts to fall.

[ann]

You're apt to find any color links on my site because boredom sets in pretty quick with me and I like to see different colors on the links.

Never has seemed to hurt though as people navigate my site pretty well ;) and I have gotten many compliments on how easy it is for them to find their way through it.

Ann

[humblebeginnings]

The exact color doesn't really matter imo.
I believe the point is that people who keep coming back to your website need to be entertained or else they won't come back. So you give them fresh content all the time to catch their attention. If you leave the ad lay-out as it is, your ads will not catch attention anymore. So I change the color and lay-out of my ads about every month. Blue, Red, Black, Green, whatever. I have the same effect with every color change; higher CTR for about a few weeks. And then it's time to change the color again.

[SlimKim]

OptiRex, we appreciate your willingness to share. Maybe you could update us in a few weeks.

I wonder if the underline factor alone is responsible.

I know one really large adsense publisher that uses what i feel is a repulsive dull green for most links. But it works.

I know another who uses 4 ads per page with multiple colors.

[Eltiti]

Test, and you will prosper! (In particular: "A/B test", or "split test".)