Tips to increase CTR (and revenues)

[gorfmeister]

I read every thread in this forum until a few months ago. I just recently came back and got caught up and read a very simple piece of advice from one message that has resulted in a 50% increase in CTR and revenues ... remove the borders from the ads and use a white background (or match the background of your site). Thanks to whoever posted that great tidbit.

Then I scanned the threads for other great insights and couldn't easily find any. I'm sure some of them have been discussed before, but I was thinking that everyone could collect all their tips into this one thread for easy reference.

Some things to ponder:

1. Are there other color palettes that work even better?
2. Which is the best placement (top above the masthead, below the masthead, embeded within your content, left or right)?
3. size/format ... is the 2 ad format always the worst performer? Which of the 4 ad formats work best?
4. Are there general guidelines you can use based on the design of your site?

Here's something we do:

On our site, we manually remove Adsense code and replace with an alternative ad-serving network from pages where Adsense displays ads that don't match or give PSAs. This is time consuming (it takes a couple of hours) and must be done on a regular basis (once every 2 weeks), since ad inventory is constantly changing, but this has increased our CTR about 30% (and also improved the revenue earned from the other network). Obviously this only makes sense if you belong to another ad network.

[europeforvisitors]

I just recently came back and got caught up and read a very simple piece of advice from one message that has resulted in a 50% increase in CTR and revenues ... remove the borders from the ads and use a white background

Isn't that a violation of the Google AdSense TOS, which forbid modifying the code?

As for tips for increasing CTR, I think a better idea would be to focus on increasing revenue. Create more pages on more different subtopics, and you'll be creating more opportunities for ads, clicks, and earnings.

[JohnKelly]

You can make the border the same color as the background, effectively making it "disappear". Not against the TOS, since their interface allows you to create such as color theme.

[tonyriley]

I thought changing the border and the background colour would seem obvious, and I immediatly did it so the ads blend in better. Although my site is far too small for me to see any difference in clicks, lol.

[div01]

[webmasterworld.com...]

[gorfmeister]

Isn't that a violation of the Google AdSense TOS, which forbid modifying the code?

You misunderstood me. We do not display AdSense on some pages. We display ads from another provider instead. We have to manually inspect every page on our site to see what ads AdSense is serving and if they don't provide a good content match, we remove AdSense from the page.

[tombola]

if they don't provide a good content match, we remove AdSense from the page

I noticed on my site that many pages with mistargeted ads are now showing good targeted ads, so I'm glad I did not remove the Adsense code ;-)