To border or not to border...

For me, it makes no difference.

[Sunflux]

Yes, I've seen the case studies where companies have significantly improved CTR by removing borders and having the ads blend in with the background, but in a couple tests I've done - one week with borders, one week without, back with borders, then without - I saw absolutely no difference in any statistics.

However, interestingly before the test I preferred skyscrapers with borders (placed in vertical columns already a different color than the rest of the page) aesthetically, but after the test I really prefer the ads to simply blend in with the background. This is especially the case when Google doesn't have a full complement of 4 ads to serve - which hasn't been a problem for the last 3 months, but has suddenly cropped up again in March.

With no border, you can't tell that there SHOULD be more ads, and everything looks more complete. Note that this wouldn't be the case if your ads are embedded in content or have stuff below them, as you'd get a large blank space, but for me this works nicely.

[ken_b]

It really depends on the type of site, site design, target audience etc.

What works great for one may not work well at all for others.

I took the borders off on mysite and made the background color match the base site background color. The result was a significant drop in CTR and earnings.

Changed things back and presto.... results returned to where they had been before I did the blend-in thing, or better.

My advice would be to keep trying different combinations untill you find what works best for you.

[danny]

I've been using a layout with no borders (in the AdSense code), but with some borders added on a surrounding DIV - top and right borders for banners and leaderboards, just a left border for skyscrapers.

I think that looks elegant on my pages, but they're probably unusual in having a lot of whitespace on them.

[mickmel]

I just changed our ads from matching the color scheme (blue highlights, etc) to completely blending in the background colors, and our CTR went up noticably. Not a huge jump, but looking back on the stats it's very obvious when the change was made. It's held up at the new level, too... :)

Mickey