Using rotating colours on AdSense

how do you do it with link units?

[londrum]

Does anyone know how to get rotating colours on link units?

I can do it for the normal text ads, but for some reason they don't let you do it for the link units.

[BrandNewDay]

Londrum, giving your ads rotating colors very much sounds like drawing attention to your ads. Do you agree with this?

[edited by: BrandNewDay at 8:06 pm (utc) on May 28, 2008]

[purplecape]

BND, it's a built-in feature when you set up your ads!

If Google were concerned that it drew undue attention, under their new stricter approach, they'd have removed that option, wouldn't they?

I think the idea behind it is to combat ad blindness, and I can imagine it might be effective on a site where visitors tend to view several pages. I've tried it and NOT found it to be effective, but I don't think it draws undue attention...

[londrum]

it seems like they have removed the option for link units though (if it was ever there?). and left it in for normal text ads.
not sure why they think there is a difference between the two.

[netmeg]

I do it with PHP, on ads *and* link units. I've never used the AdSense multiple-palette thing; actually never noticed it was there. Does it allow for separate channels for each palette? If not, how do you know what's working best?

[BrandNewDay]

BND, it's a built-in feature when you set up your ads!

Sigh... I have been away for too long... Much apologies.

[edited by: BrandNewDay at 2:48 pm (utc) on May 29, 2008]

[himalayaswater]

No,

You need to use php, perl or what ever your server support. multiple-palette thing is without channels.

After, years of testing blue and green (default) format works best with me.

[netmeg]

The best I can do is show you how I do it with PHP. Say I want to test red, blue, green and purple link units.

I get the code for each link unit (making sure I assign at least one unique channel to each), and paste it into four separate files:

greenlinks.php
redlinks.php
bluelinks.php
purplelinks.php

Then I paste this code (or put it in a file and include it) where I want my links to go:

<%

$x = rand(1,4);
switch($x) {

case 1:
include $_SERVER['DOCUMENT_ROOT']."/redlinks.php";
break;

case 2:
include $_SERVER['DOCUMENT_ROOT']."/bluelinks.php";
break;

case 3:
include $_SERVER['DOCUMENT_ROOT']."/greenlinks.php";
break;

case 4:
include $_SERVER['DOCUMENT_ROOT']."/purplelinks.php";
break;

}
%>

This will serve up the four colors pretty much evenly, and after a while you can run a channel report and see which seem to be working best. For me, red and blue are always winners, purple is kinda so-so, and for some reason, nobody likes green on my site.

[himalayaswater]

Nice and clean php code.

There is also A/B testing approved by Google. The main benefit is Google analytics provides more data about visitors and A/B testing ad version. You should try out A/B testing sometime ...

[londrum]

the problem is i cache my output, so rotating them with php is only going to change them once a day at best.
...think i'm going to have to fire off an email to google and see why they don't let us do it.