Changing AdSense Colors - what is your experience?

[WolfLover]

Ok, well, I couldn't leave good enough alone and I decided to change the link colors and the ad size and placement on one of my sites. Not a lot of traffic, but usually good for a few bucks a day on this one.

I have another similar type site that does very well with a certain color link in the ads, so I changed that on this other site and even though it looks good and stands out, it is not doing as well as what I originally had. Much lower CTR.

My experience for ALL my sites, no matter the niche is that 336X280 works best. When I use the ones that look good on the sites like the 160x600 or 728x90 forget about it! No one wants to click on those.

It's again with the ugly sites get more clicks.

[netmeg]

I changed placements this year; it's made some amount of difference. Actually, link units took over so much more of the income, I could pretty much remove the ad units and still do just fine. I probably will when I come up with something to fill in the white space.

I like to rotate between 5 or 6 color combinations in all ad spots - for one thing, I can tell that some color combinations work much better than others. And I think it also helps combat ad blindness. So I'll have an ad block, and create maybe six combinations for it - usually green background, blue background, red background, yellow background (extremely ugly, but gets a ton of clicks) and white background with blue text and white background with red text. I put the code for each combination in a separate file, and rotate them with PHP. If you want to know what works best, make sure you add a channel for color. If you don't care, then you don't have to bother.

AdSense really should have a built in ad rotator.

[WolfLover]

Netmeg, I've never had much luck with adlinks, though I've seen many others report that they do.

When you use the green or blue or red or yellow backgrounds, are these blended or sticking out like a sore thumb?

[netmeg]

The site is mainly black text, with some red and blue on white background (think 4th of July) so yep, they stick out. The yellow ones are ugly, but they work. The rest of them don't look too bad.

[AdSenseAdvisor]

AdSense really should have a built in ad rotator.

Done. You can rotate up to 4 color palettes for your text ads. Check out this Help Center entry [google.com] to learn more. There's also a blog post called "The ABCs of A/B Testing" for those of you looking to measure results of your color palette experiments.

ASA

[WolfLover]

ASA, did you all just do this today? Just happened at the same time that netmeg wrote about it? lol

Thanks!

[tebrino]

This has being around for years. I'm using it on one channel with success

[WolfLover]

tebrino, you are saying the ad rotation has been around for years? My goodness, I've been using AdSense for years and have never noticed this!

[netmeg]

Unless I'm missing something, I'm not sure how you would attach different channels to the different palette choices this way, so as to be able to tell what's working best.

[rajivatre]

Here is the help for rotating custome palletes.
[google.com...]
But I am with netmeg I dont think you can attach channels to it.

Rajiv

[roddy]

Yeah, that built in rotation has been there from the start pretty much. However it doesn't break stats down by palette and is therefore nowhere near as useful as it could be. Hell, if there was a 'automate colours' option which let Google figure out what colours work best, just as it does with ads, I'd tick it.

[BobMorgan]

Hello Wolflover,
I have taken your advice and changed by top ad to your suggested size (I'll let you know how it works out!) Thanks for the suggestion. BOB

[edited by: incrediBILL at 8:13 pm (utc) on July 25, 2009]
[edit reason] removed URLs, see TOS #13 [/edit]

[WolfLover]

Thank you Bob,

Have a great day and wish you much success!

[edited by: incrediBILL at 8:13 pm (utc) on July 25, 2009]
[edit reason] cleanup [/edit]

[WolfLover]

Ok then, ASA, can we get these features added?

Channels to add to each rotation so we can see which works best.

The Automate Colors option which roddy suggested sounds awesome too!

[JS_Harris]

I can't get the 336X280 to pay but I just can't make myself place it up top of an article where it will shove the meat of an article below the fold either... and I hear that it pays off best there.

Link units do well in the same position. A short one placed between the title and the text works best when the links are text colored i find. Anywhere else I use colored links.

[WolfLover]

I can't get the 336X280 to pay but I just can't make myself place it up top of an article where it will shove the meat of an article below the fold either... and I hear that it pays off best there.

Again, my point is, that even though YES, it makes for an UGLY website, the ugly websites many times make more money.

I would rather have beautiful websites, but if I have to choose beautiful website = NO money OR ugly website = LOTS of money, I'm going to choose ugly every time.

[BobMorgan]

I think it looks just fine and reasonably modern (of course, I'm an old guy!) What I have done is put a full width banner on top (site name and info.) Next is a split table with text on the left and the 336x280 on the right.

[Tutable]

I usally use the Half Banner (234x60) with colors that match my site and they do pretty well. The leader and skyscraper ads have never done well for me.

Link units placed in good locations do well as they look like part of the website navigation.