Using Colors To Increase Your Clicks

4.1 Design Your Website To Highlight Adsense
I once went to a fashion show where each model wore the exact same black outfit for the entire duration of the show. Boring? Hardly! The show was intended to showcase platinum jewelry, and the outfits were designed to enhance the jewelry — instead of distracting the audience. You don’t have to make all the pages on your website identical (or black). But you do want to make sure that the look of your page draws attention to the ads — and makes them appear as attractive and as valuable as platinum jewelry. Many websites have strong graphic elements that catch the eye — usually at the expense of the AdSense units.
4.2 Make The Border Go!
You can more than DOUBLE your click-throughs with this one simple tweak! Even before the Internet, ads in newspapers and magazines were marked off with a thick, heavy border. No wonder borders and boxes have come to symbolize advertising messages.
Ads with prominent borders make your pages look cluttered. They distract the eye from the ad text, while marking off the ad blocks from the rest of the content.
With just one simple click, you can match the color of your ad's border with the background color of your web page. When the border blends with the background, it frees up loads of space. The page looks instantly neater and the ads look more inviting. Make sure you also pick a matching background color for the ad. The ad's
background must match the page background on which the ad will appear. If the ad appears in a table, match the table background color with the ad background color.
The key is to blend the background and border color with the page, so that the text looks like an integral part of your web content.
4.3 Text Is Design Too!
That's right: the text size, font, color and the color of your ads must match the other text elements. If the text color of the ads is the same as the text in the body of your page, it’ll help the ads blend into the site and make the reader feel that you’ve endorsed them. And if the size of the font in the ads is the same as the size of the main body of the content, it will have the same effect: they’ll look like part of your site and not something brought in by Google.
4.4 Blue Is Best
So you want to get rid of the border. You want to get your ads the same color as the text on the rest of your page and the background matching the background color of your Web page. But what about the link itself, the line the user is actually going to click? What color should that be?
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That’s an easy one: blue. I used to say that all the text in the ad should match the text on your page, including the link. After seeing an article about the benefits of keeping the links blue — and testing extensively — I don’t say that any more. The logic is that users have come to expect links on websites to be blue. Just as they expect stop signs to be red and warning signs to be yellow, so they expect their links to blue. That means people are more likely to click on a blue link than a link in any other color. The line in your AdSense code that sets the color of your link is the one that says: Google_color_link = “#color”; “#color” is the hexadecimal number for the color you want to use. You should make sure that number is #0000FF. Keep your link blue and you can experience an increase in click-throughs as high as 25 percent!
4.5 Where Did My URL Go?
You can change the color of your text and you can make sure that your links scream, “I’m a FREE road to where you want to go!” But you still have to display the URL. It’s one of Google’s rules. But you don’t have to display it in a way that people can see it. One legitimate trick to make the click-through link less obtrusive is to change the URL display color to match the text description color. Now the link will blend in with the text description and the eye will be drawn to the hyperlink instead of the URL. Google provides these tools for you. Why not use them? Note that the 728 x 90 leaderboard and the 468 x 60 banner do not display the URL line by Google’s design. It is not a mistake and you will not get in trouble for the URL not appearing with these ad blocks. It’s just the way it is.
4.6 Deliberate Mismatching
When it comes to choosing colors, I recommend 3-way matching and using blue for the links. But there is another strategy that you can use. You can deliberately mismatch your ad colors and styles, provided you keep it to the top of your page. This distinction generates two powerful 'zones' and therefore two types of experience for the visitor. The first zone is always at the top of the first page, above the main site banner. The titles and text colors match colors found in the banner graphic heading. (Important — the URL links are hidden, so only certain text ads will allow you to do this.) The end result is that these ads, placed above the banner graphic look like key control points for your site and are just more likely to be clicked. The visitor feels that they are visiting another major area of that site.
4.7 Changing The Look Of Your Ads
The strategies I’ve provided in this chapter will all help to improve your clickthrough rates. That’s what happened when I used them and it’s what happened when other people used them. But one of the most important strategies you can use with AdSense is to experiment. If you find that a slightly larger ad format gives you better results, for example, then obviously, you should use the bigger one. In the past, changing your ads meant copying the code and pasting it into your site again. Today, things are a bit easier than that. When you create your ad code, you’ll be asked to give that code a name. Make sure that name tells you exactly where the ad will be placed and its format. Whenever you want to change the way an ad looks, you’ll be able to pull up that code on your AdSense center and make the changes. Your ad will be updated automatically within the next ten minutes. Unless you want to change the size of your ads. That you’ll still have to do manually by pasting in the new code.
5. How To Maximize Visibility And Response
5.1 Ad Placement: Where To Put Your Ads?
Location is everything. The world's best ad won't deliver if it isn't visible in the first place. But after much experimentation with Google AdSense, I know that the most visible ads aren't always the most effective. In fact, they're likely to get ignored as 'blatant advertising'. What does work is wise placement. Put them where your content is most
5.2 Go With The 'Flow'
Identify the reading patterns of your visitors. What draws their attention first? What makes them 'click'? Like I said, you want to put your ads in areas that draw your visitors in with interesting content. There’s no point in putting your ads in some out of the way place where no one ever looks. Your users will follow your content, so you need to make sure that your ads follow that content too. Look at the design and layout of your webpage, identify the places that you think most of your users look — and mark each of them as a likely spot to put your ads.
Google actually offers a pretty neat tool to help you identify where your users are most likely to look. Their heat map at https://www.google.com/support/adsense/bin/static.py?page=tips.html sums up the options pretty well:
5.3 Above The Fold
One general rule on the Internet is that people spend most of their time on a site “above the fold.” The first thing people do when they reach a website is to absorb as much information as possible before they start scrolling. The part of the page that they can see without scrolling is called “above the fold.” That’s where you want your ads. The number of links that appear above the fold affect how likely people are to click on your AdSense ads. That’s why more ads doesn't always mean more money! Google always puts the top-paying ads on the top and the lowest-paying ones at the bottom.
If you have a stack with three or more ads, the cheaper ads might steal attention away from high-paying ads and clutter up your website. You don’t want ads and links competing against each other. If you want to increase your earnings per click, remember: Less is More! And that’s particularly true above the fold.
5.4 Using Tables
I’ve already mentioned that one of the principles of a high click-through rate is to make your sites blend into the page. The more you position your sites to blend into the page, the better your click-through rate will be. One very neat way to help your ads blend into the site is to place them in tables. In the example below, Chris Pirillo again skillfully dropped his AdSense into a < table > for a clean and attractive look that turns AdSense into a new focal point.
5.5 Complementing Your Ads
Everything I’ve discussed so far has been about placing your ads where your users will be looking. That’s pretty easy. But there’s an alternative strategy, which can be very powerful: bringing your users to your ads.
You have to be careful here though. Google forbids you from saying to users “Look over here and click on the ads... I want the money.” And that’s reasonable. But with some clever design work, you can still guide your users to look in that direction.
The rule to remember here is that elements attract eyes. When a user loads a Web page, he’s always going to look at various things on the page, not just the text. That’s especially true of images, which is why one popular strategy was to place pictures related to the content of the ad right next to the ad unit. Google has now got wise to that. It’s changed its terms to forbid that practice specifically. Not surprisingly, when Google brought out that rule, it created a mild panic among publishers who rushed to change their page layouts. It didn’t help that Google doesn’t specify how far images should be from the ad units. The company just says that the images and the ads should not be lined up “in a way that suggests a relationship” between them. That’s vague enough to give Google plenty of latitude to ban publishers who think they’re doing nothing wrong. Fortunately, I haven’t heard of anyone being banned for failing to move their ads, and I suspect that you’d get a warning letter before any action was taken. So if you can’t put related images next to ads to draw attention to them, what can you do?
I’ve already talked about placing a text ad unit next to an image ad unit. That’s one strategy you could use.
You could also place an unrelated image next to an ad unit. Again, as long as there’s no suggestion of a relationship between the image and the ad unit, you’ll be safe.
For example, at SafetySurf.com, I put a link unit at the top of the page. It’s above the side bar, which is where many people put link units, but it’s also directly beneath the icon.
People are always going to look at the icon. When they look at the icon, they’ll see the ads.
There are all sorts of ways you can do this, but probably the best method is to first place your ads and then think about which images you can place near them.
Of course, you don’t just have to use images. You could also use a “Submit” button, a “next” link or anything else that users will have to look at on your page. A search box for example is an excellent spot. You know your users are about to look for something and click away. Why not offer them some of your own options. There’s a good chance that pulling your users’ eyes in this way will increase your click-through rates.