If you are one of the regular visitors to this site, you will undoubtedly have noticed the recent style changes made to it. These have been done to get my AdSense ads to blend into the site better, for the following reason:
If you monetise your site with AdSense, Yahoo! Publisher Network or a similar contextual ad service, one of the things you will wish to do is to optimise the click-through rate of your ads, because you mostly get paid by people clicking on your ads. A tip that I got from Joel Comm’s excellent ebook, “What Google Never Told You About Making Money With AdSense,” is to match your AdSense ads to your site in three ways:
- Link titles. Using exactly the same colour and style of link titles in your site helps with the blending process. Note that different AdSense ads employ slightly different styles, but mostly they use a basic sans-serif font, such as Arial.
- Text colour. The ads will blend in better if both your text colour and the text colour of your ads match. Joel has found it best to match the colour of the ad text and the colour of the ad URL to the colour of the article text, so that the ad text and ad URL colours match.
- Background colour. Another thing that will help the ads look part of your site is to match the background colour with that of your site. Usually, having no borders is best; if you do have borders, try to make it look natural for the ads to use borders by using the same borders elsewhere on your site.
In general, the better the blend of ads into your text, the more likely it is that somebody will click on an ad you publish. This is because people are usually not looking for ads! They are very good at spotting ads, and if there is any distinction between an ad and the rest of your site, they will tend to home in on that distinction. People are usually looking for content first, and then they will look for links. If you put your AdSense ads close to your natural content and links and they look similar to the content of your site, this should improve your click-through rate.
David Thomas, The Affiliate Marketer
I agree Dave. Once I changed the colors of the Adsense ads to blend in with the color scheme of my blog, the click rate went up a bit.
Then, I went a step further and found a good photo that reflected the content of the article I was writing — and put that photo right above the Adsense block, and the click rate jumped up even further.
Good ezine, Dave.
Shanti,
Ron
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