Picking colors for your website and ads is one of the most important decisions you can make. You want to make sure to draw subtle attention to your ads, making them seem valuable but at the same time blended into your content making them look like they belong. A lot of websites use strong graphical elements that catch the eye but distract the user from adsense ads. When you use adsense you want to play close attention to your choice of fonts, font size, colors, images and other visual aspects of your pages layout.

Another great tweak is removing the border of your ads. Ads with borders make your page appear cluttered and distract visitors from the text. They also make the user aware that its and ad and visitors will ignore all of your ads. Just choose the same color as your background for the border and it will blend right into your website. Make sure you do the same thing for the ad’s background, to make everything blend nicely. This will make everything neater and free up a lot of space.

Blending text is another important factor. The text size, font, and color of your ads should match that of your websites main content. If you do this it will look like the ads are part of your site and not something from an advertiser. This will have a huge impact on CTR (Click through rate).

Usually I am an advocate for setting your ads title text color to match the color of the headers or links on your website. I have read around different places and found that a lot of webmasters chose to use blue. It seems that users have come to expect website links to be blue. I’ve tested this on a couple of my websites and found that it does indeed increase CTR in some cases. You’ll have to experiment for yourself, but that’s what increasing adsense revenue is all about, testing.
Another trick which main seem obvious to some is to change your ad’s URL text color to match the rest of the text in the ad. That way all the text blends together and it makes it seem less like an ad. Another small tweak that will combine with other tweaks to equal a higher CTR.

Another strategy used by webmasters is to create deliberate color mismatching. You can deliberately mismatch your ads colors and styles, but keep it in the top of your page. This change creates two different zones for your website. The first zone is the top of your website above the main site banner. The titles and colors should match colors in the banner graphic heading. The end result is that these ads look like key menu or control points for your site and are more likely to get clicked. The visitors will feel like they are visiting another major part of your website.

Check back next time, I will discuss ad Placement, where to put your ads.