Psychological Adsense optimization

This is my first video post, a short video about optimizing your Adsense with psychological factors in mind. Adsense can be compared to shopping-mall psychology hence it is every important to choose the proper layout and positioning of Adsense. I experimented for more than 2 years and made the experience that a bad layout can get you 10 clicks and a good layout around 150 clicks per day.

Now that you watched the video I would like to add a short summary: the colors are very important. For me #000080 worked better than the standard title color #0000FF. If you ask me then that’s the same phenomenon as banner blindness. People get used to the colors and immediately identify your ads as real ads. Some people suggest to make the Title-color the same as the link color on your website but I made the experience that a solid blue still works best. All links are blue and that’s why blue Adsense links also perform best. Of course, make sure to test this method as well hence it could be that this method gets you most clicks on your website. There is no general formula, everything depends on your website.

Make your ads not look like ads
People don’t click advertisements unless they are super relevant, or the content is so bad that the ads are more relevant than the content. Especially the younger generation got extremely used to advertisements and learned to live with them. They are very hesitant and won’t click them unless they don’t notice that they are actually clicking an ad. Of course, this also means more false-clicks but that is another topic. The first step would be to change the text color of your Adsense units to the color of the your website’s text.

Make the borders go
Yes, we want our ads to look like content. To achieve that we need to make sure that both border and background color are the same as the background color of your website. In fact, there is no reason for using borders. They don’t look good at all and won’t even attract clicks because they make every ad look Adish. I never used them and will never do so which means that you shouldn’t do as well.

Hide your URL-Color
The URL color makes every ad look very Adish and as said above: adish looking ads aren’t clicked. When people see another URL standing somewhere then they will notice that they are actually facing an ad and are hesitant to click. We want people to only look on the Adsense tital – because that’s where they should click on. The first impression counts and the title is most important for the click. If we are able to draw all the attention to the title then the people will click it because the title looks like a link plus is related. However, if we let the user look on the “ads by google” or the URL then they will notice that they are actually looking on an ad and won’t click. Make the URL color the same as the text. For me a grey (#CCCCCC) or the same color as the Adsense unit’s text color perform best.

Change the positiongs
It is very important to move your Adsense units to where your users actually look at. Adsense introduced a heatmap at which location ads perform best. The heatmap is based on psychological factors as humans tend to look to the left of the page first and then move their attention to the center and then to the actual content. Those locations are the top-performing locations. If you are able to put your ads in your content, or on top of your site (like me with D3scene in the video) then you will get a lot of clicks, simply because people will look at the advertisements. Never use any sort of footer advertisements. “Gurus” recommended to do so in the Web 1.0 era, but that is no longer up to date.

Conclusion
Summing it up you should have learned that colors and placements of your Adsense units are two major factors for the CTR (click through rate) of your ads. Using large rectangles looking like content with no surrounding borders is the way to get most clicks. Blue link colors are performing best. Make sure to test your changes for at least a week to see whether your changes were good or not. Adsense requires a lot of testing. I never stop testing, there is always something that could perhaps up the revenue a little.

Related posts:

1. Which Adsense colors?
2. Best AdSense Colors
3. Adsense premium publisher