Friday September 03 , 2010

Posts Tagged ‘colors’

Optimizing AdSense: The Best URL color

Mark

 

Apr 17 |12:30

Did you know that a slight change to your ad’s URL color can already result in 10 percent more earnings? This post is dedicated the the often ignored URL, we will be discussing the best URL colors for your AdSense units. The expert helping me with this issue is Mr. Parrot. Thanks for your time!

AdSense Parrot

Mr. Parrot says: Blend your URL color!

I couldn’t agree more with Mr. Parrot. You will need to merge your ad’s design with the surrounding design of your website. This is crucial because – who likes looking at advertisements? People will not read through yours ads when they realize that they are being monetized.

Typically AdSense publishers resort to a Green URL color. The word typically already indicates the problem. Something that all people use results in a pattern. We may not use a pattern with our ads, patterns result in banner blindness and banner blindness results in no money for us.

Do the following experiment: Look at an AdSense unit with a green URL color, ask yourself, where are you looking at? For me that’s the URL color. I instantly see that way that I am looking at an ad. The best URL is actually no URL. Unfortunately it’s not allowed to remove the URL, but we can use a trick discussed below…

The best URL colors

but we can apply a trick, by blending the URL we make it somewhat invisible.. That’s done by coloring your URL the same as your AdSense Text color. In case you are using a black for the Text color you’ll also need to use that exact color as your URL color. Check out the change in performance for some time, you will see a difference.

Another option we sometimes suggest is to go for a greyish URL color, that has somewhat a similar effect to using your unit’s text color.

This post is part of our Complete AdSense guide, check it out for further tips.

 

AdSense Checklist

Mark

 

Jun 8 |17:09

Have a website with no AdSense on it? But if you are considering to do so, then we’ve compiled a list for you so you know exactly what to do and don’t miss out on anything. You can also make a visit to our Complete Adsense Guide on DuoBlogger.

Step 1: Signed Up?

Already signed up with AdSense? If not then read our sign up for AdSense post and follow the steps, as well as tips, there.
If you already have an AdSense account then you’re good to go.

Step 2: Review your possible placements

Review your own website where you want your ads to be placed.
If you think logically here:

Do I want to maximize my earnings?

  • Inside your content
  • Mainly above the fold
  • Aggressive placements (ever visitor MUST see the ads, every visitor that has not seen a ad is a potential loss of click)
  • Place link units at your site’s navigation menus
  • Place all possible ad units possible per page. (depending on how many advertisers there are for that specific niche)
    • 3 Content Ads
    • 3 link units
    • 1 or 2 custom search boxes
  • General niche site? Consider placing the ads only on subpages and not on homepage as that will only give you unrelevant ads
  • To solve that part, if you’re using a blog, go for 1 post on the homepage
  • Ads on individual pages instead? -> more relevancy

or:

Do I want to keep my website user-friendly?

  • Ads should jump out more, meaning other URL/text/title color, making it look more like an advertisement (let the visitors choose to click the ads if they are interested in it, don’t draw attention to them instead)
  • Placing your ads at positions which already contain links to other resources (bottom of page or post)
  • Below the fold and right sidebar
  • Make sure that the ads are not in the way for browsing visitors
  • Ideal for webmasters that want to use AdSese to cover the costs of their website

Step 3: Creating the Ads

Did I choose the right ad formats?

  • Make sure you avoid Banner Blindness, by making sure you don’t choose leaderboards or horizontal ad formats
  • Make use of Rectangles/Squares
  • Am I using Link units? They always bring in a buck or two
  • Use image ads or not?

Did I choose the right colors?

  • Am I using the standard ad colors? (better for non-profit websites)
  • Am I blending the ads using the same colors as my website does? meaning:
    • Same title color as the link colors, usually something like: standard #0000ff or navyblue #000080
    • Same text color as my websites content colors, mostly black #000000
    • Using the same URL color as text color? (light grey is also an option)
  • Is the background color the same as my websites default background color?
  • Never ever use borders, period.

Am I tracking each ad unit per page (and per website) with channels?

  • Did I create a channel for every ad unit?
  • Did I include a description for every channel? (why? see further below)
  • Are the channels targetable? (same reason, see below)

Step 4: Implementing the Ads

This part is completely up to you :) If you are unsure how to add AdSense to certain parts of your website then drop a comment below or send us an email.

Step 5: Review your website again

Are you happy with the placements? Are the colors ok? Are the Ads not too aggressive (within the TOS)?
Tweak a bit in the coding whenever you feel like AdSense in not yet placed correctly.

Step 6: Promote your Website using Google Ad Planner

  • By creating your own promotion page for AdWords user to placement target your channels (which are linked to your ad units – that’s why I told you to include a description for every channel, let the advertiser know which place the ad is and how it will perform vs other places on your website. This simple system from Google could massively increase your CPC by a whole lot.
  • It’s best if you read our Google Ad Planner blog post, as it’s more detailed
  • Example: D3scene

There are 2 ways to quickly promote your website to AdWords users: place a link to your Ad Planner page at the bottom or top of your website. And search google for your keywords and therefore advertisers and send them an email instead to placement target your website. Give them a good reason to do so, else they will just ignore the mail.

Step 7: Watch, Learn and Enjoy

Now that you completely integrated AdSense into your website, you can site back and watch your money flowing in. However it does not stop here, there are always ways to increase your earnings – which is good – but it sucks up time.
Because you, if you followed step 3, integrated channels into your ads, you can monitor how each is performing and tweak the placement/colors a little.
AdSense comes down to experimenting experimenting and experimenting. There’s no way around it, if you want maximum profit from it. Try a different set of ads and placements each week and see how they perform, you can always revert back to your original placement set.

Some other things of note:

  • Do not, and ever, click your own ads, even with proxies or whatever – Google will know in the end and won’t pay out, simple. (you might even want to consider keeping your websites private from your family as they often want to help you get money and click the ads which might get you banned) – it’s nice if they want to help you, but you must think about the advertisers as well. They have to pay for those clicks and they aren’t getting any conversions for it. Which could lead to Smart Pricing.
  • When in doubt of your placements/colors or anything else from AdSense, consider taking in AdSense Consulting from us.
  • Stuck on increasing CPC and CTR? Your only option for increasing your revenue is increasing your traffic. Try targeting other keywords to drive in more traffic.
 

Best AdSense Colors

Mark

 

Mar 29 |17:00

Talking about the different AdSense units it’s now time to teach you how to properly design your AdSense units. The colors are extremely important as they decide whether your visitor will click on your ads or not. Within this post we will discuss the best AdSense colors with the solely purpose to boost your CTR. This post is part of our complete AdSense guide.

Warning: If you want a long explanation with some information how we work then watch the video. Else, skip the video and continue with our direct to the point text explanation below.

Sorry for being offtopic sometimes, we tried not to make it a standard guide, but a little more entertaining (basically we just recorded what we were doing that evening).

Which AdSense colors not to use

We have shown some examples in the video, including one of ProBlogger’s posts. The idea is to make your ads look like content. Are you watching advertisements on television? Nobody likes to do so. Whereas if the ads would actually look like if they were part of the show you would probably continue watching them and eventually check them out later. Same applies to AdSense, making our ads look obviously like ads makes your visitor not click them. If we are however able to make our ads look like actual content then our visitor reads through them and in some cases clicks them, simply because he is interested in the topics. That’s why relevant ads are so important, your visitor is interested in your content and consequently also into the relevant ads.

So, don’t make your ads look like ads. Don’t use colors which don’t match your website, don’t use borders. Don’t use bright colors. Ask yourself, do you enjoy watching the ads, or is the layout annoying? Make background and border of your AdSense units the same color as your website’s background. This is very important since you want to blend your ads into the content, resulting in a higher CTR. The worst AdSense colors are those that make your ads look like ads.

  • Don’t use bright, unnatural colors. Act like you were the visitor, do the colors annoy you?
  • Don’t use borders.
  • Color your AdSense’s units background the same as your website’s background.

Focusing all attention to the title

We want our visitors to have a look on the AdSense unit’s title and nothing else. Most of the people don’t even read through the text, they just see the title and then subconsciously decide whether they will click on the title or not. Make your title look like a link is one thing you have to ensure. To do so you will have to resort to the standard link color used on the internet. People got used to blue links, so you will have to use blue as title color of your AdSense units. There is room for customization as long as the color still is somewhat blueish. The best AdSense title color is the one that makes your visitor subconsciously think that the link is part of your content.

We see a lot of people using bright URL colors which draw the attention to the URL instead of the title. That’s a big problem, especially because the URL reveals that it’s an ad. Everyone knows instantly when seeing the URL that it’s an ad, simply because every advertising program does so. It would be best of course if we could completely remove the URL, but that’s not allowed by AdSense’s TOS. There is however one thing we can do, we can blend the URL with the text of your AdSense unit. To do so, color the URL the same color as your AdSense unit’s text color which in most cases is black. Several people also reported that grey seems to perform as good as black, so test whether #CCCCCC or your AdSense unit’s text color performs better for you. The best AdSense URL color is either your AdSense unit’s text color or grey. Test it for one week.

  • Avoid other title colors than blue.
  • Navy-blue seems to work best.
  • Color the unit’s link the same as your website’s font.
  • Grey is an alternative URL color.

Blending AdSense with your content

The ideal AdSense ad

The ideal AdSense ad

Because we want to make our Ads look like content, we have to blend it with the content. We’ve shown some bad examples in the video, which attract the visitor’s attention but reveal that they are dealing with an ad. Result is that they won’t click. So to make our ad look like the content, we have to adopt our website’s design. Color your AdSense unit’s text the same as your website’s default font-color. That will make your AdSense unit look like it was part of the content. Black is the color used for most websites, we can only recommend you to stick. So when redesigning your website go for a black font color and either Arial, Times, or Verdana as font. Black is known to be the best performing AdSense text color.

Adjust the fonts of your website to Arial. By using the same font the AdSense units have we can make our ads look even better like if they were part of the content. The default AdSense font is Arial 12px, using that on your website should improve your CTR even further. AdSense now allows customizing your font to either Arial, Times, or Verdana. So, if you don’t want to use Arial then you should go for the other two alternatives. The best AdSense fonts are those that match your website’s font.

  • Changing the font’s color and layout will blend your ads.
  • AdSense text color should be your website’s default font color
  • Black seems to perform best, so make your website’s font color black.
  • Adjust your website’s font to the AdSense font. Arial 12px.
  • Customize the font during the set up process if you don’t want Arial.

If you need further assistance then drop a comment or open a thread in our AdSense forum.

Further resources

 

Best Google AdSense Colors

Hendrik

 

Oct 17 |11:23

Your choices of colors for your ads are a big part of what will decide weather or not your visitors will click or not. Google already offers an exquisite color palette for you which are located in your administrative tools area. Utilize this to your full advantage of this tool! You can use this palette to tweak your ad look to match your website or blog, and essentially catch your visitors’ eye. Make sure that the border of your ad coincides with your blog’s background color, this will make your page look ten times cleaner, and will welcome your visitors to start clicking.

You also want to make sure that you pick a background color for your ad that matches your page’s color. You want to make it look like your ad is actually part of your page, its part of your page’s web content; this will capture your visitors’ attention. This process is all about sitting down and playing around with your colors and your color scheme. Its all about experimentation, pick and choose colors, and see them there, if you are not getting any ad clicks, play around with the color scheme again, it may take a bit of changes in color here and there to get the right scheme and the right feel for your site. You need to make sure that you choose colors that your visitors will respond to.

Once you find the right colors do not just let them sit there for weeks or months, this will enable your visitors to once again get bored with your ads, and you can and will lose regular visitors. Change it up every so often, find your own set of colors that work and try to create various sets, that way you can use a system of rotation between colors and ads. Now it is onto link color, people tend to think that the usual, everyday link color blue is a bland color, and they might try to change it up. Do yourself a simple favor, and keep things the way that they are. Blue is the best color when it comes to link color. It’s easy to associate the color blue to a link, because that is what visitors are used to looking for when they look for links. Keeping your blue link color also keeps your site from looking tacky or too flashy. Stick to what you know, and stick to what works.

Another thing to keep in mind and try to prevent is ad blindness. Ad blindness happens when you choose and display the exact same color palette for your ads that are in the same location. AdSense allows you to choose four different color schemes that can be rotated throughout your ads and your pages. Again, this is something you definitely want to take advantage of. You don’t want your ads to simply wash out because your visitors just look right over them as if they are not even there. When it comes to choosing your colors, be sure to choose your colors wisely, take all of this information, and use it, because it will help you in the long run. If you follow what works for you, and what colors work for your ads, and your blog page, then you will be doing yourself a huge favor, and saving yourself a headache.

This is not something to go about doing the hard way, listen and read get all of the information and advice that you can use to keep yourself from getting in a world of pain and possibly debt. You are out to make money, and Google adsense helps you make money, choosing the right blend of colors for your site and your ads will enable you to make money in the long run. So will choosing weather or not you want to use the cost-per-click method, or the cost-per-action method?

 

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