Posts Tagged ‘psychology’
Are you using the best AdSense placements? Since starting our consulting service we noticed that almost every publisher screws up with proper AdSense placements. Nonetheless, placements are more than crucial for 100% traffic monetization. Repositioning solely one ad could already have a major impact on your earnings. Don’t screw it up!
As usual for every post part of our AdSense guide we include a video, explaining everything excessively. We recommend watching the videos for relatively unexperienced AdSense users. If you consider yourself an expert you should skip watching and continue reading with the straight to the point explanation below. So, where to place your AdSense ads?
Placing your AdSense ads – video
Placing your Ads the 100% proper way
As previously said, proper placements are crucial. In order to get your ads clicked you have to place them where your visitor looks at. What’s the point of an ad in the footer if your audience can get all the information above the fold?
Check out the following 3 resources. The first one is an in detail scientific eyetracking research which shows where your visitors look at. The second one, published by Google, is more newb-friendly version. The 3rd one is for forums.
All 3 case-studies are different but nonetheless suggest you the following 4 essential points:
- Place your ads in the top left
- …That’s where usually either where your navigation is…
- …Or where your site’s content starts
- Place your ads in your primary content
- Place your ads directly below the content (NOT in the footer)
What are our visitors doing?
It’s essential to place your ads right there where your visitors look at. Your visitors don’t scroll up and down several times just to find the ads (except for the nutless monkeys, which are only 0.001% of your visitors ;P). Furthermore, they aren’t interested in your ads at all.
Do you watch advertisements on television? We have to draw our visitor’s attention to the ads, or else they don’t even have the possibility to decide whether they want to click or not. When your visitors open your website they always look at the top left. It’s an habit, people always look first at the top left for the following 3 reasons:
- People got used to navigating around on websites using a navigation in the top left.
- The top Google search results are in the top left, they catch the visitor’s attention. When clicking on the link and being forwarded to your website the attention remains at the same location.
- Except for the length of the content a website isn’t much different to a book. A book is read from the top left to the buttom right (ever read a book?)
This is where the previously mentioned eye-tracking research comes into play. Look at the pictures, all the pictures show that the visitors at least once look at the navigation, which is placed in the top left usually. When redesigning your website, keep that in mind. People are used to a navigation somewhere in the top (left). Notice, that there is almost no focus on the top right or in general right. So placing your ads right there is an utterly wrong choice. Placing your ads where your visitors don’t look at is an unused click-opportunity.
We want our ads to be noticed
Place your ads in the top left area.
- Short Question: Why do your visitors open your website?
- … because they are looking for information which is provided in your content.
Thus another essential placement (extremely important!) is in your primary content:
- Place your ads in your content to make your visitor notice them
- Wrapping content around your ads (preferably ad left, content right) will get your ad 100% noticed. (Exception: read next paragraph)
- Place your ads directly below your primary content for two reasons:
- Assuming that you have good content (which we hope) your visitor’s will continue reading your content to the end. Voilá what’s there? An AdSense unit!
- As blogs and forums are getting more and more important people know that they can find other reader’s comments below the content. Those comments are usually helpful, so readers scroll down. Placing an AdSense unit there will attract attention.
Analytics together with AdSense
Tweaking placements using Google Analytics
Google analytics provide’s an handy feature: The so called Site Overlay. Using the site overlay you can quickly determine how your visitors navigate around your website and which content interests them in particular. Using that data you can adjust the placements to make your ads draw even more attention.
- Most click activity show high attention regions
- Place your ads there. Go for link units if you have used the other 3 content units elsewhere.
- Link units tend to work extremely well in your site’s navigation
- Don’t forget to blend your link units.
Banner blindness for AdSense users
Our Enemy: Banner Blindness
Yes, there is this so called phenomenon banner-blindness. It’s nothing invented by communists. Many webmasters have excessively used several banner layouts. We call them bouncers because either your visitor’s attention bounces away or in worst case, your visitor himself.
Countermeasures against banner-blindness
- Avoid web 1.0 layouts i.e. leaderboard or in general horizontal banners
- Superior CTR option: Go for rectangles, they attract a lot of attention
- Design friendly: Anything possible, should just be squarish.
- The first impression decides everything, read below.
The first impression decides everything
Opening our website our visitors don’t wait a minute to think whether they should click the ad or not. They subconsciously decide, click the ad, or not and they do so within milliseconds. Using proper placements without a good ad-design can still result in extremely poor-performance. We dedicated several articles to exactly that topic previously on DuoBlogger.
Further Resources
- Previous AdSense reviews done by us. Worth a watch, high learn factor.
- AdSense millionaire
- AdSense tips and resources
- Integrating AdSense into Analytics
- Blogging and Google AdSense
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
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
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.
Today I was contacted by Kiraly Zoltan – he asked for some tips to improve the Click-Through Rate of his Adsense ads on his website. I opened the website and noticed 2 major mistakes in the layout of his adsense units.
Bad Adsense layout
Do you notice what he is doing wrong? If not then make sure to read my post about the best Adsense colors and the hot-spot ad positons.
The first problem is that he is using a 728*90 banner. Banners are Web 1.0 – nobody clicks them anymore. They suffer from the problem known as “banner-blindness”. We got used to normal horizontal banners and do not click them anymore. Leaderboard and banner ads are out! Don’t even think about using them if you have alternatives.
If you want to get a decent CTR and not one click per year then you must work with the large rectangles. They attract a lot more attention and look less like banners as long as they are not showing an image. Replace them on your website and I am almost 100 percent certain that your CTR will improve by 1-2 percent. I have been using the banners before as well and no, they did not work for me neither!
So how do you place two large rectangles next to each other? The answer is simple, use html to create a table for your Adsense units. The code to do so is:
<table>
<tr>
<td>Code 1</td>
<td>Code 2</td>
</tr>
</table>
That will place your Ads next to each other drawing more of the visitors attention and as a result improve your CTR. Really, whenever you make a website – this code will get you a decent amount of clicks!
The next problem with his Ads is the color. He is using #FEA20F as the link and URL color. What kind of color is that? Have you ever seen someone using it before? Don’t invent new Adsense improvement strategies! Use that what works! Blending Ads with bright URL color has never worked for me and won’t do for you as well. Choose a dark blue as link color. #000080 is definately my favorite and most successful one. The reason for choosing the blue is simple: people are used to blue hyperlinks and will consequently click them more often. #0000FF is the color almost all websites use for ad-links – that’s also a problem, people got used to it and do not click ad-units in that color that often anymore! Take a darker blue as link color!
You also don’t want the readers to have a look at the URL – you want them to look on the link and click that one right away. If they look too long on the URL they will notice that it is an advertisement and probably not click which means that you do not get any money at all. Make the link color a grey like #cccccc or the same color as the text in your advertisements. So if your text is black, then make the URL black, or grey.
2 Large Rectangles
That’s what gets you the highest CTR with Adsense in my opinion. Let’s have a look what Kiraly changed. He implemented my suggestions and is now using a #021588 as link color which is almost the same as the navy-blue #000080. But what the heck? Why is he using a #21588E as URL color? That’s not the best solution if you ask me. You should make it the same color as the text-color of your Adsense unit. In his case the text-color of his Adsense unit is #424242 which means that he should make the URL look the same. That way the people tend to look and click the Link of your ad more often.
One last thing which I would suggest in case of his website is to place the Adsense units not in the middle, but more to the left. People look at the top-left corner of a website when loading the website. That is in fact the best position for advertisements. Try to allocate your Ads more to the left by adding a <div align=”left”>(your table with the adsense ads)</div> around your table. That will move them right into the so called “hot-zone” and result in a higher CTR, too.
Embed all those changes and I am more than sure that you will experience a CTR-boom. I did the same on all of my websites and believe me – my click through rate is way better now. It is like in your local shopping-center. The people arrange their products psychologically to make you buy products more often. Same applies to the Adsense ads – you want to magically make users click them! Let me know if you need assistance with the placement and look of your ads.
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Hendrik
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