Ads to Blend or Not to Blend…

Posted by David on Jan 17, 2009 in Design, Monetizing Your Site | 1 comment

Depends.  For Adsense, YPN or similar ads (especially text ads) the best thing in all of my experiments is to blend it in with your content.  I’ve had extremely high click through ratios for years doing this.  There are some people that will disagree and say that making the ads completely different colors and sticking out will get you more clicks, but I don’t believe that and so far my experiments haven’t shown that.

Also when I say blend I mean exactly matching all colors, not make it look similar in colors.  It has to look like part of your content or part of your sidebar links.  It might sound hard to use the exact colors but it’s actually very simple.

Making Your Ads Blend How-To.  The way I do it is I open up my website or template and use Visual Color Picker.  It’s an awesome freeware program that will tell you exactly what colors are on your page.  Of course you can use Photoshop or a similar program but Photoshop doesn’t let you find your colors from websites that are already online.  Anyway I open up my website and use the program, find the colors I need to blend, then make notes of each color (colors are in the #000000 format).  Then I go to my ad company let’s say Adsense for example and input the colors.  Ta…da…it’s that simple.  In under 5 minutes I have all the colors I need for my ads.

For banner ads or ads that are images I don’t worry about blending in the colors, I just make sure the ads are relevant to my site.

If you design websites, manipulate images, or anything like that Visual Color Picker is a great tool for your arsenal.  I find myself using it almost every day for different jobs.  Of course you can’t beat the price (FREE!!!).