Customizing Adsense Ads

Customizing Adsense Ads for better performance mainly involves choosing three aspects: What Color to use for the Ads? What Ad format to use for the Ads? Should you use borders or not? Let us discuss each of these aspects: Ad Color: By properly chosing the colors you use with your ads to match the theam of the over all website, it is possible to make the ads appear as an integral part of the website and less like Ads. This improves the chance of a visitor clicking on those. The five parts of the ad which you can change the color on are: The border color of the ad The background color of the ad The link color of the ad The url color of the ad The text color of the ad It is hard to generalize what colors should you use. The generally agreed theory is that the Ads should blend with the overall theame of the site and should compliment the content. You can bleand the Ads with the rest of the content: By not choosing a border, that means the border color should be the same as the page background color By choosing the Ad background color the same as the page background color And choosing the text, url and link color in such a way to suit the existing colors used on the page. Ad Format Depending on where you want to place your Ads you choose the Ad Format. See our article "Different Ad Formats" for details on currently available ad formats. Let us see some of the general guidelines of using these Ad formats. Leaderboards and Banners are horizontal formats and are suitable to place on headers and footers. On the verticle sections like left and right nav bars, you may use narrow or wide skyscrapers When you want to places ads around or within the main content of the page, choose Buttons, Squares and Rectangles. Best style is determined based on how it fits best on your page. Using formats that have been very popular and overused (like banners and classic skyscrapers with a border) may not work very well in most cases as they tend to be ignored because they are instantly recognized as ads. Integrating them into the content gives good results. Sometimes choosing image ads may work well and compliment your site if your site is purly content based with minimum graphics. Borders The commonly agreed recommendation is to not use borders. This means you should choose border color as the same as page background color. A border seems to act like a separator between the Ads and the content which is not a good thing in most cases.