In a previous post, we showed that ad color combinations shouldn’t necessarily be the same across the same page; some color combinations work excellently at the top of the page, for example, but are outperformed by different ones in the footer or sidebar. Testing is the only real way to arrive at the best format for each position on the page.

We’d like to challenge another piece of ad formatting conventional wisdom: matching your ads’ background and border color to the page background color will make it perform best. We ran a test on HubPages, and found certain shades of gray (the exact shades for each zone were determined by YieldBuild) outperformed white consistently. HubPages’s background color is white:

Going with your background color is probably a fairly safe rule of thumb, if you’re not equipped to test or use YieldBuild. But the figures above should amply demonstrate that relying on a rule of thumb means you’re leaving money on the table.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, April 30th, 2008 at 4:24 pm and is filed under Online Advertising. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.