The AdSense Optimization Team, which helps its publishers make their ads perform as well as possible, has released a blog post with the rule of thumb that ads that blend into your site template’s color palate tend to perform better than colors that stand out. This is exactly what we had suggested in our on AdSense formatting back in May, advice that we derived from our own testing.

The rules of thumb they suggest, which we corroborated 6 months ago, are:

• ads that blend into the page background tend to perform better (not always, but usually)
• borderless ads (or those with a light color) tend to perform better (again, not always, but often)
• try rotating the position and colors of your ads regularly (something that happens automatically if you’re using YieldBuild

We agree with these general suggestions, and would add that for ads below the fold, it might be advantageous to try a contrasting color instead of one that blends (although you won’t really know for sure until you test, or use YieldBuild to do the testing for you).

This entry was posted on Wednesday, November 12th, 2008 at 12:32 am 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.