Customize AdSense Ads

We've seen how to best place your ads so as to make them efficient. Now let's see what else to do to in order to get the most of them.

Ad color

The coloring style of the ads may render them too obvious or barely noticed.

Stand out color theory: brightly colored ads that contrast with the rest of the page.

Risk: ads tend to be too intrusive.

Blend in color theory: similar look with the rest of the page.

Risk: ads may seem to cheat the visitor into clicking.

Whatever style may work for you make sure you make the text visible. Usually it is better to make it look like a classic link type (blue letters).

Image ads are best complimented by light backgrounds, no matter if the image is light or dark.

Ad unit style

The style you use for your ad units depends on the placement you choose:

Thus, for headers and footers the usual formats are leaderboard and banner.

Skyscrapers are usually placed on sides. The format is popular as it allows the display of the greatest number of ads and have a neat look on the page.

Buttons, squares, rectangles -- seem to have more appeal to the visitor when placed inside a content area.

Of course the best style is the one that fits best on your page. Avoid the use of formats that have been very popular and overused (banners and classic skyscrapers, especially the ones in default format, with a border), as they tend to be ignored because they are instantly recognized as ads. Integrating them into the content seem to be more effective.

Your pages will do better without colorful page elements, flashy images which distract visitors' attention. Still, if you have to use colorful images, a recommendation would be to make your ads even more attractive and colorful -- in this case you may use rotating ad colors and colors that grab attention -- and to allow image ads.

Border or no border

The universally agreed upon recommendation is to drop the borders -- borders seem to act like a barrier for the reader, may divert attention and are also stoppers because they look like classic ads, and surfers are adblind.

Remember to diversify:

• Make sure you change the default formatting of the ads -- people are blind to this type of formats.
• Make sure you change the ad formatting on each page. Keeping an unitary type of formatting will lead also to ad-blindness.