Using Colors To Increase Your Clicks

1 Design Your Website To Highlight Adsense

I once went to a fashion show where each model wore the exact same black
outfit for the entire duration of the show. Boring? Hardly! The show was
intended to showcase platinum jewelry, and the outfits were designed to
enhance the jewelry — instead of distracting the audience.

You don’t have to make all the pages on your website identical (or black).
But you do want to make sure that the look of your page draws attention to
the ads — and makes them appear as attractive and as valuable as platinum
jewelry.

2 Make The Border Go!

You can more than DOUBLE your click-throughs with this one simple
tweak!

Even before the Internet, ads in newspapers and magazines were marked off
with a thick, heavy border. No wonder borders and boxes have come to
symbolize advertising messages.

Ads with prominent borders make your pages look cluttered. They distract
the eye from the ad text, while marking off the ad blocks from the rest of the
content.

3 Text Is Design Too!

That's right: the text size, font, color and the color of your ads must match
the other text elements. If the text color of the ads is the same as the text in
the body of your page, it’ll help the ads blend into the site and make the
reader feel that you’ve endorsed them.

And if the size of the font in the ads is the same as the size of the main body
of the content, it will have the same effect: they’ll look like part of your site
and not something brought in by Google.

4 Blue Is Best

So you want to get rid of the border. You want to get your ads the same
color as the text on the rest of your page and the background matching the
background color of your Web page.

But what about the link itself, the line the user is actually going to click?
What color should that be?

That’s an easy one: blue.

I used to say that all the text in the ad should match the text on your page,
including the link. After seeing an article about the benefits of keeping the
links blue — and testing extensively — I don’t say that any more.

The logic is that users have come to expect links on websites to be blue. Just
as they expect stop signs to be red and warning signs to be yellow, so they
expect their links to blue.

That means people are more likely to click on a blue link than a link
in any other color.

The line in your AdSense code that sets the color of your link is the one that
says:

Google_color_link = “#color”;

“#color” is the hexadecimal number for the color you want to use. You
should make sure that number is #0000FF.

Keep your link blue and you can experience an increase in click-throughs as
high as 25 percent!


5 Where Did My URL Go?

You can change the color of your text and you can make sure that your links
scream, “I’m a FREE road to where you want to go!”

But you still have to display the URL. It’s one of Google’s rules. But you don’t
have to display it in a way that people can see it.

One legitimate trick to make the click-through link less obtrusive is to change
the URL display color to match the text description color. Now the link will
blend in with the text description and the eye will be drawn to the hyperlink
instead of the URL. Google provides these tools for you. Why not use them?

Note that the 728 x 90 leaderboard and the 468 x 60 banner do not display
the URL line by Google’s design. It is not a mistake and you will not get in
trouble for the URL not appearing with these ad blocks. It’s just the way it
is.


6 Deliberate Mismatching

When it comes to choosing colors, I recommend 3-way matching and using
blue for the links. But there is another strategy that you can use.

You can deliberately mismatch your ad colors and styles, provided you keep
it to the top of your page.

This distinction generates two powerful 'zones' and therefore two types of
experience for the visitor.

The first zone is always at the top of the first page, above the main site
banner. The titles and text colors match colors found in the banner graphic
heading. (Important — the URL links are hidden, so only certain text ads will
allow you to do this.)

The end result is that these ads, placed above the banner graphic look like
key control points for your site and are just more likely to be clicked. The
visitor feels that they are visiting another major area of that site.


source : www.joelcomm.com