Blends in but also stands out
The best practices to increase CTR is not only blending alone but also standing out quite a bit.
Joel’s site makes this point crystal clear, http://www.askjoelcomm.com/. The leaderboard comes right upfront of the screen, yet Joel does a good job by implementing a prominent image directly under ‘Ads by Google’, which is very clever in that visitors are often distracted by larger visual element from its nearby smaller ones thereby neglecting the ‘Ads by Google’ text.
Another good example of blending but also standing out is Adsense Backgrounds. It’s a method of buzz recently and claimed to be successful in bringing up CTR. Some may understandably worry about its abidance of the Adsense program policy. According to many practicers, it is approved by Google as long as the backgrounds steer clear of confusing visitors of content and ads. Take a peek at here and here. But I should really warn you before trying this out that, make a request for review to Adsense support team and see for yourself what they’d say about your implementation of Adsense backgrounds. And it’s no harm reading this post at webmasterworld.
Moreover, you can make your ads stand out by attaching carefully designed borders. Well actually they are still backgrounds, only without the fancy part. Check here for some free background border images.
There’s also a thread going on on DigitalPoint on whether to blend or stand out. Much thought and valuable ideas that I will digest just a few here. A DPer Fka200 was very generous to share his expertise:
- Layout plays an important part in Adsense CTR. Don’t be too wide but rather center your content up front in the middle with a layout that spans less than 800px. This way visitors are more easily caught with ads in their eye.
- He also clarifies what he thought would be best for different sorts of sites:
- Arcade site: image ads + text ads in small squares
- Information site (mostly text content site): blend with text
- Forums (sites recurring users interact with each other): multi-color rotator
