To Blend or to be Bold

There's a lot of articles and forums around talking about how your adsense units compare to the rest of your pages as far as layout and palette go.

I've seen a lot of support for the blend method, where your ads color and placement blend in with your content. Having said that, there's also the camp supporting being bold and making the adsense units stand out and beg for as much attention as possible.

What I'm interested in is whether anyone has noticed any performance relationships between certain categories / keywords of content and how the ads are displayed to the reader. It could also be you're opinion on the quality & quantity of the content that shows you which method performs best for you and how to optimise for the best CTR.

Personality may come in to play, I've always been very quick to become ad-blind and sometimes am surprised of the subconcious ad filtering that goes on. To some degree adsense that blends seems more appealing, and at other times I can find the blend method too sneaky and it makes me want to leave.

Are there any general rules you have come up with for different types of content? Have you discovered which content draws audience that repond best to bold ads that demand attention. Do you think you can take blending too far to the point where it can severly impact the advertiser?

 

IMO, Blend.

I've seen one where it looked like a clown had exploded. But the rest of the site was pastel colors. I was compelled to gawk at it.

 

sites also look a lot classier when blended. and yes ive had best results with blend. Allmost nothing when I went bold.

I think users figure out that that big block of hot pink is something they dont want to look at, and they ignore it. Blended ads on the other hand just get scanned over like everything else that a user's eyes see.

 

Generally, blended works better but you should experiment. I've duplicated blended layouts that produced over 50% CTR on one site and it doesn't work nearly as well as a different format on another. I don't think there a universal "right way" just formats that usually work better. Same with ad unit size. Ad positioning seems to be pretty consistent. There is a heat map on google that shows where you should place the ads.

 

Speaking of heat maps, maybe somebody should do an eyetracking study on blended ads vs. bold ads.

Sholva, you mention that you sometimes find blended ads to be sneaky. That's my opinion for every blended ad. You might as well ask your visitors to "click here."

 

This eye tracking study is something that i thought of before where do people contrate on when looking at a site but how do we know if these socalled maps are truly based on scientific studies? Do you by chance have any idea how they perform these tests?

Do they place special goggles on peoples heads?