What color palettes are the most successful?
If you want to get the highest impact with lowest effort, we recommend optimizing your color palettes. Choosing the right palettes can distinguish between ads that will be seen - and click - the ads that users will ignore them directly.
We list some strategies below that are designed to reduce the ad indifference, ie, a tendency to ignore any user that is separate from the main content of the site. By doing these changes, your ad will be more interesting for users. The goal is not to create the user as the ad content, but allows users to view and read the ads before you can click on the interesting things for them.
Strategy colors should be used on your site will vary depending on ad placement and background color ad location. See table below for a quick reference on the advice of our strategy to be successful in your site.
Ads in the content of ads near the content
Ad bright background or complement Samar Samar
Dark background ad Samar, complement, or contrast Contrast or complement
Here is a short description of the 3 techniques can be used to design color palettes that will be successful in your site:
* To disguise, make the background color and border of your ad with the background page ad location. If your site has a white background and you do not want to spend a lot of time to select the color for the ad, you should use a palette Place Open our standard.
* To complement, use colors that already exist on your site, but do not identify with the color of the background and border that are in the exact location of the ad.
* To make a contrast, select a light color with the background of your site. Contrast is only recommended for sites with dark background, so you should use a palette with white background, the border is white, and blue titles.
For most color techniques, you should use the color of your ad text and links that already exist on your site. For example, if all the links on your site green and black text, use the link also green and black text for your ad. Because most users to see the blue link, you can also try using blue.
In general, use a rational way of thinking when choosing a color palette. If your site's main colors are pastels, do not design ads that have all the primary colors. Users will not click on ads that are not visually interesting.
Although your ad has been designed with the perfect, but the above technique may not be successful for several reasons:
* Does your site have the most repeat visitors?
If your visitors to return frequently, they will tend to ignore the ad's position over time, regardless of the color ad that is displayed. Try to change the color or occasionally change the location of your ad on the page.
* Does your site have a lot of ads and content that is full?
If your site is filled with ads or content that contains a lot of competing, you may need to use a color that is visually more interesting for your ad to attract users. If the above technique does not provide results for you, try using a light palette
Tips to make the ad interesting: open your page and see at a glance, place yourself in a position as a regular user. Does your ad attract attention, but not excessive? Do you want to view and read the ads, or if your eyes move directly through? Try seimbangkan between excessive ads against your content with ads that are not even users will see. Imagine you as a user, then see the example below. Whether you will consider the application of this ad?
Tips for testing color palettes: add variety and freshness to your ad through with several color palettes. You only need to set the option Use multiple palettes when creating the ad code on the Choose Ad Format and Colors in the ad code setup, then press Control or Command key, then select up to 4 color palettes.
Wednesday, February 4, 2009
What color palettes are the most successful
Firefox add-ons can help streamline the process of creating webpages
Do you regularly work with your webpages and AdSense implementation, tinkering with HTML or PHP and creating images and code on the fly? If you do, Firefox add-ons can help streamline the process of creating webpages. Here are some in particular that you may find useful:
ColorZilla
This extension tells you which RGB or hex color you're looking at, to help you make sure you created that logo for your business with just the right shade of blue, for instance. The tool also creates custom color palettes while you're browsing, so you can use them in your designs.
MeasureIt
Like the name says, use this add-on to measure the width and height in pixels of any element you see on a webpage. It's very simple to use, and you can define how much space you have left for that AdSense ad unit on the right-side. :)
IE View
Do you frequently use Internet Explorer to check how your website renders on that browser? This add-on allows you to view the way any page would look if it were opened in IE, without the hassle of opening another browser. You can also see pages that aren't Firefox-friendly much more easily.
WebDeveloper toolbar
This all-in-one toolbar gives you quick control over things like JavaScript display, form and CSS elements, screen resizing (so you know what your website looks like in smaller resolutions), HTML validation, and much more.
Hopefully, we'll soon have a similar set of add-ons for Chrome, and we'll be sure to share them with our readers.
What are your favorite add-ons for web developing? Leave us a comment below.
Expect a tax form
This is a friendly reminder that we're currently preparing and mailing tax forms to eligible U.S. publishers and will be sending them out by the end of January. Please keep in mind that not all U.S. AdSense publishers will receive a tax form from Google.
How do you know whether to expect a tax form? We'll send you one if:
- You submitted a Form W-9, are not a corporation, and were paid at least US $600 in 2008, OR
- You indicated that you are subject to backup withholding and had taxes withheld
If you won't be receiving a tax form, but you still have questions on how to report the payments you received from AdSense, please consult your local tax advisor.
Optimization Your Price
It can be tough to sell advertising in today's economy. It can be even tougher to figure out how to maximize revenue for each ad impression. Google Ad Manager, our hosted ad serving and management solution for publishers with small direct sales teams, was built to address these issues. Ad Manager helps publishers maximize the value of their ad impressions while reducing ad serving costs.
We enlisted the help of Nandu Ramani, Engineering Lead on Ad Manager, to talk about one of Ad Manager's features that helps publishers maximize the value of their ad impressions: AdSense price optimization.
What is the AdSense price optimization feature in Ad Manager?
Many publishers don't sell all of their ad inventory. In these situations, publishers might not serve any ads or might serve less valuable house ads, therefore losing potential earnings. The AdSense price optimization feature in Ad Manager provides an automated solution so publishers will always have an ad to serve in an undersold situation.
We also wanted to make sure that when a publisher runs multiple ad networks they are always showing the most valuable ads. For certain individual impressions, AdSense can provide the highest paying ad. When that's the case, an AdSense ad shows. When that's not the case, an ad from the highest paying alternative network will be shown.
How does the price optimization feature work?
In order for AdSense to compete against other ad networks, a publisher must manually enter a CPM for each configured network. We use the CPM entered to determine in real time, on a per impression basis, whether or not an AdSense ad will pay a publisher more. If the AdSense eCPM is greater than the CPM value entered for competing networks, then an AdSense ad will be shown. Additionally, AdSense will never compete with a publisher's directly-sold inventory. To enable the price optimization feature, all a publisher has to do is check a box when setting up inventory.
As a publisher, how much will I earn using AdSense price optimization?
It's hard to predict; the best way to find out is to opt your ad slots into AdSense price optimization and see how AdSense performs for you. With AdSense price optimization, Google will always serve the highest paying AdSense ad available, and will never lower the price of the winning ad, or reduce your earnings from it.
When should I use the AdSense price optimization feature?
We suggest you opt all of your ad slots into AdSense price optimization. AdSense ads will only appear if they're able to pay you more than the alternatives, so there's no risk of losing revenue.
We also recommend that you opt your premium placements into placement targeting so AdWords advertisers may specifically choose to bid for space on your website.
Sounds good. How do I get started?
If you already have an Ad Manager account, go into the inventory tab in your account. For each ad slot where you want to enable AdSense price optimization, click on the name of the ad slot, check the 'Maximize revenue of unsold and remnant inventory with AdSense' checkbox, and click 'Save.'
If you don't already have an account, get started today at http://www.google.com/admanager. Then, when you're setting up your inventory, make sure to opt all of your ad slots into AdSense price optimization.
For more information about AdSense in Ad Manager, check out the following video.
Hot Success Story
AskDaveTaylor.com offers tech support Q&A on subjects ranging from mp3 players to Linux to AdSense. We recently chatted with founder Dave Taylor about his site and his AdSense experience.
Inside AdSense: Where did the idea for your 'Ask Dave Taylor' site come from?
Dave Taylor: There's a great backstory, actually. I've written twenty different books on various business and technical topics, including Teach Yourself Unix in 24 Hours and Creating Cool Web Sites. Each time I'd publish, I would be sure to include my email address and other contact information. Problem was, people would send me email with questions. Lots of email with questions.
Over time I found myself answering the same questions again and again and realized that there had to be a better way for readers to search through an archive of already answered questions. I tried an online discussion forum, but it didn't really work very well (though it did give me an excuse to write my own bbs system from scratch, but that's another story!).
Then early in 2003 this "weblog" thing started to gain a bit of traction. When I first saw how it was built upon the concept of an author writing entries and others being able to add their comments, I realized that it could be ideal for my needs.
IA: Why did you join the AdSense program?
DT: As a businessperson, I had always viewed my website as a cost center. I mean, you had to pay for hosting, you had to pay for graphic design, you had to pay for Internet connectivity, etc. That was just my mindset. It was a marketing expense and its purpose was lead generation for my consulting and book sales.
In mid-2003 my friend told me about this "AdSense thing" and said that he'd been experimenting with it and making some money. So I finally decided that I'd try putting some adverts on my site (I'd been on the Web since 1996 but never had any adverts on my sites until that point). That first month I made more than I expected by simply adding the AdSense adverts to my pages and was surprised as heck. Then it started to grow...
That's when it hit me, that my website was becoming a profit center for my business, not a cost center. I began to pay more attention to the site and published new content on a more regular basis. Within a few months I was earning enough to pay my mortgage, and today my website, and specifically Google AdSense, is a primary revenue stream for my entire company.
IA: Can you talk a little about your experience with optimizing your ads?
Once I began working with AdSense in earnest, I began to wonder how ad placement, size, color, and design would affect earnings, and how to balance my desire to offer a splendid user experience with the need to simultaneously maximize revenue.
Enter A/B testing. I read and talked with many AdSense publishers, tried what they suggested and what had worked for them, fiddled with my own ideas, and generally tried every variation I could imagine to see if I could improve the click-through-rate of my ad blocks. The greatest boosts I saw in clickthrough rate were when I moved the advert into the middle of my articles, when I made sure it had the same color background as the material around it, and when there wasn't a solid border or other visual element to make the ad stand out from the surrounding content.
Truth be told, I've also paid close attention to the sites profiled on the AdSense blog, looking at how they integrated ads into their own design and trying to emulate their successful techniques on my own site.
IA: Glad to hear you used the blog! Any other optimization tips for our readers?
- Focus on generating really good content that meets real user needs.
- Design your blog so that there are minimal distractions for the user.
- Wrap your blog entry around the Google ad unit and put the ads where users will see them, though make sure you have them visually distinct from your content: trying to trick readers into clicking on ads is a definite no-no and anti-reader too.
Do you also have an AdSense success story to share? Let us know.