Probably the number one advice given when it comes to increasing revenue from Adsense is to blend the ads into the content. In most cases, blending is the best thing to do, but that’s not always the case.
Take the case of a site that has children as an audience. In this case ads that stand out, with brightly colored backgrounds, have a much higher CTR then the standard ads that look like text.
Another case, that I haven’t tested yet, is showing ads to webmasters. I don’t care how well the ads are blended, most webmasters will spot them a mile away. In the last twelve months, I was fooled only once by an ad as far as I can remember, and it was a video ad, when they first showed up.
Which makes me wonder. What ads are better to show if you have as readers advanced webmasters? Blended ads that most will ignore anyway, or ads that stand out and are well targeted and interesting to them? You know what ads I find myself clicking? Image ads that say something that interests me. Not text ads, not well blended ads, but images, exactly the thing I’m not using on any of my sites. So, to me it seems that if you have as readers people that make money online and know everything about blending and Adsense, the best thing is to make it an image, and to make it visible.
But, since I only use Adsense here as a placeholder for direct ads, and I don’t use any large sizes on this blog, I can’t really test this theory. If anyone has any experience with areas where blending produces worst results then making them obvious, please let me know in the comments and I’ll update this post.
The best tip might be to blend in 9 cases out of 10, but people also say that you should experiment to see what works best with your audience and design.
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