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Google Adsense Tip

June 18th, 2007 by John Hok

Many times when you go onto a site with Adsense you see the same type of ads over and over again. Over time users tend to succumb to something many people refer to as “ad blindness”. This is when you’ve seen the ad in the same place for such a long time that you eventually learn to ignore them. This happens many times on forums.

I just wanted to share some of my personal tips to combat ad blindness.

Rotating Colours
I just discovered this simple, but useful tip that allows your ads to pick from a random set of colours that you sepcify.

Code (javascript)
google_color_link = ["000000","FFFFFF","F0F0F0"];

Setting your colours like that in the code will allow your ads to rotate from those 3 colours randomly. Add or remove as many colours as you like. It’s best to change minor things like the URL colour or title colour in a subtle manner. You don’t want your ads to be a rotating block of hyper bright colours like pink or neon green where the background constantly changes between these colours. This will just make your site look ugly. Remember, subtle changes!

Image Ads
Adsense has an option to allow image ads to be displayed. I say, use it! The odd image ad mixed in with the text ads gives the ad unit a nice change. Users might get thrown off by this slight change and might be more inclined to click on the image ad. Also the visual images from an image ad are better at attracting attention from users.

Alternative Ads
Don’t just limit yourself to Google Ads. Use the ad unit you have creatively. Rotate your own ads in there. You can advertise events going on your site or that you are planning. Advertise some of your other sites. If you have one big site and one smaller one, you can leverage the traffic from your bigger site to advertise your smaller one. This way you still get a variety of ads but they still benefit you.

Rotating Position
This is a good one sometimes. Don’t be afraid to move the ad unit around. After all if you move it around, it’s harder for users to get accustom to where the ads are and this is a great way of combating ad blindness.

Well that’s all I’ve got to share with you for now. I hope that you can use these tips and incorporate them into your own sites to hopefully help increase your ad revenue.

Big question is why don’t I do this on JohnHok.com? This blog was never meant to be a means of revenue so I could care less about increasing the CTR on the ads located on this site. Plus it takes extra effort to incorporate these well. Effort that I don’t have just now.

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19 Jun 2007 at 3:47 amNathan

I didn’t know about the rotating colour thing for Adsense. So thanks for that

Some great tips there!
19 Jun 2007 at 10:30 amBen Cass

Great advice John! I tried implementing some of these tips on my content sites, it’s been good so far!
23 Jun 2007 at 4:10 amKay

thanks for the tip! will be using this.
30 Jun 2007 at 9:38 amCarl Pei

Hey John,

What plugin do you use to display the code?
07 Jan 2008 at 6:02 amAjith

Hey John can you please change my blog address to the new one which is http://www.exnol.com
25 Jan 2008 at 7:01 pmJohn Hok

Sorry for not replying folks.

Better late then never.

@Carl: The plugin I use is called Dean’s Code Highlighter which can be found here:
http://www.deanlee.cn/wordpress/code_highlighter_plugin_for_wordpress/

@Ajith: Please refer to my newest entry about linking details.