2.1 Ad Formats: "Dress" your ads for success!

How would you like your ads served? Banners? Skyscrapers? Rectangles?Squares? What about borders and background colors?

The choices can be overwhelming. Many people let Google decide for thempreferringto stick with the default settings. Big mistake! From my ownexperience I can tell you that it's like swapping a hundred-dollar bill for aten-dollar one.

For almost one year I settled for just a tenth of what I could have beenmaking — just because I didn't bother to control the looks and placement ofmy AdSense ads.

The various ad formats, colors and their placement on the web page can bedone in thousands of combinations. You can literally spend hours every dayexperimenting with every possible combination. But you don't want to, do you?

Let me give you a few 'ground rules' that have sky-rocketed the CTR's on mytop-grossing pages:

2.2 Don't "look" like an ad

People don't visit your website for ads. They want good content.

If you make the ads stick out with eye-popping colors, images or borders,that makes them easy to recognize as ads — and people work extra hard toavoid them.

The same goes for ads that are tucked away in the top, bottom or someother far corner of the page. So easy to ignore!

If you want people to click, make the ads look like an integral part of yourcontent.

2.3 Go for text ads instead of image ads

A text ad offers many advantages over image ads:

A. With the right formatting, a text ad 'blends in' with your site content. Animage ad will not give you the same freedom with itsappearance, as the only thing you can play with is the sizeand positioning.

B. You can squeeze more text ads into the space that aconventional banner takes. People love to have morechoices!

C. Properly formatted text ads don't look like clutter. Bannersdo!

D. People hate banners and avoid them at sight. Many testsconfirm that people are much more receptive to text adsrelated with your content.

2.4 The Best Performing Ad Size

an ad. But you’ll also want them to be a particular size. Which size is that?

336 x 280 – the Large Rectangle.

Why should you choose the 336 x 280 ad block? Simple. It gets the mostclicks! My studies have shown that this format looks most like real contentadded to a page. I’ve dabbled with every size Google offers and this is thesize that consistently has the best results. Other people have told me theexact same thing. That’s all I need to know!

Second best is the 300 x 250 – The Medium Rectangle.

This ad block size is really useful when you went to have two sets of ads sideby side. They fit on most web pages just perfectly!

I would also recommend using the 'wide skyscraper', text-only ads on theright hand edge of the screen — in conjunction with the 3-way matching

If you think about it, nearly all PC users are right handed (even left-handedpeople like me control their mouse with their right hand because it's how wewere 'brought up' to use a mouse.) By placing the ads on the right handedge it's psychologically 'less distance' between your right hand and thescreen.

This 'closeness' in my opinion makes the user feel more comfortable andtherefore more likely to click through to a link. They feel more in control oftheir visit experience.

Stay away from the 468 x 60 ad block!

One of the first things people do when they sign up for AdSense is to grab a468 x 60 ad block.

Big mistake.

I have a theory about why they do this. It’s the same theory that explainswhy the 468 x 60 block does not entice clicks.

Most site owners have the mindset that when they put Google ads on theirsite, they must place the code that conforms most to traditional webadvertising. And that would be...? Yup, the 468 x 60, the ubiquitous bannerformat that we have all come to know and love and... IGNORE.

Everyone is familiar with the 468 x 60. And that’s exactly why the clickthroughrate on this size is very low, even among advertisers who useimages on their banners.

The 468 x 60 blocks screams, "Hey! I am an advertisement! Whatever youdo, DON'T click me. In fact, you should run from me as fast as you can!"In all but a few special cases, I have found the 468 x 60 ad block to becompletely ineffective, and recommend ignoring it the same way your visitorsdo.