You might have read everywhere on the internet about tweaking ur adsense code – about the colouring patterns. What colours give you the most of clicks and which ones give you just pennies.

I was going through a few of them on ezine articles and was bit disappointed to see how similar every article read. All of them were non-practical, dream like and false. In the sense that none of them really explained the practical way of doing it – just promises about dollars and big incomes overnight! Take a back seat and look at it – doesn’t it all sound a bit to exaggerated?

Here’s my perspective on adsense colours(tweaking the code) and some clarifications on the false information I read on the internet.

I read in one of the articles –

“Then I remembered reading an article once that discussed the psychological
impact of colors on the human mind. I started researching everything I could
find on the subject.
After a lot of reading, many tests and periods of watching my clicks go up and
down, I found the one color combination that seemed to work the best.
Testing previously done at supermarkets had revealed that the same product
could pull more sales from just changing the colors of the label. What were
these colors? Red and yellow! The combination of these two colors has an
immediate impact on the person who sees them. They make your eyes stop and
focus. They pull your eyes right to that part of the page. They grab your
attention! I’m not sure exactly why the combination of red and yellow does this,
but it does. On one of my sites, I changed my Adsense ads to a bright red
border and a yellow background with black text and URL.
My click through rate more than doubled with just that one simple change.
”

What a pity! In how many sites have you seen read and yellow adsense box? Not even a few? Not surprising.

Now don’t think that I’m getting personal with this guy – he may be right.

My argument is that – tweaking adsense colours and its efficiency is completely dependant on two factors – 1) the website target audience and 2) Turn-around time.

This guy may be right – he might have managed to earn few bucks tweaking the code to red and yellow! But it is an exception, if my guess is right. Let me explain this with the factors mentioned above.

1 – Target audience.
Before tweaking the colours, your first job will be to find out who your target audience is. For example, if you have a website on parenting and child care – then your target audience is probably expecting women, women in general and soon-to-be dads probably. You don’t count kids as your target audience – do you?

I would argue that - rose/pink colour text links and dark red titles on the google ads will be more attractive than a “masked to site colours” ads or a pale/light colours.

This is not psychology but common sense, ladies love red/pink colour and identifies with it more than any other colour.

Now if the site was a gaming site – with game reviews and downloads – your target audience would be teen or young at heart people. For them, a techno combination of colours would be more preferable – right? Say black and grey or yellow?

2 - Let’s see the second factor – Turnaround time.

By turn around time I mean – the average time taken for a visitor - right from visiting the website to clicking on an ad.

For example I visit a website, at 5.12 pm read the articles and while doing so gets caught in an ad – clicks on it at 5.18 – therefore, my average turn around time is 6 minutes.

Now, find out how your website is designed? Is it intended for browsing through(less time spend) or stay using it(longer usage time). From my experience, I’ve noticed that blogs have a higher usage time than email sites. Would you disagree with me if I say that you spend 10 mins accessing your email – say gmail, while spending hours together reading blogs?

Therefore I suggest that sites with lesser usage time should use brighter ads – so that visitors – who are unlikely to sat tuned into your website, get out of it - through the ads. The exit function will happen in about 5 mins or so and all of those exit functions are converted to clicks on ads – by using the brighter coloured ads – that will catch their attention like no other!

But, in a website that has a higher usage time – or higher turn around time, like for instance blogs – DONOT use bright colour ads – they will only blare out that they are ads and shout – DON’T CLICK ME !

Blog users or longer time taking viewers are likely to read the articles completely at their comfort avoiding the distractions – so don’t let your ad be one, mask it similar to the article using colours that match the blog and let them appear in between the posts. So that the viewer don’t get distracted – all the while, finds a break in reading the ads and if interested in the content, will click the ads!!
The point I’m making here is that colour codes are crucial in deciding the cilickability factor of a website. But it depends on the theme, viewer type and turn around time for the site. And for each of the factors there are different colour schemes and placements for ads that are applicable.

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