Ad Color

At Adsense Support they offer advice as to what color palettes will most likely bring more clicks to the Adsense ads. This is what Google AdSense Support says:

“If you want the biggest revenue impact for the smallest effort, we recommend optimizing your color palettes. Choosing the right palettes can mean the difference between ads your users will notice — and click — and ads they’ll skip right over.

We’ve outlined a few strategies below that are designed to decrease ad blindness, the tendency for users to ignore anything that’s separate from the main content of your site. By making these changes, you’ll be making your ads more visible to users. The goal isn’t to confuse users into thinking ads are content, but to get users to see and read the ads so they can click on those that interest them.

Let’s briefly define the three techniques you can use to design color palettes that will be successful for your site:

  • To blend, make the background and borders of your ads the same color as the background of your page where the ad is placed. If your site has a white background and you don’t want to spend a lot of time choosing ad colors, we recommend using our pre-designed Open Air palette.
  • To complement, use colors that already exist on your site, but don’t match the background and borders exactly where the ads are placed.
  • To contrast, choose colors that stand out against the background of your site. Contrasting is recommended only for sites with dark background, so we suggest using a palette with white background, white borders, and blue titles. For most color techniques, we recommend using colors for your ad text and links that already exist on your site. For example, if the links on your site are all green and your text is black, use green links and black text in your ads as well. Since most users are accustomed to seeing blue links, you might also try using blue.In general, use common sense when choosing your color palettes. If your site’s main colors are pastels, don’t design ads that are all primary colors. Users won’t click on ads that are visually offensive.

    Even if your ads are designed perfectly, the techniques above might not work for a couple reasons:

  • Does your site have mainly repeat visitors?
    If your visitors come back day after day, they’ll likely become blinded to the position of the ads over time, regardless of the ad colors. Try rotating colors or occasionally switching the location of your ads on the page.
  • Does your site have a lot of ads and busy content?
    If your site is filled with ads or packed with loads of competing content, chances are that you’ll need to use more visually arresting colors to make your ads catch a user’s eye. If the techniques above aren’t getting results for you, try using more prominent palettes

Tip for making your ads visible: open your page and give it a quick glance, putting yourself in the mind set of a regular user. Do the ads draw your attention, without being garish? Would you be likely to notice and read them, or do your eyes glide right past them? Try to find a balance between ads that overwhelm your content and ads that your users won’t even see. Imagining you’re a user, look at the examples below. Would you notice the ads in these implementations?

Tip for testing color palettes: add variety and freshness to your ads by rotating between several color palettes. All you need to do is choose the Use multiple palettes option when generating your ad code during the Choose Ad Format and Colors step in the ad code setup, then hold down the Control or Command key and select up to four color palettes. ”


That's coming straight from the AdSense Source itself. You can choose to use their recommendations on ways to maximize site revenue with Adsense, but just for fun, I'll give you a few more opinions.

Some webmasters have reported that they had the most success with brightly colored ads which were in vast contrast with the color scheme on the rest of their web page or web site. Others say they've had the most success with blended ads, in perfect color scheme with the rest of the site. In my opinion, placing AdSense ads that blend with the other colors of my web page and correlate to the style throughout the rest of my site, have given me the best results. The reason for this is probably because the AdSense ads that come up on each page are relevant to the content on the page, and in turn may appear to the user that the ads are additional content. Trial and error is probably going to be the best method of testing which strategy works best for your individual web site.