3.1 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 thempreferring to stick with the default settings. Big mistake! From my own experience I can tell you that it's like swapping a hundred-dollar bill for a ten-dollar one.
For almost one year I settled for just a tenth of what I could have been
making — just because I didn't bother to control the looks and placement of my AdSense ads.
The various ad formats, colors and their placement on the web page can be done in thousands of combinations. You can literally spend hours every day experimenting 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 my top-grossing pages:
3.2 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 to avoid them.
The same goes for ads that are tucked away in the top, bottom or some other far corner of the page. So easy to ignore!
If you want people to click, make the ads look like an integral part of your content.
Today's visitors are blind to banners, mad at pop-ups, weary of ads and skeptical of contests and giveaways. So how do you win their confidence? Simple. Don't make your ads look like ads!
Here are a few simple choices that zoomed my CTRs to incredible heights:
3.3 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. An image ad will not give you the same freedom with its
appearance, as the only thing you can play with is the size and positioning.
B. You can squeeze more text ads into the space that a conventional banner takes. People love to have more choices!
C. Properly formatted text ads don't look like clutter. Banners do!
D. People hate banners and avoid them at sight. Many tests confirm that people are much more receptive to text ads related with your content.
Fig 3.1 This banner ad stands out, but will it get clicked? Dave Taylor, best-selling technology writer and AdSense partner, stands up for text ads in this article at:
http://www.free-web-money.com/000449.html
You can read more of his AdSense articles on this page.
To compare the look and feel of the different ad formats, there's nothing like Google's official AdSense guide at:
https://www.Google.com/AdSense/adformats
3.4 The Best Performing Ad Size
So you’ll want to use text ads and you’ll want them to look like anything but 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 most clicks! My studies have shown that this format looks most like real content added to a page. I’ve dabbled with every size Google offers and this is the size that consistently has the best results. Other people have told me the exact 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 side by side. They fit on most web pages just perfectly!
I would also recommend using the 'wide skyscraper', text-only ads on the right hand edge of the screen — in conjunction with the 3-way matching I talk about in chapter 4.
If you think about it, nearly all PC users are right handed (even left-handed people like me control their mouse with their right hand because it's how we were 'brought up' to use a mouse.) By placing the ads on the right hand edge it's psychologically 'less distance' between your right hand and the screen.
This 'closeness' in my opinion makes the user feel more comfortable and
therefore more likely to click through to a link. They feel more in control of their 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 a 468 x 60 ad block.
Big mistake.
I have a theory about why they do this. It’s the same theory that explains why the 468 x 60 block does not entice clicks.
Most site owners have the mindset that when they put Google ads on their
site, they must place the code that conforms most to traditional web
advertising. And that would be...? Yup, the 468 x 60, the ubiquitous banner format 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 clickthrough rate on this size is very low, even among advertisers who use images on their banners.
The 468 x 60 blocks screams, "Hey! I am an advertisement! Whatever you do, 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 be completely ineffective, and recommend ignoring it the same way your visitors do.
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