Deane at Gadgetopia experimented with a new format for her Adsense ads – no borders – and discovered one of the best ways of increasing CTR:
‘If you have Google Adsense on your site, here is the best piece of advice I can give you: don’t put borders around your ads. I had a border around my skyscraper banner on the right here, so it sat in its own little box.’
This simple move made a substantial difference to CTR and no doubt a corresponding difference to overall earnings.
Of course each blog is different depending upon the overall design – but this is a tactic I use on most of my sites pretty successfully. However if you do keep in mind you might get a bit of flack from it – check out the comments on the above post and you’ll see that some are ethically opposed to it.
Found via WorkBoxers
Maybe because its a long day but I’ve got to note that the only way to make the borders go away is to set them to the same colour as the background, strangely enough it took me several minutes to work this out, it might be time for bed :-)