Cash Keywords has a good reminder that Adsense has a feature that allows you to Create Rotating Adsense Ad Colours which is one technique that can help overcome ad blindness.
I think this is a particularly helpful tool for those blogs and websites with a lot of repeat readers. For example a site like Engadget (which has a very loyal readership) rotates the style and colours of its ads every impression. In doing so they change the look of their site subtly every time a reader logs in and in the process give their ads every chance of having their ads seen.
So if you’ve got loyal readership consider rotating your ads. On the flip side if your traffic comes largely from search engines it may be smarter to find the colour and design that works best and to stick to it rather than risk having lower performing configurations appear on your blog.
How do you do it? Here’s Google’s explanation:
‘For added variety and freshness, you can even choose to rotate through up to 4 different color palettes at a time. To take advantage of this feature, you’ll need a newer web browser with JavaScript functionality (Internet Explorer 5.5+ or Netscape 6+). However, the color choices will be visible to users of most web browsers.’
Give a try on it.
I’ve been using adsense for 3 months. I found that adlink CTR increased but adunit CTR decreased last month. It’s maybe the ad blindness that you mentioned.
The other downside to doing this is that it doesn’t allow you to monitor each different color in a seperate channel. A better option would be to wrap the Adsense code in a PHP (or similiar) script that would randomly rotate them (each having a different channel). This would allow you to monitor the seperate colors and see which one was better.
I don’t think the colors are as important as the visual “differential” between the previous colors and the current ones. It’d be interesting to measure, though.
I am giving this a try on my site. I will try it for a week and see what happens.
Please do share! I would be very interested to hear everyone’s experiences with this.
[…] 2. Regular readers tend to be ad blind Darrens written about this previously over at Problogger but I’ve actually seen in the figures for the first time. Sure, regular readers will click on ad spots but the CTR is much lower than for new readers, particularly on Adsense ads. Ive had lot of different traffic in the last four weeks on a variety of different subjects and its the posts bringing in completely new traffic that have the high CTR’s, and I’m talking at times four to five times higher rates on the same ad spot as per a post that would attract a regular reader […]
Here is my article about google adsense color rotating in chinese …
Adsense廣告顏色使用技巧