Designing your AdSense ads

You will also be able to design the format of your ads within your AdSense account. Google allows you to play around the text of the ads within certain parameters like size, type, nature, text color, borders color, background colors, url color and the shape of their edges. Google also lets you choose how you want your AdSense ads to contrast against your main text by being able to choose the templates among them blend, mother earth etc. Personally I have found blending my ads to the text works where I don't want them to conspicuously stand out.

While designing your ads for primarily the purposes of AdSense income, you may want to consider making them stand out. Take care however not to overdo the colors, otherwise your site will look like its reading the riots act to visitors to click on them or else... The idea here is to softly make the ads stand out but not so much as to distract the reader of the main text. This means you will be doing a balancing act with the AdSense font color, the background and the general shape around the edges of the ad boxes.

My research has shown that choosing a soft AdSense ad background like light grey combined with emphasized text color on that ad's background has a good effect on the click through rates. But grey if your own site's background is white. Grey works best with websites with a white background. Other lighter colors work best with different backgrounds on websites. I guess I'm trying to say that your AdSense background color should just be enough to provide a slight shade to differentiate it from your original website's background. Don't make it scream here.

This might hold true when you visit other websites like hubpages.com which shares its AdSense revenues with article contributors. What they do here is that they serve AdSense ads around your article and if it's a nice piece, you will get decent clicks if not an outright click-riot. I observed that, since their website background is white, they serve their AdSense ads with an ad-background of light grey while blending the top-text ad's background white. Your best bet here is not to take my word for it but to keep on tweaking, testing and turning the ads until you see what works for your website.