What is the best color for an ad unit?
You have successfully set up ad units and are maybe even making a few bucks. Now you are looking to improve performance. One of the simplest steps you can take is to optimize the color of your ads to make sure they are noticed. Here are a few best practices to keep in mind when selecting from the 112 colors provided by Microsoft pubCenter or when customizing your own color combination.
-Ads blended to match a web site typically perform better than ads with loud colors. Set the ad unit’s background and border color to the match the page background color. This will help the ad unit to blend into your page. Color your title either traditional hyperlink blue or use colors that already exist on your site.
-Match the ad unit to the most visible and important colors on your page. If your logo is green, you might try coloring the ad unit's border and background the same green, then use the page background color as the ad unit’s text color. This can make the ad unit more noticeable than the blended technique.
-Contrast the ad colors if your site contains lots of compelling content and you want to increase the odds your ads gets noticed. With this technique, you can choose to contrast colors near the ad unit, or the colors most prominent on the page. For maximum contrast, color the elements of the ad unit itself in contrasting colors. Contrasting is recommended only for sites with dark background and be careful of ‘ad blindness’.
-‘ad blindness’ occurs where screaming colors are used in ads, which tends to lead to users ignoring anything that's separate from the main web site content.
-Modify colors and/or ad position to keep your ads fresh for repeat visitors.
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