The SBI Mall

This is an addendum to my previous post about ugly Adsense ads, with a few examples.

Several of you wanted to see examples of what I mean by “ugly” Adsense ads, so I decided to look around a bit on the web. I did not find any that I would classify as “ugly” or particularly drawing attention, so I decided to create a few examples myself to help you understand what I mean.

Here is the first example. Bear in mind that these are all generated within my Adsense account, and using the Adsense preview tool in the Adsense setup wizard. For this reason the ads are not ads, but they do the job well to illustrate what I mean.

Example of ugly Adsense ad

Don’t bother clicking on the ad. It’s just an image, not an actual ad!

Anyway, as you can see, the ad has red link titles and red text as well. The link URLs are the normal blue color that is common for links. The background is white, and so is the border.

The reason why I think this will work well is that red color draws the eyes like anything. If you are on a web page and you see something in red color, you want to read it first before anything else.

Another example:

Another example of an ugly Adsense ad

Now as you can see, this is very similar to the above example, with the difference that the borders are yellow instead of white.

The reason this works is again similar to the last one. And yellow draws attention too.

Do you remember a thread in the SBI! forums where Elad talks about how he started getting better CTRs when he placed quotes next to the Adsense ads and highlighted them in yellow?

The ad above works on the same principle, but you don’t have to think of a new or relevant quote for each page/ad. It also doesn’t violate Google’s TOS which state that you can’t place anything near the ads to draw attention to them. (Or at least I think the TOS say that, so correct me if I am wrong here. )

Yet another example:

Yet another ugly Adsense ad

Once again, just like the last example, but with a different border color. Hey, gotta keep your visitors from getting used to the same ad design, to prevent ad blindness, yeah?

OK, another example, to show that you can go extreme too, if you want:

My eyes! My eyes! Help!

I wouldn’t recommend using that last ad design. It really hurts the eyes and might offend most of your visitors into leaving your site. I only included it here to show what’s possible.

Don’t let this keep you from using colored backgrounds, though. For example, check this out:

Example of ugly Adsense ad with a color background

You could try other variations and find out what works best for you. In the end, it also depends a lot on your own site’s design and color scheme. I would recommend using a color scheme for the ad that really conflicts with your site’s color scheme.

As always, testing will lead you to the right answer

I have always been a proponent of testing things, but over the past one or two years, I have begun to REALLY grasp the importance of testing things.

If it looks promising, test it to find out for sure.

If it looks silly and stupid, test it to find out for sure.

If it looks exciting, test it to find out for sure.

If it looks boring and mundane, test it to find out for sure.

The bottom line is that you never know what is going to work for your particular combination of niche, audience, your own voice, site design, and a lot of other factors. So it’s really, really important to test.

And these days Adsense lets you create ads that you can modify on the fly without having to update your pages, so it’s now even easier for you to keep testing.

Hope these examples provide a little help and you can better monetize your content as a result. Happy monetizing and do let me know what you think.

Related posts:

1. Butt ugly Adsense ads make more money