Like any good capitalist, you are trying to make the most money possible with your website. In order to do that you need to get people to click on your ads. There are many different things that are important when you are designing your ads, one of the is the Ad Placement Strategy. What this page will focus on is your what the ads should look like, the Ad Color Strategy. This page will focus mainly on Google Adsense,™ since that is one of the most popular ways that webmasters monetize their site. However the same strategies can be applied to any ads you are putting on your page.

When you are deciding on the color strategy for your site you need to look at what type of site it is. Article pages are different from forums. Sites with many repeat visitors need to be treated differently than sites that only get a few repeat visitors. First we will focus on what to do with an article page.

It is generally thought that if you have an article page you should blend the ads into the background of the page. For instance, on this page I would put ads with black text, on a white background without any border. DO NOT PUT A BORDER ON YOUR ADS! In general, ads that are set apart from the context of the page are just ignored by the users. Their eye automatically blanks them out, and thus they do not click on them. If the background on your page is dark, there are other things that you can do. Although blended ads still work well on dark background pages, contrasting ads also perform. A tan ad on a black page draws attention to itself in a way that a black ad on a white page does not.

If, instead of an article page, you have a page which draws many repeat visitors, such as a forum, you need to use contrasting ads. If you use blended ads on a forums, people will just look past them. If people come to the same site time and again, the ads need to stand out to get clicked on. Google also lets you rotate the colors in your ad palate automatically. This will make sure that when your visitors come back to your page, it doesn't look exactly the same this time as last time. Experiment with that and see if your click through rate improves.

Here is a table on ad color strategy which Google compiled with data from thousands of webpages.

	Ads Within Content	Ads Adjacent to Content
Light Background	Blend	Blend or Complement
Dark Background	Blend, Complement, or Contrast	Contrast or Complement

Looking for more information on how to maximize the income from your site? Check out the list of some of the Highest Paying Keywords