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I’ve read a lot of forum threads about this topic and none of them had a definitve answer to this question: should I use outstanding, blended, unique color, only images or multiple color ad blocks to maximize my Adsense revenue?

Finally I decided to run a little Adsense experiment and try them all, one by one, for 5 days. To achieve better results I decided to change only 1 Adsense block (the upper right 300×250 square you can see on each article page) and run each different ad type for 5 days. After running each block type for five days I wrote down the Click Through Rate and revenue of each type and finally compared them to see which Adsense type works best.

Here are the 5 Adsense units I tried:

Blended

• Link color: same color as website link color
• Description: same color as website content
• Url: same color as link color
• Background: same color as background color

Unique Color

• Link color: same color as website content
• Description: same color as website content
• Url: same color as website content
• Background: same color as background color

Oustanding Color

• Link color: a color you don’t have anywhere on your website
• Description: same color as website content
• Url: a color you don’t have anywhere on your website
• Background: different color than your website’s background color

Multiple Colors

If you don’t know how to display multiple color Adsense units read: ” How to display multiple color Adsense blocks “. In this experiment I displayed 3 different Adsense blocks with outstanding colors.

• Link color: 3 different colors
• Description: same or different color as website content
• Url: 3 different colors
• Background: 3 different background colors

Only Images

 If you decide to display only Image Ads, you don’t really need to define colors.

Results:

Highest Click Through Rate:

5) Unique Color

4) Outstanding

3) Multiple Colors

2) Blended

1) Only Images

The five days I ran “only image” ads, I had the highest CTR.

But what about the revenue?

5) Unique Color

4) Outstanding

3) Multiple Colors

2) Only Images

1) Blended

Conclusions

Even if the CTR of image ads was higher than the click through rate of all the other ad types, the clicks were not paying as much as the clicks on text ads. I achieved the highest revenue by using blended ads while I made a really bad experience by using “unique color” advertisements. Even if they were blended, they had a horrible CTR!

To achieve even better results I thought about running this experiment for a longer time (even if it already took me 25 days of “research” to write this article) and display each Adsense type for at least 20 days.

The experiment was quite short, but I can say that for this website, blended Google Adsense Units are generating the highest revenue even if they don’t reach the highest CTR.

Of course it also depends on the type of website you are running but if you own a blog with a 2 column layout and place your Adsense block in the upper right corner of your articles, blending these ads should give you the best results