Firetop

Some of you may have noticed that earlier this month I changed the colour scheme of this website from pastel blues to ‘vibrant’ oranges (in keeping with the lovely Dorking sunset photograph I added to the header). One of the major upsides of this theme change has been the doubling of Google Advert click-throughs - which means increased ad revenue. I’m now seeing average banner click-throughs in excess of 1% each day, and it won’t be long before I receive my second payout, much speedier than the first $100 which took about six months. So why has the new colour scheme caused this increase in clicks?

To me the answer is staring us in the face, the default colour for hyperlinks is blue - we all know that a blue underlined word is probably a link on a web page. The old blog theme used blue links throughout the site, from navigation to articles, not so with the new colour scheme, now the only blue links on site are in the Google ad units (which haven’t changed size or position). So it seems that what I have done is make the Google adverts stand out a bit more than they did before, causing twice as many people to click through to the relevant ad content. One might argue that this could be at the expense of clicks through to my blog’s major content - but with the high prominence of ‘one hit wonders’ that I see in the traffic report I don’t think regular visitors will be put off surfing multiple pages per session.

Technorati Tags: google adsense, optimising adsense, improving click throughs, ctr, banner advertising, contextual adverts

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