Blend in or Contrast with Your Site?

In addition to optimizing your ad placements, should your ads contrast with your Web site or blend in? Both Yahoo! Publisher Network and Google AdSense report that best performance of their ad placements tend to be from ads that blend in with the content.

Another poll by Yahoo! Publisher Network via Your Ad Display Preferences asked, “Do you find it more successful to select ad colors that blend in with your site or contrast?” The chart below shows the results

Most Successful Ad Colors Blend In Vs. Contrast (Yahoo! Publishers) ^[12]

Answer	Response (%)
Blend in	85.71%
Contrast	10.46%
Other	3.82%
Total	100%

Google AdSense staff continue to write about blending your ad colors with your site's colors, such as their AdSense Help Center article, What color palettes are the most successful? and their blog posts, Color your ads beautiful and Unobtrusive ads can boost revenue. Google's AdSense Help Center makes the following recommendations based on your site's background colors: 

In addition, for sites with mainly repeat visitors Google AdSense recommends rotating color palettes or occasionally switching the ad locations to help avoid banner blindness. If your site has lots of ads and busy content, Google AdSense recommends to “use more visually arresting colors” for your ads.
Marketing Experiments Journal also reports better ad conversions with blended ads in their case study article, Online Ads Tested, dated 27 March, 2007. “Advertising that blended in and looked like a 'native' site content performed significantly better than ads that stood out from the rest of the page.”

To receive higher clickthrough rates for your contextual ads, you should test making the text in your ad match the size and colors of the host site's native content. Company logos and offer elements should be small enough not to shout “advertisement” so loudly as to be blocked by the subconscious “ad filters” of content site visitors.
In order to discover what type of ad is most effective for your particular content seekers, we suggest you test multiple variations of ads that appear “native” to the page against those that stand out.

Google AdSense, Yahoo! Publisher Network, and Marketing Experiments Journal all stress the importance of considering your own site and visitors. Whether using your own ads or contextual ads, such as those through Google AdSense and Yahoo! Publisher, you may need to experiment a bit with your own site's ad locations, ad sizes, formats and ad colors to achieve the best performance from your ads.