Blue Is Best

So you want to get rid of the border. You want to get your ads the same color as the text on the rest of your page and the background matching the background color of your Web page.

But what about the link itself, the line the user is actually going to click? What color should that be? That’s an easy one: blue.

I used to say that all the text in the ad should match the text on your page, including the link. After seeing an article about the benefits of keeping the links blue — and testing extensively — I don’t say that any more.

The logic is that users have come to expect links on websites to be blue. Just as they expect stop signs to be red and warning signs to be yellow, so they expect their links to blue.

That means people are more likely to click on a blue link than a link in any other color.

The line in your AdSense code that sets the color of your link is the one that says:

Google_color_link = “#color”;

“#color” is the hexadecimal number for the color you want to use. You should make sure that number is #0000FF.

Keep your link blue and you can experience an increase in click-throughs as high as 25 percent!