I understand that blending the colors to your site is good practice but I have been reading a lot about the psychology of colors. I am surprised no one has done a study yet on which color attract clicks.
red attracts the eye big time. red also makes it hard to read stuff if done properly. sound familiar ? red lights stop signs target stores and on and on blue is a very soothing color, and stuff sound familiar ? wal-mart (uses both blue and red, red where the items/prices are and blue when u check out to make u all comfortable with buying stuff)
There is no one size fits all answer to this question. Your adsense colors should coordinate with the color of your website. Your typical underline blue links could work since this is what many people associate with links. Not always true though. Anytime you visit a site you have to get reacclimated from one site to the next in order to identify the links. Again, the links should coordinate with the site. Once the visitor has established the underlying text that indicates a link, they'll associate that as a way of finding more information and click. Hope this made since! Hint: Look at the color scheme of the link units within this forum. Prime example of what I meant by blending adsense links with the "normal" website links (forum breadcrumb trail).
Yes I understand all of that. But what is psychology of it all. If you could choose any colors to build your site around which ones would increase clicks. I am sure there is a relationship somewhere.
You may very well be right, but I think that it would be something that is incredibly difficult to measure. For example, certain colors provide a sense of authority and so forth, but if you put them on a crap site with popups and so forth, there is no way they will fool anybody into thinking the site is of high quality. I think your best bet is to use them to complement your site. This might mean using colors to draw attention to the ads or perhaps to make it hard for people to realize they are ads instead of content, if you are willing to do that. You may also want to color your site based on your audience. If you want boring business people to view your site, don't go with garish flamboyant colors, unless your site is some type of entertainment site where that might be appropriate. So, I know I said a whole lot of nothing specific, but I really think it is that kind of issue.
I personally think a big part of the color scheme for any website ought to have to do with the site's content and the site's audience. People seem to naturally have a sense of when a color scheme fits and when it doesn't fit the content. For instance, you probably wouldn't make a site for legal advice with lots of bright, flashy colors. Similarly, you wouldn't expect ads on this kind of site to be obtrusive or flamboyant - often times as we know, you can drive visitors away from an otherwise great site with really distracting ads. I think my point is honestly that there truly is not one single best color for adsense ads or a website but rather the best color for site and ads alike depends upon what you're presenting, and who you're presenting it to.
I might try red border (not background that would burn the eyes ) and I'll give you results someday... I wish I just had a bigger traffic to see the real difference.
My understanding is that basically either the publisher wants to tell the visitors that those are ads or I had read somewhere that those who are using Google are IT-savvy and this group of surfers won't click Adsense ads and that user of Yahoo! MSN Search are most likely to do so.