I've read the debates over blending vs. contrasting for a long time, and decided to do my own experiment after suffering from very low CTR in my forum. For the last few months i've had contrasting ad colors (RED) in a single skyscraper just above the nav section in my forum.. the CTR has been pretty steady (VERY low).. A few days ago i changed the color to blend exactly with the links in the nav section and the rest of the pages. the first few days CTR was higher than usual, and for the last several days in a row it is over 2x the normal rate. I know i need to collect data for a longer time to be statistically correct, but it's almost so obvious i think it's safe to say that on my site, in my forum, blended seems to perform best (YMMV)..
Nice work tearabite. You may want to grab yourself a split testing script, which can make things easier to judge.. Your blending would make your site look better to I bet, so nice job!
my forum too has a text link that is similar to the menu bar and I can see that's there actually some clicks on that. Blending is better than Contrasting imo in term of forums
IMO, blending is always a good idea. It wouldnt give a dull 'ads' look that you see on every other website. Also, if the ads are not blended well, they give a feeling of sponsored ads, which people would hesitate to click on. Well blended ads always are good and they also improve the look of a site.
blended usually works best though I have pages where a border seems to work - but I guess that's because other elements on the page like titles also have borders.
I had blended ads for a long time but then I changed the color of the ad title to be just a little brighter then all other links and I raised my ctr 2x. But other colors on the site are also important, my site colors are quite grey so this little trick attracted my visitors eyes because ads still looked like normal links, they didn't just stick out.
Blended ads are generally difficult to realize and lots of visitor think they are site menus or part of content and they click. That's a good point.
I had a large rectangle ads on my blog that rotates between the blue of my blog's link and the blue of Google's SERP. Now I've stop it from rotating, but just using the blue of my blog's link. Will check it out tomorrow if it do increase my CTR.