Hi Today I worked a lot on blending in google adsense banners. My best work you can view here: http://www.hiphop-battles.com/forum/forumdisplay.php?f=10 other style http://www.hiphop-battles.com/forum/forumdisplay.php?f=10&styleid=9 Can you spot the third adsense banner? Feedback is welcome StarBuG ps: I contacted Google about if the implementation is ok with them. If they say no I let you know
The better the blending the less the banner blindnes the higher the CTR. In 95% of all cases anyway But I´ll see what the changes are. Maybe it's nothing, maybe it's something. Time will tell
Right...and you're getting those stats from? Just because a lot of people say it and implement it doesn't mean it's necessarily the best or true.
I get the stats from my adsense account of course. Like most adsense publishers I am tracking each ad separately so I can see exactly if it is working or not.
I wonder if those stars could not be construed as calling undue attention to the ad? Am interested in hearing what Google says.
In my case; blending really hurt my CTR. Now i changed the colors of my ads and made them stand out; the CTR has been increasing steadily.
It always depends on the location, your kind of visitors and many more factors. It is still a case by case decision but I have made the experience on my project that blending gets the best effects.
Agree 100%, especially if you blend and place the ad in the midst of highly-used locations on your page. Your blend in the forum display there looks like it is probably quite effective.
It will be even more effective if I get someone to write a randomise location hack that displays the ad on random location each time the forum is loaded. that´s my next plan
The one in the forum is nicely blended, what is a pity is that it's the third one in the html source, so I think it will not get the best paying ads. But if the two ads at the top have a good CTR then no need to do anything else. Otherwise if you see that the two ads at the top don't earn you that much you could simply do more of the one in the forum and remove the ones at the top..
I got the answer from Google I replied to this email to clarify if the placing in general is not allowed or just the camouflage as thread (icons, thread view numbers, starts, etc). I changed the look and now we wait to see if google accepts this kind of placement: http://www.hiphop-battles.com/forum/forumdisplay.php?f=10&styleid=1 I'll keep you updated
Just got a reply from google that my placing now is acceptable for them So the next step will be the random placement of the ad between the threads Does anyone has an idea how to implement a random display of the ad? StarBuG
If you can find the loop where your forum displays all the thread what you can do is before the loop, set a variable : $myads = 0; $myadsense = "all your html code for your adsense block" then within the loop : loop_start: ..... if ( (rand(1,5)==1) && ($myads < 3) ) { echo $myadsense; $myads++; } .... loop_end; what it does is give the ad one chance out of 5 to display, if it displays then it increase the counter $myads so we don't have more than 3 ads on the page. But random means we can have less than 3. But if you have more than 15 threads you should most always have 3 ads. If you have less than 15, say 10, then change the rand(1,5) with rand(1,3) for example.
Thx but that is not what I am looking for. I am looking for a random number between 2-15 which will be the location of the ad in the actual threadlist. So that users can´t get accustom to the ad beeing at position 5 The original hack author is going to write a random position hack for vB in a few days.