Well I have been meaning to do this for quite some time. Well I said a while ago I was testing the Google 336 ad placement. I changed the colors to see if it would increase the click through rate. It did to some extent but it was not a huge increase as I would have liked. So a few days ago I went full out and changed all of the ads on the site and the links to the same color. So all of my links, Google ads and shopping.com ads on the review pages are the same color. I was easily able to update the links on the pages via the CSS. The Google ads were changed by just changing the include file for the Google 336 ad. If you are unsure about what I am talking about check out this post about putting your ad codes in IFRAME’s. The only ad placement I was not able to completely change was the shopping.com placement. Each ad is individually generated so I would have to go back though all of the ads and change the link color. So only the latest reviews have the link color changes.
So after I changed all the colors I was actually surprised at how well the page looked. It seemed to me to look a lot smoother and more fluid. The ads on the page did not stand out as much and actually seemed to be like part of the review. See this is what I want. Yes ads that stick out get people’s attention, but if the ads on the page actually look like they are supposed to be there people are more likely to click on them. Hopefully this method will increase my click through rate even more and make me more money. Right now the click through rate on the latest reviews has been twice of what it normally was so it seems to be working. I am going to test for a couple of more weeks to see if I’m going to keep things this way.