AdSense Text Ads Get Title Highlighting

Google announced that it has updated all text AdSense ads to allow for the title color of ads to be changed when the user moves their mouse over a link.

The company says after a period of testing, it found that this actually results in higher earnings for publishers, while also “increasing user and advertising value.”

“As you can imagine, there are numerous combinations of link and background color across the ad units on all publisher pages,” says Stephen Yuan with Google’s AdSense engineering team. “After extensive testing, we have found that the color of the change itself can make a big difference: the wrong shade can even be detrimental to clickthrough rate (CTR). To determine the color that the title link will change to when a user places their mouse cursor over it, we’ll take your chosen title color and find a nearly complementary color on the color wheel. For example, a blue title would change to red. These colors outperformed all the others we tested.”

“We’ll continue to keep studying the effects of color on CTR and ad performance to bring you more enhancements in the future,” adds Yuan.

This week, Google also announced that publishers have access to a new report that allow them to view earnings by ad network.

With the report, you can see a breakdown of impressions, clicks and earnings by Google-certified ad network.