How to increase CTR

[shield]

Anybody know of any good techniques for increasing clickthrough rates...

I know that positioning is a vital part of it and perhaps colour is but are there any other ways to encourage users to click on adverts?

[CannonBallGuy]

On another webmaster forum that used to be very popular and active, the adverts were made to stand out using really strong, contrasting colours byt the new owners when they took over the site.
It made loads of people leave, and now the forum is gone and the url just leads you to the new owners original domain related forum (which I'm pretty much boycotting because they completely destroyed the webmaster forum community that I loved so much...).

[shield]

Yeah dont worry I dont plan on making the ads really odd looking and multi coloured just for attention...

[CannonBallGuy]

Good. But that said, I'm thinking that a solid, 1px, red border around the adverts as a whole could be good...

[shield]

Yeah maybe...

I might try out some looks over the next few weeks and see if there are any major differences in the amount of clicks... trial and error basically

[Loisal]

I try and tweak something due to greed, I always end up shooting myself in the foot. It's always best to let your ads and traffic for that matter take on a natural course of action. Instead of worrying about increasing your ctr, I would focus on getting better themed ads that pay more, this way you can keep your current traffic, but increase revenue, which was probably your overall goal anyhow.

[ishuvonet]

There are many actions you can take for a good CTR...

= Simple design
= ad color
= add positioning
= blending ad
= site loading time

[chrishirst]

Google Adsense have documented some good practices for layout and ad positioning (http://www.google.com/adsense/support/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=132575)