Make your ads gel well with content

Innovation is the key. As a webmaster, you would agree, making a site popular, or earning through a site that runs on PPC program is not easy. Right? Do agree that you have always been experimenting with ad layouts, ad colors, ad placements and so on.
Ad placement, its blending with the background and theme of the site do play an important role in the ad click rate. A well blended ad can actually go to increase the ad click rate by more than 200 percent…yes, by 200 percent.

Whether you are using Google ads or yahoo publisher networks, by default, these ads come with border; black, gray or some other user defined color. It is really not possible to change the color of the borders, and border does prevent ads by gelling well with the content. I have real appreciation for some sites that I had seen, where ads were so well blended that it was really hard for me as a webmaster to separate the ad from content.
Making borderless ad is not difficult. All you need is to have some elementary knowledge of hexa-decimal code. Basically it is a 6-digit hexadecimal (base-16) character that defines each particular color display on the web. For example, #FFFFFF constitutes the color “white”, #000000 constitutes the color “black”, and there are a lot in between, for example #99CCFF (light blue), #993300 (dark maroon), etc.
As a step one, note your website’s background color, say #FF9900 (bright orange). You will notice that the default script given by Google Adsense may be similar to this:

You can modify the above script by adding a few more lines. It should become something like this:

Now, what has been done that we have changed the color of the ad box to be that of background and net result appears to be that of border less ad. This finally leads to a nice blending of colors and making the ads less intimidating.
What to Chose…. Image or Text ads?
Google, so far, is definitely the king in web banner advertising and offers option of text, image ads or both. It is also a matter of debate, which type of ad to chose; text, image or both. Most of the publishers have only one ad account and no alternate account. Therefore, where the ad server is not able to give the ad for the page, the blank space in the page does look annoying. So, my personal view is, why waste the space? Why not allow image ads as well? These may have poor click through rate than text ads, but do pay well at times and also eliminate the problem of annoying empty space on the page.
Yes, an argument in favor of text-based ads is that text-based ads are less likely to be perceived as a forced advertisement, psychologically speaking. The text ads look very similar to your own content text, making them subtly blended into your overall design.
Also text-based ads can display multiple ads in a banner against single ad in image-based ads. This would give the visitor n opportunity to choose what to click. Personally, I may have been a loser in allowing image ads, but I am happy with the looks and feels of the site that it lends to the site as against empty spaces or public service ads.
Much does depend on content topic too. On many topics such as shopping sites, image ads are preferred and if you chose a text based ad only, you may miss many precious page impressions. On a travel related web site, “last minute fare” ads are quite often image only.
There fore, in conclusion, I would recommend, choosing text ads without border with text and image option.