Highlighting ad titles

As we continue to improve and launch new features, we’re always interested in hearing your ideas and feedback. Many of you have shared that you want to be able to change the title color of ads when a user moves their mouse over the title link. After a period of testing, we found that this feature resulted in higher earnings for publishers while also increasing user and advertiser value. We are pleased to announce today that we have updated all text ads with this change.

As you can imagine, there are numerous combinations of link and background color across the ad units on all publisher pages. 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. Please also feel free to keep sharing your product feedback and suggestions!

Posted by Stephen Yuan, AdSense Engineering