One of my AdSense sites is a website directory called 'The Louisiana and Cajun Website Directory', http://www.louisianacajun.com. It was my first personal site, and I have owned it for over 10 years. One cool note, if you google 'website directory' I come up as the third website, right behind Yahoo. All I can say is, Yahoo better get on the ball.

Anywho, being a directory, it contains dozens of off site links on each page. As you can imagine with so many links, my CTR (Click Through Rate) from this site is very low, < 5%. After 10 years, you would think that I would just accept it, but alas, I have not come to terms with it, and am building traffic to offset the low CTR. But! I have also been experimenting with different ways of increasing the CTR to the site. Below I describe what I noticed by after simply trying different colors for the AdSense links.

My Adsense link color on this site has been the standard 'link blue' on an all white pallet. This differed from the actual website links, which are a dark gray.

I have been testing different ways to increase the Click Through Rate and read an article the said Adsense links would perform better if they matched the theme of the site.

What does that mean? Should the Adsense link color be the same color as the rest of the links on the page? Should the other configurable Adsense colors be the same as the sites colors?

After reading that having the links be the same color as the rest of the site would improve your CTR I decided to try this. I changed link colors in Dec 2006 to be the same colors as the links off the site.

I noticed my Click Through Rate was cut in half. My rate dropped to an average of around 2%.

Why did this happen?

Here is what I think. If your site contains a large number of native links, as mine does, your Adsense link color should stand out from the other links on the site.

So is the reverse true? That if you have a small number of native links, that your Adsense link color should be the same as the links on your site? My gut from other sites seems to indicate this, but I have not tested or seen enough of a trend to confirm.

So to summarize, if you have a large amount of native links, Adsense will need to stand out. If you have a small amount of native links, Adsense should blend in. Well maybe?

So in the end I may have left more questions unanswered than answered, perhaps more testing will help shed light on this issue.
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