Adsense Now Offers Rounded Corners

For those of you who absolutely hate being square, Adsense has just the ad format for you. They’re now offering ads with the option of rounded corners. Here’s a sample of how the ads look with the rounded corners ;

Normal

Rounded

Very Rounded

If you’ve heard that Adsense works best without borders AND blended into your content, I’d like to suggest that you give borders a try. Used properly with the right color, they can really make your ads stand out and increase your CTR. Then again, it depends on whether you WANT your ads to stand out. I was a die-hard-no-border-blend freak once. It didn’t matter if my CTR was the pits. It didn’t matter if I was flushing page impressions down the drain, because the “experts said ‘the best format is borderless blending’”. Until one day when, looking at my pitiful CTR for a couple of pages, I decided to live on edge and add a border.

Whoa Nelly! CTR shot up. I let it be for a couple of days to make sure it wasn’t one of those notorious Adsense blips. CTR remained consistent for pages with bordered ads. Then I removed the border again for one week and CTR crashed to pre-border days.

So am I advocating only border ads? NO. My ads with borders only work on one page and that page gives me very nice earnings everyday. It doesn’t seem to work across the board. So the thing I can deduce from that and suggest to you is that too many factors go into how well an ad will perform on a given page. That means a border may work for some pages and stink on others. The only way is to give it a try - at least for a week. Less than that is too short a time to gauge the effectiveness of any change.

Okay, so give it a swing. The new Adsense ads with rounded corners may just be the thing to give your CTR a shot in the arm.

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