Make Your Ads Look Less Like Ads

The basic goal of this document is to make your AdSense ads look less like ads, and more like content on your page. It has the second goal of putting the ads exactly where they need to be to draw the most clicks.

“Wait a minute,” you might say, “isn’t that a little shifty?”
No, it’s not. The AdSense publisher’s problem is that the typical Internet surfer is plagued by “banner blindness”.

People automatically overlook anything that looks like an advertisement because of being bombarded with ads all the time. It’s not that they aren’t interested in what the advertiser has to offer. With AdSense you know that they are interested most of the time, since the ads shown are related to the content of the page.

The fact that the visitor clicks on the ad is an expression of their interest in whatever that ad has to offer. What I’ll focus on in this document is not hiding the fact that the links are ads, but putting the ads on the page in such a way that they are not overlooked by the visitor. Google makes it very clear that the links are ads by placing their “Ads by Google” link in the ad block.