AdSense and many other AdSense publishers have said to get the best CTR (Click Through Rate), it is best to blend the ads to the color of the site so that they appear like part of the rest of the site. I don't know about the effect of usage of a background color of a search box, but one thing is for sure, blending the colors of the search box color to blend with the colors of the site will make your site looks better. Blending the color of the search box will covered in another post. When generating the scrip of an ad unit for AdSense for content, you will first sign into your AdSense account. The first page presented will be the daily report of your earnings. To generate the script for the contextual ads, search box or referral text or button links, you will have to click on the AdSense Setup tab at the top of the page. A page with 3 choices - AdSense for content, AdSense for search and Referrals will be presented to you. If this is the first time you are generating the ad unit, it is best to create a color palette with colors that blend with the colors of your website. This is so that if you need to generate the script for the ad for that site again, you can just select the palette you created rather than doing it all over again. Also, if you click on AdSense for content, when you are generating the script, you will have to set the color. You can then either use the default blue1, or change the color. But doing it this way means the next time you have to generate a script for that site, you will have to start all over again. If at that point, you click "Edit palette", all the choices that you have made for generating the script will be lost and you will have to start all over again.
ADSENSE COLOR PALETTE
To create a color palette, click the "color palettes" sub-tab (just below the AdSense setup tab) and you will get a "palette editor" like the screenshot below:
To blend the color of the ad to the colors of your site, first you will have to determine what are the HTML codes for the colors on your site you want the background of ads to blend with (you can also click the box of color next to the box containing the color HTML code, but there will be limited choice of colors and it will be less accurate). It will be more accurate to enter the HTML codes of the colors of your site. For this, you obviously need to know the color code of the color on your site. For this task, the tool ColorPic will be of great help to you. You can download and install ColorPic at ColorPic, the versatile color picker. (Close the new window to get back to this page) With this tool, you can get the HTML color code or RGB value of any color you put your mouse on. See screenshot below (click to enlarge). Note that the cursor is placed on teh title, (circled in red), the color in the box is the same color as the color of the title and the HTML code of that color is displayed in the box next color box (circled in red):
AdSense have adviced that best results are obtained by selecting color for the ads border and the background to be the same as color of the part of the website where you are going to place the ads, color of the Title to be the same as titles of the website, color for the text is best chosen to be the same as the text in the post content, and color for the link is best when it is the same color as the links in the post and/or sidebar. For these tasks, ColorPic will be your good friend. Regarding trying to get the HTML code for the color of the links, it is best to take a screenshot (PrintScreen and paste into Paint that come with Windows under Accessories, or my favourite - Irfanview (free). This is because in most sites, the color of the link change when you place the cursor on them. This will not happen in a screenshot. Use the screenshot to get the color code for the link.
It is good to blend the ads so that it appear like the rest of the content of the site, but you should be careful not to blend it so well that it become almost invisible. When you are done, type in a suitable name for the palette, for example after the name of the part of the site and the name of the template like "left sidebar Thisaway Blue".
Another tip is if the links in your site are not bright blue in color, it will be preferable to try to change the links color to bright blue as long as it does not clash too much with the other colors of your site. This is because most links on the web are colored blue, and this is easily recognise as a link by most browsers and thus more likely they will know that to get more information, they will have to click on the blue links. This may involve changing something in the CSS (Cascading Style Sheet). Get into your template editor window and look for this block of codes
a:link {
color:$linkcolor;
text-decoration:none;
}
a:visited {
color:$visitedlinkcolor;
text-decoration:none;
}
a:hover {
color:$titlecolor;
text-decoration:underline;
}
To change the link color, say to blue (#00FFFF) or other shades of blue, change the above to
a:link {
color:#00FFFF;
text-decoration:none;
}
a:visited {
color:$visitedlinkcolor;
text-decoration:none;
}
a:hover {
color:$titlecolor;
text-decoration:underline;
}
GENERATING THE SCRIPT FOR THE AD UNITS
Now the next time you generate the script for the ad unit, you will have a drop down menu for the color pallette. All you have to do is to click the down arrow and select the color palette that is suitable for the part of the site you want the ad unit to be in. Generating the script, including using custom channels are described in another post
If this post is not clear to you, feel free to leave your question in the comments and I will try my best to answer it and perhaps even edit the post to make it clearer.
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