Although pay per click advertising is dominated with search advert campaigns, there are still millions of advertisers out there that stick to using image adverts or image adverts along text adverts in synergy. Image adverts are great mainly because the advertiser has a lot more freedom with how they want to portray what they are trying to advertise to the web user. However, by having such freedom can also work against advertisers, as it can become very difficult how an advertiser should design the image advert with what colors to use. In this article, I am going to look into the benefits and drawbacks to the two main color combinations you can use for image adverts: blending the colors or contrasting them.

Blending the Colors

The majority of adverts you see out there will usually adopt a design where the colors blend together. This means if they were to use red, they would mostly likely use a similar shade such as orange. If the advert used blue, then green or purple would be the preferred choice to blend the advert. You will also find many adverts simply adopt one color, against a white background to keep the color scheme as simple as possible.

The main pro to blending the colors is that it looks aesthetically pleasing to the web user. It does not have to stand out. But, if you use the right blend of colors, you can make your image advert stand out and look pleasing to the eye at the same time – having something pleasing to the eye is important as it is usually harder to get web users to click onto an advert they do not like the look of or is ugly to look at, such as these animals!

However, having a blending of colors can sometimes cause your advert to not stand out enough, reducing the click through rate of it. This is an inherent problem with blending colours – by making the advert look nice, you risk there being a reduction in CTR. This is why it is always a trade off between having a bright advert with a high CTR or a color blended advert which struggles to gain as many clicks (because it does not stand out from the web page as much).

Contrast Colors

As it states, contrasting colors means to use any combination color in order to get the advert to stand out as much as

An example of an advert using contrasting colors

possible. Examples include big bright colors such as red against yellow or black against white. You will usually find that a third color is introduced too, to really make the advert stand out.

By having such a colorful and bright image advert, you are going to get the web user see the advert sooner as it is going to be more noticeable than a color blended image advert. Therefore, contrasting the colours generally gain higher CTRs.

On the other hand, contrasting colors is usually associated with spam as you are not trying to get a click from displaying contextual information to the web user but instead trying to get a click based on ‘look at me, I’m bright and colorful’! For this reason, although your CTR might be looking good, you may suffer with a poor conversion rate especially if the targeting of web users in your campaign is not up to scratch either. This will ultimately result in a campaign paying for clicks with little hope of them clicks actually gaining you a conversion.