It is the million dollar question: what are the best performing Adsense adverts publishers of the program should use to make the most amount of money? The problem with this, though, is that publisher will have a different opinion about what are the best performing Adsense adverts: different combinations of colours, sizes, types and locations will work differently for different websites. However, from my past years experience with Adsense and helping other websites online with it, I have noticed that the best performing adverts have common traits. I will be looking at the colour, size, type and location.
 

Colour

When it comes to choosing the colour of your adverts, there are three main options you can choose from listed by how successful they have been for me and others:

1. Blend – This is when you use the current colours already on your website for your adverts. For example, if the colour of links on your website are blue, to blend your advert in, make it exactly the same colour for the title. This has been the most successful for me since web users mistake the adverts for internal links.
   
2. Compliment – This is when you use similar colours to that on your website. For example, if your website had blue links but a orange background, you would make your advert orange/blue. This is not as successful as the blend adverts but still relatively well performing.
3. Contrast – The sky is the limit. When you contrast advert colours, you can choose any colours you want because you want to make your adverts stand out and grab attention. However, they usually annoy web users causing the CTR to be ridiculously low.

Size

The size of the advert is another key aspect to the success of it. Again, I will list the top three sizes they have worked the best for Adsense publishers such as myself:

• 336×280 – This is by far the best because it can be placed anywhere and is the largest of the squarer adverts. For example, it can be placed in the sidebar or above/below content. The larger the advert in Adsense, the more likely it is to get clicked on.
• 468×60 – This is the perfect size advert to be next to the header image at the top of webpages. You may think the 728×90 advert might perform better. However, for most websites, they do not have enough space for such a horizontally large website. Therefore, for the majority of bloggers, 468×60 is the header advert to go for.
• 250×250 – I love this advert because it is the largest of the perfectly square adverts. It is the perfect size for placing inside content without obstructing your web users from reading the content. This tends to get the best CTR when placed in the content.

Type

Fortunately, the type of advert can be one of three options: text only, image only or text and image. From personal experiences  it is best to keep all your adverts as ‘text and image’ unless you absolute need just text adverts to appear. You will want as many advertisers to bid for your advertising space. Therefore, enable this to happen by displaying all types of adverts.
 
 

Location

Location is crucial to Adsense. Here are the top three locations on the stereotypical website:

1.  Above Content – With web users looking to this area first, it is a no brainer why this is the best performing location.
2. In the Header – This advert will always be above the fold and first to load when your website loads giving it maximum coverage.
3. Top of Sidebar – If you have chose not to use the above content advert, placing one at the top of the sidebar achieves similar results to that of above content adverts as it is an area web users frequently look.

 
As always, remember to always experiment. I can only guide you to the best performing adverts. You need to then experiment with what you have been told to find the best performing adverts for your website.