If you look at the majority of articles on PPC tip, tricks and so on, you will find that the majority of articles look at ways you can improve your PPC campaign through changing your text advert, landing page and so on. The problem is that the majority of these tips do not look at how the colouring will affect your pay per click campaign’s success. It is an important factor for both publishers and advertisers of PPC. For example, colours will be widely used by PPC advertisers when designing their landing page while the colour scheme of publisher PPC adverts are a significant factor determining the CTR of the advert.

Advertiser

When looking at the advertiser side to pay per click advertising, there is really only one area the advertiser has full control over where they can choose the colour scheme: the landing page. I personally consider the landing page to be the most significant element of a campaign which can affect the success of it the most (because after all, it is where the conversion takes place). For this reason, it is extremely important to choose the right colour scheme for your landing page.

Publisher

The publisher side to PPC relies much more on colour scheme than the advertiser side because publishers can choose what colour adverts they want to appear on their websites. There are three types of colour schemes you can go for:

• Blend – By far my favourite, these adverts blend using the colours of your website making them look less like adverts. 
• Compliment – This uses a combination of your website colours and new colours to create an advert that compliments your website without blending too far in.
• Contrast – Usually has the highest CTR but, also, it is the most annoying to visitors.

There’s a quick guide to where colours are used in PPC. The next step is to choose exactly what colours you want to use with your PPC campaign (or adverts). For this reason, below is a list of colours with what they mean to people when people see them. This will help you choose the right colours for PPC:

• Black is a colour associated with darkness, power, dominance and authority. It is not a kind colour to look at which is why not many websites use it.
  
• White is the opposite of black and represents purity. It is a colour that can be easily looked at which is why many many websites use white backgrounds with black text on top (as these are the two most contrasting colours out there).
• Blue is the stereotypical colour for an advert on the internet thanks to Google adopting this when they first created their search engine. Since the sky and sea is blue, it is a colour that is looked upon as tranquil and relaxing. Blue is also the colour of loyalty. However, since that most PPC campaigns out there want as many new visitors as possible, the loyalty side to blue will not matter much. It is always a good idea to include blue somewhere on your page due to it’s history with being links and it’s general tranquillity.

Well, there are three colours already – just several more to go! Therefore, make sure you have a read of the [Part 2] to this article which looks at all of the other colours on the spectrum. I hope this article is starting to make clear that colours are actually quite important in PPC. One colour can subconsciously mean one thing to a web user encouraging them to a conversion. Therefore, make sure you know before you choose your colour scheme as a publisher or make your landing page what each colour individually means.