I recently added images to the homepage ads on my main revenue site. The increase in CTR was more than I could have hoped for. It went from a paltry .5% to over 2%. That’s huge. At this rate I will shatter all my previous records for revenue. The reason this strategy works so well is that the pictures draw visitors to the ads and for whatever reason they thing the ad links are part of your site.In a way I’m kind of pissed that I didn’t do this before. Most of the forums will tell you that this is the way to go. And no this isn’t a violation of the Google TOS. If you have any questions before you do this just ask them. They’ll get back to you within about a day. All that being said here are a few tips for adding images to your adsense ads.

Alignment
The first thing to remember is that you want the images to align with the ads. This can be kind of tricky because the number of ads can vary depending on the type of ads you choose. When I first tried this it was all guess work. To do all this without pulling your hair out you will need to edit all your pictured in a photo editing suite like Adobe’s Photoshop.

When created my first image layout it was all guesswork. I would create an image and then guess where to align the individual pictures. The easy way to do this is to copy the adsense demonstration templates and import them into the photo editor. I then created the picture layout based on the ad. There should be a picture above or next to each ad. This works much better.

Color Blending
This is key to getting everything to look natural. I would recommend you get the color code for the background of whatever site you going to do this on; for example, 008000, 0000FF, or 6C82B5. Make this the background and border color for the adsense ad. Then import the picture(s) into Photoshop. I recommend that you use multiple pictures, one for each of the ads that will be in the adsense ad. Now color in the background around all your images. You want as much of the background color around the images as possible. Now save the image as a .jpg file and upload it to your web server.

The Last Bit, Coding and Testing
Now you ready to generate and insert adsense code into your site. Remember to use the color we talked about above. It doesn’t matter which you add fist in your site, the adsense code or the code for your image. Just make sure that the adsense code is immediately after the image code. You might have to wait an hour or so before the adsense code properly spiders your site and places the right ads.

Once the ads start to show up correctly make sure the images line up right over top of them. If they do you’re don, if not go back into photoshop and experiment with your alignment.