How would you like your ads served? Banners? Skyscrapers? Rectangles? Squares? What about borders and background colors? The choices can be overwhelming. Many people let Google decide for them- preferring to stick with the default settings.

Big mistake! From my own experience I can tell you that it's like swapping a hundred-dollar bill for a ten-dollar one. For almost one year I settled for just a tenth of what I could have been making - just because I didn't bother to control the looks and placement of my AdSense ads.

The various ad formats, colors and their placement on the web page can be done in thousands of combinations. You can literally spend hours every day experimenting with every possible combination.

But you don't want to, do you? Let me give you a few 'ground rules' that have sky-rocketed the CTRs on my top-grossing pages:

Don't "Look" Like An Ad
Meet the AdSense Family
Text Ads - Google's Finest
Video Ads

People don't visit your website for ads. They want good content. If you make the ads stick out with eye-popping colors, images or borders, that makes them easy to recognize as ads - and people work extra hard to avoid them.

The same goes for ads that are tucked away in the top, bottom or some other far corner of the page. So easy to ignore!

If you want people to click, make the ads look like an integral part of your content. Today's visitors are blind to banners, mad at pop-ups, weary of ads and skeptical of contests and giveaways. So how do you win their confidence? Simple.

Don't make your ads look like ads! Let's begin by reviewing each of the different types of ad available from AdSense and explaining their uses... then I'll introduce you to a few simple choices that zoomed my CTRs to incredible heights.