Images with Google Adsense Ad Units : Add a Border

Just in case you have not heard about the latest way to improve Adsense CTR - place the ad units strategically aligned with images which draws attention to these ads and can get better clickthrough to make you more money.

The most popular of these tricks was to use a 728 width leaderboard which displays 4 ads horizontally. Now above each of these ads place 4 well spaced borderless related images of the keywords. So if you sell laptops, place 4 laptop images and the ad units will appear below them. This has a immense visual appeal and attracts eye and may convert into clicks.

However, all is not well with the terms of service - Jensense reports in this scoop from google

“Publishers are still welcome to place images above the ads. The only exception is if it’s in such a way that it looks like the images are part of the ads.”

“When something like that comes to our attention, we’ll ask that the publisher place a visible border between the ads and the images, to make it clear that the images are not being served by Google on behalf of the advertisers. We generally do not ask publishers to remove the images completely, we just ask that they add borders to avoid confusion.”

So you can continue with the trick, but add a border (to clearly demarcate the fact that these images are not being served by google) to be on the safer side and not violate the terms of service. So did this trick work for you?