Test by Yourself

Many internet marketing gurus talk about test results. Can you trust those results?

No Way
One day, I read an article about the performance of different ad formats on Google AsSense. Basically, it says the borderless (border colour is the same as the background colour) ad format performed better than any other ad formats. Before changing the border colour of all the ad units on my site, I decided to test the findings myself. Below is how I did it.
I picked my 8 most read articles.
I assigned a unique channel to ad units on those pages. (Ad format: 336x280 text only)
I waited for a month and checked the click though rate. (I did this for each border colour: blue, gray, and borderless)
Surprisingly, the results showed that the borderless ad format didn't perform well on my site. The ad format with a gray border had the best performance.

What's Going On?
Why didn't my result confirm the other guy's result? It's simple. Dfferent ad formats suit different webpage designs. The design of my webpages and the other guy's webpages differed. So, the same ad formats shouldn't work equally well on both websites.

Get Your Own Results
Don't take another person's test results. Test things yourself to find out what works best on YOUR site. Yes, testing takes time. But remember this: If I had taken the other guy's words and started using the borderless ad format, I would be making less money today.