[jonknee]

Why do you say amateur designs? Google knows what converts, I would wager that their designs are the antithesis of amateur. You may not find them pretty, but those are different things. AdSense does let you specify all sorts of things about the look of the text ads though (font, colors, etc). They also have a tool for you to automate A/B testing of different combinations.

[hiphopyo]

For instance, here's the guy responsible for their latest text ads: http://adnanvirk.com/ -- now I'm not saying he's bad. He's good. But is he good enough for Google?

> AdSense does let you specify all sorts of things about the look of the text ads though (font, colors, etc).

I'm afraid that's not enough. We need to control margins, paddings, line spacings, as well as media queries. We need to be able to remove the arrows, lines, buttons etc. that don't belong there. Ie. "perfection is achieved, not when there's nothing left to add, but when there's nothing left to take away".

Google has great designers, I'm sure we can all agree on that. Unfortunately, none of them are part of the AdSense team.

For text ads done right, see the ones in Gmail.