About image ads

what do you think?

[malasorte]

Until a week ago I never used image ads on my site. I have two medium rectangles on my index page, this is the page that generates about 90 percent of the page impressions for my site.
A week ago I selected one of these medium rectangles to display both image and text ads. The other rectangle shows only text ads.
The result: CTR down by 3 percent, earnings up 35 percents. The CTR drop is quite understandable, the image ads are mostly untargeted with my content. But how is he increase in earning explained? More competition for my ad space from advertisers? Is just a week too less of a time to know for sure if these changes are because of the image ads?

[celgins]

I'm guessing that the average web surfers' blindness to image ads has an effect on an advertiser's price-per-click.

Text-ads are the big thing these days, and it's text-ads that are driving the Adsense/Adwords network.

Image ads used to be the most effective...(ie. banners, boxes, etc.)...so I'm thinking many advertisers will pay extra to have those images showing on your site.

In effect, if an image ad can still grab your attention, you're probably really interested in what you're seeing. Which is why some advertisers will pay more for that click.

[annej]

What kinds of image ads are people getting. I am afraid to try them for fear of getting poorly designed ads.

[figment88]

I am afraid to try them for fear of getting poorly designed ads.

You have to also remember that google now allows animated gifs and flash for everybody. All image ads go through a review, but it is not clear what the criteria are.

I have been playing around with them for a few weeks as an advertiser. Here's some observations from the other side

--by far rectangles do the best. I think advertisers with this spot are generally trying to have high quality space

--conversely, the leaderboards and skyscrapers are almost useless. Even at $0.25 CPM's many sites are useless. Some sites seem designed to ramp pageviews without regard to anything else.

--I have some professionally done animated gifs that look really nice. I also have some sloppy non-animated graphics that I through together. My ugly graphics do much beter as far as ctr.

[solidgas]

I may be wrong, but don't image ads pay per thousand impressions regardless of clicks. This may be the reason for the higher earnings.