When does AdSense Switch from Text Ads to Banners?

How Does that Happen?

[helleborine]

A competing forum in the same topic as mine also has AdSense.

My forum is doing very well, and I have a large and changing variety of targetted ads.

My competitor's site is doing extremely poorly in terms of traffic.

A month ago I noticed that instead of targetted ads, my competitor only shows a banner, image ad that is completely off-topic. For a month, only that banner has been displayed.

I was so curious that I checked the source code to be sure that this was indeed AdSense and not some other script.

It was indeed AdSense.

When does Google stop showing targetted ads on your site, in favor of a bland, general-interest image? Has anyone seen/experienced this phenomena?

[stormshield]

helleborine, some advertiser have their banners displayed through adesense,too. It looks like you must have allowed google to display them by checking ht option:

Text and image ads in all ad units.
Rather than :
Display text ads only in all ad units

You can change in "my acount" tab.

By the way, there's nothing wrong with banners, although they seem to have lower CTR -- people tend to ignore them.

Cheers,
Storm

[miguelito]

It looks like you must have allowed google to display them by checking ht option:
Text and image ads in all ad units.
Rather than :
Display text ads only in all ad units

You can change in "my acount" tab.

By the way, there's nothing wrong with banners, although they seem to have lower CTR -- people tend to ignore them.

Cheers,
Storm

well first of all, helleborine isn't talking about his site, he is talking about a competitor (he states it quite clearly)
secondly, banner ads with images are not paid on a click through basis, they generate income by 1000s/impressions.
if your visitor clicks on an image ad, it is not counted as a click on adsense.

[hunderdown]

Those ads are presumably site-targeted.

Assuming that you and your competitor allow graphic ads, and that your competitor is doing poorly with text ads, it's entirely possible that an advertiser who targeted BOTH forums would be able to get his CPM ads on the other one, and not yours.

Example: Let's say that you are earning $5 on an eCPM basis, and your competitor is only earning $1. An advertiser targets both of your forums, and maybe others as well, and offers to pay $2 CPM. The advertisers ads would appear on your competitor's site (and his income would increase) but would not appear on yours.