Have Google Image Ads improved?

Anyone using them, strictly image ads?

[Erku]

From time to time I try the image ads, and in the past the performance was very bad. Has anyone tried them recently? Have they improved? If google asks the adword image ad users to improve the appearance we could use them wonderfully, but so far it's not good.

[joelgreen]

In my experience image-only ads performance is even worse than before. But I do not have much traffic to know for sure.

Think following factors make image-only ads perform not so well:
- not all advertisers have image ads available, so when you select to show image-only ads pull of advertisers become smaller (so less competition -> less per click). Sometimes images look hardly related to your content.
- image ad fills whole ad block, so user has less choise if compare with few text ads in the same ad block
- users get used to image ads (especially 480 banners) and click them less than text ads, image ads are hard to blend
- some users browse with images disabled

Think default ads configuration (text and image) performs best.

[hyperkik]

I've had some brilliantly designed image ads on my site, but as they are site-targeted ads it's hard to gauge their performance. One was promoting a new book, and there was a series of ads promoting a new TV show, and on the whole they improved eCPM while they ran.

[Hobbs]

I'm looking forward to Google's improving their image ad inventory for me to be able to put ads on otherwise off limits places like my front page. ASA was once asked and did not give definite conclusive information on the image ads inventory, which I think is very low and needs promotion in the AdWords side of the program.

[incrediBILL]

Why in the heck would you want image ads on your site?

Banner blindness and banner blocking made online advertising a pale shadow of it's former self before AdSense popularized was the text ads. AdSense looks like content, people read them, and the CTR is much higher than any banners ever were on my site.

No image ads for me!

[Hobbs]

Because I have areas where text ads are not welcomed. If Google gives us something significant we can run, and compare to other banner affiliate programs, maybe then they can increase their profits and ours, I can't really tell right now if low ctr is a problem with the trickle of available inventory.