Image Ads vs. Text Ads

[Irongeek]

What is your experience with running:

Just Text Ads

Just Image Ads

Both Text and Image

I switched from text only to "Text and Image" and my CPM and CTR went up a whole lot. I'm guessing what your site is about, and what ads are being ran matters a lot.

[ken_b]

I run both text and image ads. That seems to have worked out best for me.

But with image ads it's worked best for me when I use the 300x250 or 120x600 adblock sizes.

[OntarioBucsFan]

I just finished running an image ad only test. It was a disaster. They did look good on the site but the CTR was terrible.

[nippi]

text only adds

[Irongeek]

These last few days have been about 33% better than normal since I switched to Text and Image ads. I guess in depends on you nitch.

[moTi]

when i allowed them, image ads were often obtrusive and low quality. the colors didn't match my site in the least and there was almost no inventory. consequently, they didn't show often because of low performance. moreover, advertisers should know that the visual impact must be rewarded adequately for a branding campaign. this is not included if they pay other than cpm.

i need to have some control over my graphical layout. at least, one could arrange some minimum standards.
so i manage my ad sales for image banners independently, but with moderate success.

[greatstart]

This may be a bit tacky for my website, but I saw someone else using two 336x280 large rectangle adblocks side by side. The left one is set for text only, the right one is set for image only. It is neatly placed in a 700 pixel width table, and looked very appealing. I wonder if the webmaster of this site gets a decent payout using such a scheme?

[Undead Hunter]

You say your CPM and CTR went up a lot... but what range of CPM and CTR are you in?

$1-$5 CPM? 2-4% CTR? It would be more meaningful if you could give us a little more info on your situation. Also, is your site specific, or generalist, and what kind of traffic are we talking about?

For example, I'd wager CPM on a forum site would go up w/ images, at least at first as its "new" to the readers.