Recent Increase in Image Ads over Text ads?

Seeing an increase in image ads versus text ads on my site

[bouncybunny]

I know the following doesn't have a lot of 'scientific' basis behind it, but I thought I might raise it for discussion anyway.

I've noticed recently that on one of my two Adsense populated sites, a dramatic increase in image ads over text-based ones.

When I originally started with Adsense, about 5 years ago, it was predominantly (almost exclusively) text ads that seemed to be appearing.

I'm guessing that some of this has to do with site targeting (which might explain the difference between my two sites). But certainly, in the past year, my main site seems to be dominated by image ads. And in the past few months this seems to have increased yet further.

I've also noticed a dramatic lessening of income during this period, but switching off image ads doesn't appear to make much difference.

Anyone notice anything similar?

[netmeg]

It may be some of those "other ad networks" that Google is working with. I think most of them are display ads.

[Jaideemaak]

Following Google's advice about allowing text and image ads, I experimented a while back and CTR went down when I had both enabled. I therefore reverted to text only ads.

I watched an Adsense 'webinar' recently and heard the same message again. Despite my previous unsuccessful experiment, I followed Google's advice and turned on images and text once again. Once more CTR dropped, so I have just gone back to text only ads.

When I checked, I saw that with both options enabled there are a lot of image ads, as per your observation. In my experience CTR is lower when image ads are displayed. YMMV, of course.

[buckworks]

Your observations about CTR are interesting, because from the advertiser's side of things I see image ads getting a CTR that is seriously higher than text ads on the content network. Some banners get more than ten times the CTR that our text ads do. I've seen that with more than one client, too. That ought to be win-win for everyone.

So it surprises me to hear AdSense publishers reporting lower CTR when they enable image ads.

It would be interesting to know where the discrepancy comes from.

[drall]

We also followed Googles advice twice after being prompted by reps and meetings to enable image ads and every time we did we saw a large drop in both CTR and eCPM.

Both tests ran two weeks across 40 websites spanning hundreds of topics and subtopics and roughly 1.2 million uniques and the only area that saw equal earnings to text was entertainment related. We disabled image ads network wide and havent bothered with them since.

I suspect it is very topic sensitive.

[JasonDX]

Is it possible to block site targeted ads? I've noticed that most of these are image also. I have a ton of site targeted ads and I'd like to run a test to see if earnings improve without them, but I don't think we can opt out of these.

[netmeg]

You had to write to AdSense, ask them to disable, then they'd send you an email telling you if you do that you will likely earn less money, then you write them back and insist, and THEN they would shut off site targeting.

Not sure if that even applies now, but you could try.

[bouncybunny]

It may be some of those "other ad networks" that Google is working with. I think most of them are display ads.

Ah, this might make sense, if I remember the timescale correctly.

I wonder if it's worth disallowing the 'other' networks?

EDIT Just noticed Google-certified ad networks in AdSense [webmasterworld.com].

[Cancellara]

IMO Google is placing image ads on sites with low CTR or underperforming CPM text ads (or those where they cant figure out the right text ads = most websites). They probably realized it is more profitable to run $1CPM image ads in stead of waiting for a $0.05 click revenue from a text ad.

[bouncybunny]

Perhaps. Although, that's not an issue with any of the sites I mention above. Indeed the one affected has a very pleasing CTR and CPM sitewide. Ads are (and always have been) very well targeted and plentiful.