Adsense Image Ads - Do They Work For You?

... an old subject but maybe worth a revisit

[austtr]

I recall putting Adsense image ads on some sites a little while after they were launched and the results were so off-topic I dropped them immediately. I tried to find some current coverage on this subject but everything I found is from years ago.

I have a couple of sites with very "wordy" pages that would benefit from some images to break up the flow and image ads might just do that quite well. However, I don't want to end up with just one or two ad images occurring over and over again, or very off topic ads. It will look stupid if the page is about New York airport transfers and the ads are about discounted Icelandic hotels.

What is your current experience? Is there a decent inventory of image ads, is relevance matching OK and how do they compare with text based ads for generating income?

[netmeg]

I mentioned in various other posts here that I've been testing text vs image this summer during my peak season, and was pleased and amazed to find image ads performing much better this year than they have in the past. The CTR is about twice that of the text ads, and the eCPMs are way up too.

I don't worry about the relevancy. I can't do much about it anyway; can't even really determine it because of interest based advertising. Since I am getting a reasonably good CTR and eCPM from them, I have to assume they're of interest to somebody.

[Edge]

Not all webspaces are the same - I have three sites and only one does well (OK) with image ads. The other two that don't perform well with image ads are texty web sites.