Image ads worth the trouble?

Will they be shown, much less clicked on?

[Sierra_Dad]

I have a few text ads now and pay about $30 a month.

They concern a downloadable software product. There are some screen shots and things I could use for eye catching ads.

I have run adsense ads and allowed images, but I've never actually seen one. Google always picks text.

Given these circumstances, I wonder if it is worthwhile to paste some of these things together in the ad shapes, or just let the users experience all the neat images when they come to my site, and focus instead on more text ads.

Thoughts?

[RhinoFish]

On content side of things, my image ads outperform my text ads by more than 2x on ctr without any lowering conversion ratio. I test out my images and image ideas with people before I run them and my images ads are a departure from most others that I see. If the product is visually appealing, I often skip all text completely and try hard to convey via use of image only. Works very well for me.

And before I ever tried it, I had assumed banners / image ads would stink.

I have tries these same images on CPM basis within AdWords and it didn't work well for me at all. Prefer paying for clicks via CPA than for imps via CPM.

[Sierra_Dad]

That's a good perspective.

I am getting very few impressions on the content network and few clicks now.

Sounds like the image thing can be worthwhile if I get it right.