Hey, After finding out yesterday that images next to ads have now been clarified by Google as being against their ToS, I have removed all my images that were next to ads. I know it's a little too early to tell but since then my CTR has dropped by over 1%. It doesn't sound like much but technically that's a loss of 25% of revenue I could be earning (in my case that is...). I was just wondering how this change has effected you guys and your CTR? It's caused quite a big hit for me. That said it only confirms that I need to try harder and is in a way, motivating! Hodge
I never used images next to ads and pull in high ctr rates anyway. It's all about ad placement and blending. Not trickery.
I personally don't consider it trickery, but you're entitled to your own opinion... But think about the number of webmasters that were using this technique. Even Google had a period where they were testing out the use of thumbnails next to ads. CTR decreased by 20%?! How high was your CTR to begin with?! And god that must have been a big hit for you then.
True - they have now decided it's trickery but obviously there is/was a lot of controversy surrounding it even at Google, otherwise they wouldn't have taken so long to address this topic.
Well doing optimization and placement is partially dipping into the trickery area.. else we wouldn't do things like blending and all... blending works because people do not know they were gonna be clicking on ads but removing the images did cause ctr drop around 10% for me but with further optimization i think you can make up for that figure..
I added images at the same time I changed my placement of my ads. After removing the images, my CTR is just about the same. I guess it was not the images that were causing the click throughs.