i used images next to my adsense but always used borders around the image and another border seperating them but with the new adsense announcement of no images next to adsense, i've removed my images cause in the end..making some money from it is better than losing my account. it's a bit early but was wondering what people's results are as of yet... for me..CTR is almost down by 50% but it fluctuates throughout the day so i need more data to see what the real results are. also - assuming less clicks throughout the adsense world now due to this, would you assume that the CPC would go up now also?
I removed my images first thing this morning and have seen about 25% drop-off in the units that once had images. We will let things settle over the next day or so and see how things shake out.
"G" is doing this becase alot of their search terms are being triggered by the "alt" text associated with ads. Hence the searcher is getting to sites that may not be relevant. But the surfer will click ads anyway.
I removed mine last night... CTR and eCPM have dropped like a rock today - though likely due to a less-than-ideal non-images implementation now (need to begin tweaking and testing again). Also I've been hit pretty hard by smart-pricing lately so "hopefully" after a week or two after smart-pricing gets reassessed, things will improve. Also making the situation worse (and less easy to diagnose), is Google's new image-based "Ads by Google" text that I've seen starting today on my site as well as many others (consists of several flavors such as the Google "G" icon, the multi-colored "Google" logo on various background shapes and colors, etc). I've attached a sample of one such icon (there are others as well). It seems to display at random times throughout the site. I think this is an absolutely horrible idea, instantly killing any attempts at content integration. Better-targeted or not, I'm probably switching to YPN soon.
Plummeting CTR? I don't know what you're talking about. Then again, I've never used this method in the first place, so... /whistles
jackburton2006 called it months ago. I remember when I was about to launch my site, I was thinking about implementing images next to the adds. I found a post and you said, I cannot remember your exact words, if Google come out and say this is no longer allow, people will feel it head, at this point I decided not to implement this so I can see the sites threw potential.
I had used only one ad unit lined up with images... This is what i get after 30 hrs of removing them... Previous CTR : 1.10% Today's CTR: 0.45% Previous Earning: $ 11.56 Today's Earning: $3.81 It Sucks man!!!!
My average CTR was more than 10% and was getting more than $75 per day. I will let you know if the miserable 2 hours I spent last night removing all those clever little graphics has resulted in a huge drop next week. You cannot look at a few dozen visits and deduce anything from that. Wait till you have had a few thousand visits, then do the math. Yours in fraternal sorrow Chris
I had my 2nd best day of this month after removing them and I'm off to a really good start again today.
I only had images on a couple of sites and have had them removed for about a month - so far the CTR on those sites hasn't changed much and has actually gone up a little on some of the sites.
I've lost 60% of my CTR and 40% of my eCPM (less clicks, but at higher price) Almost all my sites are made on white background, and I am using all white ads, with black text and light gray URL. Yesterday, I've dropped lots of 728*90 with images and replaced them with 300*250, embeded on content (floating on the right side when placed on the beginning of texts, and on the left when placed in the middle) and I am having a very good response to this placement. The 300*250 are configured all white with text on the same color of the content, title the same color of content url and URL light grey. Using light grey to make the URL almost invisible, improved my CTR in the past.
One of my channel CTR was around 2 with small graphics next to it, now with same kind of impressions few days ago where it makes $12 with no images it earned $2 so huge lost for me on most of the sites where i used images next to ads. But i think its a good step by Google to ensure there advertisers get the relevent and targeted trafic. Best of Luck guys.
Google: remove your images I'll put mine. "my visitors are not interested to know who is serving the ads"