I finally decided to do an experiment which I know has been discussed here before. But when it comes to dating siites maybe the result is more dramatic. I have a forum that gets more than 500,000 page views a month. After seeing my amount per click drop 50 percent over the past year, and basically giving up on AdSense to go the affiliate route, I came back on last time. I think being able to edit ads from my account instead of manually changing them on my site gave me the ambition to try one last time. What I found over a two week experiment with one ad unit. One week with image tower ads and then one week with text tower ads. Image Ads 4 cents per click. Yippy! AKA stealing traffic. Text Ads 17 cents per click AKA what I consider a fair price Folks we are talking about a 425% better pay out on text ads v/s image ads. What about my CTR? Well let me just say that on this one ad unit the CTR drop was so small that I am still 3 times better off with the text ad v/s the image ad. You do the math ' So in my small world of dating, this is the result. I have no idea why, but what I do know is that my days of image ads are over.
Ok thanks for the comments about the content of my site. My site has been with AdSense for years and it does not show anything worse than the ads that display on it. I have read the TOS
i dumped the image ads option on 90% of my ad blocks years ago... remember that you have to delete image ads from both the ad block, and at your account level(so that image ads won't show up on new ad blocks that you create). congrats on finding something that works on a forum!
well, it all depends on your niche I found a niche where the CTR ranges between 35 - 45% (image ads) and it may go up, as a certain industry starts to use Google more and more. I hope.
i get better ctr with text ads, because people are conditioned to ignore banners... when you allow image ads, you'll end up with cpm crap like the fart button. adsense cpm would be nice if it paid well, but that is not the case.
it doesnt matter if u r getting 40% CTR if image ad is CPM based. It wont be paid on clicks but impressions.
Every site's different. Some sites make more off image ads and visa versa. A blend is good, don't want eye-fagitue for your visitors.
It's not adsense safe as I can get you banned anytime. Of course I'm not an asshole, but competition is..
I know the most possible answer to this and is the reason that everyone should never just use image ads and should actually mix then so image ads and text ads can be shown on that ad unit. Google would determine which is the better ad to show during each visitor. The reasons why the earnings per click is smaller is because there are less advertisers bidding to show their image ads. The reasons for this is because it takes a lot of time to make an image ad that will work, it also can cost to produce one. Now with text ads, all it takes is for you to tap a few keys on the keyboard and you have produced a text ad. So in other words, it's much easier and quicker to product text ads than image ads meaning more advertisers are likely to use the text ads meaning more text ads are bidding against each other. I use Adwords where I have never looked into Image ads just because of this. It takes a few minutes at most to type up a text ad whereas it would take a good few hours to design and create the banner for an image ad.