I see that a lot of websites use only text ads. I need to know from you if there are reasons why the image ads are not very "popular"? I'm doing this questions 'cos I use image ads only in one of my websites that is a photo gallery ( http://www.galeriashqiptare.net/index.php ) Are there any pro and contras about the use of image and text ads. cheers.
Ppl just don't like to click on image ads...simple as that. Maybe it'll be different in a photo gallery though. Is your CTR decent?
IMHO - The image ad only route can be very benefecial to certain sites since they generally pay much more per click. On a site with a lot of return visitors, like a forum, I wouldn't recommend it because the same ads will keep showing and most return visitors will not click them because they either already have or are not interested. Text ads allow for a larger variety of ads to be displayed and can yield a higher CTR even if it's a lower CPM. I place a combination on my pages. Pages that I know that I have a lot of random traffic I try and use a 468x60 image banner simply because they pay better and the chances of getting a click on them are better.
text based adv- save space, bend into the background easily and can make it looks like your site but not an adv. Image adv- people get used to it and automatically will avoid clicking it
IF the image is exactly relevant to the content, thats great, but there arent so many image ads available....
image ads are evil, video ads - pretty good. but I didn't saw any video ad, then they were enabled on my site. Video ad count is very little in adsense.
I prefer text ads really coz for me, it gives more choices for my readers...like for every page, usually there's 4 sites in the adsense that may take their interest unlike image ads wherein there's only one site....
Image ads are usually CPM and text ads are usually CPC so select according to the nature of your site
big ad number not allways good. All humans are lazy from birth and web users try to concentrate on needed content but not on ads, after some they became ad blind for image ads, popups etc. brain automatically rejects that ad information. Only ads that differ from content very little, can attract such people. Try such experiment, put in white web page center one sentence and one text ad below it. then count CTR, it must quite big, becouse people are not lazy to read one sentence, after that they read ad text, and click if will like it. But if there were very much content in the page, and the same ad, CTR must be much lower, becouse people are lazy to read all content, besides posibility that he will read and click on ad lowers. So good luck in experimenting
I prefer the look of image ads - but apparently text ads have a much higher click through rate... that black adsense PDF book thingy agrees with this opinion too...
To answer this question, you only need look at the purpose of Adsense -- because visitors have developed blindness toward image ads, so Adsense did text ads, and have become kings of the hill. That is why you should always choose text ads over image ads unless you're getting paid per CPM, and even then only if you have a lot of traffic to take advantage of the CPM.