Hi, I have a site with a very good CTR (about 20%) and usually I still use the old adsense code, because I always used that and find it easy to quickly add an ad with this format where everything is control in the HTML code. OK, so just today I've moved on this site from old code to the new one, so that I can have pretty good stats about it. And what do I see? Images ads get the high CTR while text ads get ridiculous CTR.. It's like for one ad unit, 10% with images and 1% with text. So from tomorrow I'll change in those two ad units to display only images and the whole site's CTR might jump about 2 times.. It's not the same story for all ad units or all sites, for instance on some site I see the ctr is about the same for images, text, flash, etc.. So for those ad units I won't change anything, just let adsense display text and images, because it won't improve anything to restrict to either text or images. But in the example above it is crystal clear that everytime adsense displays text, I'm losing money when images would get about 10 more times clicks.. So analysing ad units is very important in some cases, you might discover things.. This particular website has been online since 2008 and I was always happy with 20% CTR, but all those days there have been money left because of text ads displays
The main problem is updating the code if you´re one of those guys which have 20websites. BTW: 20%CTR wow...congrats on that.
Yes, but I've found that we don't need to update the code, well that is only if you were already using custom channel to analyse by ad units. It was just because I want to use the chrome addon, you know so that we can see stats by ad unit in overlay on our sites. This works only if we put adsense in the new way, with the new ad code, it doesn't work with the old code. So while I was doing that, I did check the stats by ad type and saw this fact about images being a lot more clicked than text. But you can check by ad type even with the old code, you go to: Performance reports, you select a date period, then you click by custom channel, then you click on the custom channel you want to analyse, then click on the ADD DIMENSION button and choose ad type. If you have selected a large date period, it's better that you first display the stats by month, otherwise it will show per day and for each day will detail all ad types, hard to analyse correctly this way. By the way I didn't wait until tomorrow and now I have restricted to images on those two first ad units.. But while images ads are more clicked in my case, text ads have a better CPC than images, but still the CTR of images ads compared to text ads is so much more than the RPM is still higher (about 2 times) so restricting to images only will have a positive effect on earnings. I usually don't like time passing by too quickly, but now I wish I could be in 24 hours later to check that it has indeed worked as planned. If not, I will revert back to letting adsense decides what to show images and text, because that's usually what I always have done. But in this case I think it can work positively, the difference is so obvious that it is easy to decide, I'll let you know if it was correct or not.
Great James, thank you so much ! I just see in my stats that in my case text ads are waaaay more clicked then image ads, so I just change it all to only text ads. I will report here after 15 days or so is there any improvement with my earnings.