There has long been a debate about whether you should go for image based Google adsense ads, text based ads, or select the default image and text based ads.
On my sites I had pretty much ignored image ads for no particular reason. Recently I got a message from Google in my adsense account saying that I could raise my revenue by selecting image ads. I decided to give it a go.
On paper, image ads should be more profitable compared to text ads on a click by click basis. Image ads take up as much space as at least three text ads (depending on space) and therefore must out-bid those other ads. Or that is what you would think.
It seems that in fact the revenue from image ads appears to be lower. I am about four days into a one week trial of hosting image ads on another site and my revenue seems pitiful. Lots of clicks are worth less than 10c and some as low 1c.
I am going to complete my weeks testing and I will post the results here, but I don’t hold out much hope that the ads are going to “bed in” and start producing decent results.
Two points to add:
1. Click rate has not diminished much. Maybe a little but it’s hard to tell over such a short period of time.
2.The site in question is a health information site and therefore is arguable more suited to text ads. It is said that sites which favour images anyway, such as fashion and corporate sites, do better with image ads.
Whether or not image ads are going to work for you is hard to say. One piece of advice is to try them on only a few pages for a week and see what happens. I rather suspect that they won’t improve your revenue and might make it go down.