Images with AdSense Ads, the Next Big Thing?

Google's AdSense program has become and almost ubiquitous source of income for webmasters both large and small. As a result may people have been playing with the format and placemet of AdSense ad units to maximize click-through rates.

The greatest amount of information about optimizing adsense unit placement and format comes from Google (hardly surprising, as they make money from these ad units themselves) and their data clearly indicate that wider units tend to out-perform taller ones with the formats: 336x280, 300x250 and 160x600 resulting in the highest overall number of click-throughs.

It has long been known that plain text ads out-perfrom image-based ads (my page on internet advertising effectivenesss explains why). Also, ads that look as if they are part of the text (same background, no border and with blue links) out-perform ads that stand out as separate blocks. It's even better if you can incorporate the ads into your text. Indeed, a recent study by Tim Carter (at AskTheBuilder.com) showed a 20% increase in revenues when he palced a large rectangle (336x280) ad unit positioned within his articles and sited in the upper left-hand corner.

If you generate pages with lots of text then using multiple ad units can help with click through rates (just note that if you have multiple ad units then the ads which lie lower down your page will have lower bid prices). But it's important that the ads with the highest click-through rates must appear first in your HTML code (you can use CSS to locate it anywhere you want on your page).

The latest trend, however, is the use of images to make ads stand out on a page (see Draw a Pig for an example. Now, you can't use things like flashing GIF arrows pointing at your ad block as this would violate the AdSense terms and conditions by enticing visitors to click. However, you can have a lerge letterboard (say 728x90) and if your site is about flowers, say, then you can legitimately place a row of flowers above the ad block as this simply fits-in with the overall theme and content of your site.

Indeed, if recent reports are to be believed then this is strategy that even Google themselves are experimenting with (see the Digital Inspiration blog). This seems only to be a beta test for Google at the moment, but a number of people have now reported seeing versions of the Google five-ad tower where the first ad in the block is an image rather than the expected text ad. I've just started using this image enhancement technique on my own websites (you can see and example here on my history of the spice trade page) where the images are all ancient means of transporting spices and thus relate directly to the content of the article itself.

Over the next few days I'll begin converting more of my high-traffic pages to similar image-based formats and I'll report back on my progress in abut three weeks. It certainly seems to be a sensible way froward and anything that improves click-through rates can only be a good thing (especially if Google are experimenting with this themselves).