Text vs. Image Adsense Ads
By: John Elder posted in Adsense
Hello good people!
Well it’s Thursday, the weeks winding down, and I’m pretty exhausted for some reason so today’s article might be a little on the short side!
Today I want to talk about something fairly important to any Adsense empire, and that’s choosing the type of advertisement to display on your website.
With Adsense, you have lots of different options to choose from, but they break down into two main categories: text ads versus image ads, and ad size.
Text vs. Image ads
People argue with me about this all the time, but I find that using text based ads on my websites brings in more income than image based ads. I’m not really sure why that’s the case.
If I had to guess, I’d say its because a text ad shows more choices…there are usually 3-4 different ads displayed at once, any one of which can catch a site visitors eye.
On the other hand, with an image based ad, you only get one ad. If your site visitor isn’t interested in that ad, you’re done.
Just to be clear, this is what I mean by a text based ad block:
Another reason it might convert better is because people might not realize it’s an ad at all. It looks just like a text link, and if you design your site well, a person might think they’re just clicking on a link to another page on your site.
Who knows…
At this point, I don’t really care WHY text based ads pull better, I just know that they do based on my testing. But test yourself! It’s easy to put text ads on 100 of your sites and image ads on another 100 and let them ride for a month. Then compare the results. Don’t listen to me!
So that covers our first category of ad choices…the next category is ad size.
What size ad should you use?
Again, always test yourself. It’s a little harder to test this one because there are a lot of different layout options. Personally I like to use one 336 x 280 sized block with distinctive colors for the links that don’t blend in to the main color of my website.
For instance, if the dominant color of my website is red, then I’ll use bright blue text links in my Adsense ads. Some people like to make the ads blend in and seem like a natural part of their sites (in order to try to trick a visitor into thinking that the ad is really just a link).
For someone like that, if red is the dominant color of their website, they would choose red links. Or whatever.
That’s something you can easily test. Personally I like my ads to POP OUT and grab attention, so I use colors that do just that. In fact, I’ll create a very bland color scheme for my site design in order to make those Adsense ad links pop out even more.
But test yourself.
Size is less important…you can take some liberty here. I like 336 x 280….but if 250 x 250 works better for your site design, then go with that.
The Bottom Line…
You can get all the traffic in the world to your site, but if your Adsense ad block gets ignored, you won’t make any money. So always be testing new ad placement and sizes on a small number of sites to see what works best.
A 10% increase in click thru’s can translate into tens of thousands of dollars in extra income year over year.
Keep on building!
-John
The Marketing Fool!
