Sometimes you can find gems by looking at ad type!

(written by JamesColin)

to let you know that in ads performance, I have found a gem.

On one of my site I have 20% CTR for the page.

I have analysed each ad unit and found that the first two had a very high CTR for images, but very less so for text.

For the first ad unit it was like 10% for images and 1% for text. The CPC for images was about 0.1 and about 0.2 for text.

So it’s a no brainer that in this particular case, restricting the ad unit to show only images would be a winner since the RPM of the ad unit would increase for sure.

It’s not the same story for other sites or ad units, sometimes the RPM of the ad unit is about the same for images and text, so in this case it’s better to just let adsense show what it wants..

But in some cases it makes sense to not display text ads (or image ads) when the difference is so obvious in RPM, because everytime a text ad is displayed instead of an image ad, you’re losing money, for sure.

I’ve implemented that on the first two ad units, and of course the result is increased CTR for the whole page and increased RPM too, that was to be expected.

Of course before doing that I’ve looked at the ad type stats for a significant period of time, in fact since start of the year, and the trend was always the same, so it was obvious that this move would be beneficial.

Usually I prefer to let adsense decides what to display, and although I’m happy to have found this particular case for optimization.

I feel adsense should have done it by itself and stopped showing text ads when it sees that for months showing text ads is always earning less in those ad units.. Adsense should be a little more clever when deciding what ads to display in particular ad units.