I have little joy with image ads - however I guess it depends on your niche and also the design of your site. Image ads look very out of place on my site, as I am content rich, with almost no images, so they really scream advert at you. I don't think they are all CPM, in fact I am sure that they are CPC.

Thank you that helps to know. My site is content rich too. So you are saying that the Image ads don't look very nice either?

On my site, no. I also don't like the look of banners and large image adverts on most of the sites I look at - they really scream advert to me.

Are all image ads CPM or there are CTC too?

NO! There are image ads that are CPC

Has anything changed?

nope. at first, google tried to explain, that the image ads market is in an evolving process, that advertisers first must get used to it etc. most of the webmasters believed that months ago.

it is now years since google introduced graphical banners. but from my point of view, nothing has changed. indeed, its a non-starter and probably one of the greatest disappointments in adsense history.

but why will image ads not work?

well, advertisers don't adapt, so the ad inventory is still very weak. also publishers refrain from showing these ads. compared to text ads, it may have practical, monetary and visual issues for both parties.

adsense image ads are mostly a pain in the eye, because of unprofessional design. this is bad more than ever, since image ads have only a reason to exist, if they at least in part fulfill a branding purpose. in fact, if they contain less relevant contextual information than text ads and thus get fewer clicks they need to have a branding purpose in order to not be inferior roi-wise.
for this, to please the viewer, they need to look good, simple as that. but even then, since google advertisers are trained to look for the quick calculable cpc buck instead of cpm image branding fuss, graphical banners are not suitable for their business. compared to text ads, they simply don't pay off.

how to solve this? first google ought to remove its annoying google text on image ads. this is ridiculous. then offer a banner design academy for advertisers ;) then make all image banners cpm and force that through the advertising market.

you see, there is no solution in sight. cpc text ads will continue to be the core product for the time being.

[edited by: moTi at 3:01 pm (utc) on Oct. 4, 2006]

Nice presentation of the facts moTi!

Chapman

Image ads have performed fairly well on at least one of my sites. I wish there were a bigger inventory. But on the AdSense side, I don't run any image ads because I just haven't had time to create the images.

(I meant on the AdWords side... I must be getting ADdled)

Thanks for the presentation, great remarks.

What industry are you in Netmeg that image ads do well?

thanks

It depends on what kind of image ads you're running as well. I've had many corporate image ads on my site and they are done by professional ad agencies so they look just fine. Also this fall I've seen GM running a brand awareness banner in almost all large formats and I've yet to see the "Ads by Google" brand with this ad. I have most of my leaderboard ads set for image/text and usually at certain times of the year, large companies will take over the leaderboard since they are bidding higher for a brand awareness campaign.

Where image ads show their real weakness is exactly what was mentioned in the previous post - quality of the ad image. Large corporations either hire out or produce in-house by professional graphic artists. Google's appeal to advertising is that any mom & pop operation can have text ads up and running in a few hours. Not many mom & pop operations have time to spend testing and creating appealing image ads. Nor would they be inclined to when they can get traffic right away from a few dozen text ads.

I always hoped Google would expand their image ad network to a eCPM model but obviously nobody expects to see image ads on Google's serps and I guess they are not ready to develop the content network just yet. Maybe in the future?