Image search and adsense

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Image search and adsense

What's your experience?

vero

2:49 pm on Aug 8, 2009 (gmt 0)

Does having your images in the Google image search help bring more people to your site - particularly people likely to click your ads?

Let's say your site on widgets has lots of photos of widgets, along with content. If you let Google list these photos in its image search, are you more likely to get people coming to your site from that page - people who'll click on your ads?

Or are you just getting people who simply wants to copy your widget photo to use on their own blog?

My stats show that my images lately crop up in Google image search a lot, and I'm wondering if that is likely to help my Adsense CTR or not.

koan

8:54 pm on Aug 8, 2009 (gmt 0)

In my experience, they're unlikely to click ads, but then again, it's all about the topic. If they're searching for product photos, instead of cute kitties, then I guess you stand a better chance.

And yeah, image thieves are also part of the package. If you can, add your copyright on them.

sabrebIade

7:37 pm on Aug 9, 2009 (gmt 0)

CTR no.
Traffic yes.
If you use the "shotgun theory" the more visitors you get, the more of a chance you have for clicks.
Images do bring traffic.

Lame_Wolf

5:40 am on Aug 10, 2009 (gmt 0)

CTR yes
Traffic Yes
9400 images with google.

It does depend on the topic. Some are good clickers, some rare - and it is on the same site.

HuskyPup

10:22 am on Aug 10, 2009 (gmt 0)

90% of my traffic these days are for my widget image searches as opposed to people searching my widget directory for widget information.

The CTR depends on how they are presented however they are generally well-paying. If they are in my Coppermine gallery then my average for 2009 is 0.60% however on my purpose built pages (pre Coppermine) then the CTR for 2009 has been 3.33%.

Of course it would be nice having all the images on purpose-built pages however 10,000+ image pages takes a lot longer than putting together a Coppermine gallery...a lot longer!

I'm not bothered about the widget trade copying my images, I would rather they used high quality optimised images on their sites rather than poor quality, bloated, room-sized disasters.

Erku

1:32 pm on Aug 10, 2009 (gmt 0)

how can one check from google analytics if the traffic came from google images?

tim222

3:35 pm on Aug 10, 2009 (gmt 0)

My so-called "Photo Gallery" contains only images that are related to the website product/service and each one includes a 2-3 sentence description. On average, eCPM rates on those pages are pretty much the same as the rest of the site. But in reality what I see is that on most pages the eCPM rate is either a couple dollars lower than average, or a couple of dollars higher. There's really nothing right on average.

I know some of them are coming from Google Images but I have no idea if those are the clickers. I suppose it's possible that the low eCPM pages are a result of traffic from Google Images, but I don't know that for sure. It could be the other way around, or have no relevance at all.

Another thing on the images - most of my images are around 320x240 pixels. All photos are low resolution. Most of them are 10K to 20K in size. As a result, I probably don't get very many people who are only looking for images. Slim pickens on my site :) This also minimizes bandwidth theft.