Found my problem - along with the new ad format comes some serious targeting problems on my pages.

Full page of ads about seafood and the page has ZERO about seafood on it.

Is your site about diets ?
May be it's about the Seafood Diet ?
See Food, and eat it... <Groan>

We just got the new layout on our site this morning. So no stats on performance yet, but it looks okay. The 336x280 ads with appended URL to the title don't wrap, so that is nice. The URL just cuts off at the end instead of wrapping. Gives the ads more whitespace between them.

The 736x90 changes definitely take some getting use to. They look very different on our site. We had to add some spacing after the ad unit on some pages to make it look better since it was looking over-crowded.

Looking forward to see how they perform.

that was lame, wolf.

It is too early for this... ;-)

These 726x90 are not good in the latest format.
I've seen it on many sites where the links or text are not in full view.
I don't use that size on my site, but thought I would give it a go. Same problem... part shown adverts.

They should make it 748x100 but I would prefer something like 450x300 or 480x250

@incrediBILL
Yes, it was rather lame :)

Wow we are seeing some very positive results so far today from the new ads. Particularly the 728x90 ad. It is doing really well.

I see the new ads now, but can't tell if it's making a difference. Nothing unusual as yet. I have the 728x90's on some sites, but all I ever see there are image ads with big donuts on them, which, since I stopped eating donuts a few years ago, is kind of cruel. Those aren't Interest Based Ads, they're Temptation Based Ads.

From an appearance standpoint, chopping off urls strikes me as an imperfection. Why the AdSense team may consider that an improvement, I guess, remains to be seen.

That said, I can't yet detect any significant change in my results.

The 728x90 seems to have problems, at least here in Greece.

The ad description appears BELOW the title. This is OK if there are 3 ads, but when there are 4 ads, description appears cut.

Moreover, the right side of the rectangle is totally empty.

Those aren't Interest Based Ads, they're Temptation Based Ads.

Hmmm. If I recall correctly, you previously had a problem with Russian bride ads. Now it's donut ads.

If these are all interest based ads, that makes me curious about your surfing habits, but I don't think I'm legally old enough to go there.

FarmBoy

OK, I think I resolved my own problem and now CTR is actually HIGHER than it's been all week, insufficient information to blame or attribute the new layouts to anything yet, still watching and tracking trends.

Fixing the targeting issues, considering nothing on my pages had changed, turned out to be as simple as reloading the problematic pages multiple times until it summoned the mediabot crawler to finally come back to the site and re-read those pages.

After the mediabot visit, VOILA! all the pages went back to normal targeted ads almost simultaneously.

The Russian Bride ads are because of my persona as a 62 year old Polish man. (One of my clients)

The donut ads - those are actually coupon type ads for local stuff, similar to Groupon. I can't remember the name of the company, but I have this big honking glazed donut following me everywhere I go on the web, and *particularly* on my own sites.

I've had these running for a couple of months on and off and they've made no noticeable difference in earnings for me.

The 4 ads look very, very cramped!

It's been showing on my site for two days. Find it quite ugly but CTR is up by 30% so I am not complaining.

New layout started showing on my site yesterday (friday) morning.
Really impressive results for ad size 336x280 in the middle of the page.
CTR went up by 1 percentage point and eCPM almost doubled.
For friday, which is usually a very low income day (these sites are targeted to gulf countries where friday is weekly holiday) these results are really encouraging.
Now waiting for weekdays to check the result.

PS: IHHO ad blindness was the major issue for adsense. Now atleast for few days this new layout should show good results.

Thanks
Rajiv

CTR is up for me too (quite a bit), but I agree it's probably due to ad blindness and is likely to decline over time.

I'm seeing the same results. CTR on the 336x280 is more than doubled for me on a usually slow weekend day. Lets wait and see what the rest of the week brings.

OK, after several days with the new style ads, I'm not seeing any significant change in stats one way or the other.

I think google trying to try something different because the classic style for the adsense ad.

I must say - at first glance i was very nervous about the new adsense ads design.

No longer is that the case.. my CTR has gone through the roof and yesterday i had a record day in earnings - the wierd (yet awesome) thing about it too was that it wasn't a record by only a couple dollars, but MUCH MUCH more... VERY awesome!

I'm lovin it.... (not mcdonalds..)

I like the new layout - had been hoping for a new size ad with this layout, actually - except for the ugly way the URLs are chopped off, often mid-character.

For whatever reason, I just noticed the old layout reappearing on one of my sites. So, maybe the new one hasn't fully been implemented yet.

In Greece, all new layouts have been removed and replaced by the old ones...

Well, I might as well join in this thread since the topic is why I visited today. I was wondering whether anyone else was seeing eCPM and CTR increases like I was. It started on Saturday, August 14, 2010 for me.

My eCPM and CTR are both up significantly. *However* - several people have asked me why I decided to put advertisements where I didn't have any before which goes to ad blindness since I hadn't changed anything.

I observed that if you click on the "Arrows" below the ads, you see the next lot of ads which shows in old way only
(URL at the end of the ad instead of next to title).
Anybody noticed this?

Thanks
Rajiv

*However* - several people have asked me why I decided to put advertisements where I didn't have any before which goes to ad blindness...

So maybe ad blindness has been eliminated.



FarmBoy

Things are changing fast. Just over the course of this thread NAF (New Ad Format) has gone from bad guy to good guy.

FarmBoy

I wrote a few days ago that the new layout resulted in a huge boost in earnings for me. But I also wrote that I expected this to wear off when my visitors got used to (and blind to) this new layout. This has already happened; CTR and earnings are now back to normal.

We saw a small pop for a couple days and now it's right back down across our network. CTR across our network is now just 25% of what it was when adsense launched, this drop all started when the economy started tanking in late 2007. Major reasons I believe is the economy and behavior tracking / interest ads.

CTR on the 336x280 is 2,5 times higher than before the change. I am now starting a test with the new leaderboard as a replacement for a horizontal link unit. Lets see what that brings.