The lack of replies should be a giveaway. I suspect that most don;t have an answer ... all you can do it A/B test the two and see which gives better performance.

Drupal, of course, only complicates things ... good cms, but not as widely used as other CMS packages.

Hi tangor,

Thank you for being brave enough on answering. I thought that if forum members answer questions such as link ads vs other types of ad types: [webmasterworld.com...]
then my question is legitimate.
I guess I was a bit naive that others might want to share their experience...

Yes indeed, one can always test A/B but there is an effort in displaying personalized ads because of GDPR, and I wanted to test if it's worth making that effort.

I'll open another thread for how to run this test A/B ads, as for me this far from being deterministic.

@Ronnyy

Are you running AdSense exclusively?

If you are then your CMS doesn't need to play a roll. You can switch off personalization at the account level, such that all ads regardless of the specific ad-unit will be contextual.

From my experience personalized ads tend to pay more but appear less frequently. Switching them will typically result in lower earnings. But as with all things AdSense it really depends on your audience, niche and geographic location. You can check the "Targeting Types" report to see the % mix of contextual vs personalized. If you have large % of personalized ads the impact of eliminating them will obviously be greater.

As for A/B testing you can do this too within AdSense, go to "Optimization" -> "Experiments" and then you can setup the experiment.

It is a valid query. Sadly, I am not in the GDPR sphere (thus lack any insight) and do not use Drupal ... avoid it if I can! (Lack of experience, not knowledge)

Good luck! I will watch with interest on how your next thread is presented and how it shakes out.

Hi NickMNS, tangor, thank you very much for your answers.

Yes I'm running Adsense exclusively.
Now I'm running only contextual ads. I set-up the Adsense account like that, only contextual, not personalized.
It was my understanding that GDPR forces me to first inform the visitors, but also give them the possibility to opt-out. On top of that I should not show them any ads before they would have made their choice.
This is not rocket science, but it's not that trivial either to set-up.

My website offers free language lessons in 4-6 languages, therefore the location is worldwide, but mainly US and Europe.

IMHO the personalized ads should pay better, just because they target better the visitor, they know he/she is interested and expect/hope to get more from him/her. I was thinking that the contextual ads would pay less since the interest in languages is there, but not that much... I tried to diversify a bit, to cover other subjects such as wines, but it's difficult as I'm losing the focus from the free language lessons.

Thank you

If you go to the EU-User Consent tab in AdSense -> "Blocking Controls" -> "All Sites" you can set only the EU ads to contextual and then set all ads for all other locations to both personalized and contextual.

Thank you very much Nick, yes, I did that in the past, it's set to contextual. I did not pay attention to the note on the bottom stating that this is applicable only within the EU.