On one of my blogs I have been experimenting with my Adsense top banner (728×90). Although there are many sources to derive information and examples from how to place Adsense ads in your template, strangely enough I did not find much information on how to optimize the “ad-type” of these ads.
Depending your account settings in Adsense, there is a default way of displaying your ads. Most of the time your Adsense ad is set to display either text-ads or image-ads. In your adsense java script the line: google_ad_type = "text_image";
As this blog is mainly product related, I had neglected my default settings and put the banner to “image only”: google_ad_type = "image";
I thought it was best to let the ad image mingle with the images that are already in the posts throughout the pages.
Being disappointed in both CTR and ads on display (I had to tweak the competitive ad filter on a daily basis), I decided to change the ad type to text only [google_ad_type = "text";]
It is still a bit early to say that my CTR has gone up a little, but it appears to have done so in the first 5 days.
I am looking at some more information on what is best to set your ad_type to in relation to different kind of blogs, but it seems that there are not any rules defined for that.
Has anybody got some good guidelines for this?