Text Ads or Image Ads

A question I see a lot is "Which is better with Adsense, text ads or image ads?" and the honest answer is, it depends.
Sometimes a layout will dictate whether you can use text ads or rich media ads. There are certain scenarios where using text ads would break the Adsense TOS whereas using image ads wouldn't.
Another thing to consider is which one would fit better with the placement. Sometimes using one type or the other just doesn't make any sense because it sticks out like a sore thumb rather than a piece of jewelry.

In any event, I've gone ahead and gathered my statistics for the entire year of 2010 and listed each of the Adsense ad types in order of best performing to worst performing for each of the categories Adsense tracks.

Page Views

1. Image Ads
2. Text Ads
3. Flash Ads
4. Animated Image Ads
5. Rich Media Ads

CTR

1. Animated Image Ads
2. Text Ads
3. Image Ads
4. Flash Ads
5. Rich Media Ads

CPC

1. Rich Media Ads
2. Flash Ads
3. Image Ads
4. Animated Image Ads
5. Text Ads

Page RPM

1. Rich Media Ads
2. Image Ads
3. Animated Image Ads
4. Text Ads
5. Flash Ads

Estimated Earnings

1. Image Ads
2. Rich Media Ads
3. Text Ads
4. Animated Image Ads
5. Flash Ads

Blocking Low Paying Adsense Categories

I was looking through the new Adsense interface today (the version with /v3/ in the URL) and found out that the control over blocked ads is a lot better than I remember. Under the "Allow and Block Ads" tab there are two awesome options in "Blocking OptionS" section of the sidebar, "General Categories" and "Sensitive Categories".

Sensitive Categories has things like dating, politics, religion, etc. Whereas General Categories has everything else.

Both of these sections show a list of possible Adsense categories along with what percentage of the ads you've displayed came from each category, and how much of your Adsense revenue came from each category. Most of the categories also break down into multiple sub-categories.

As soon as I found it I immediately realized I had a couple of categories with bad impression/revenue relationships. For instance I had one category that was accounting for 13% of impressions, however it only accounted for 3.8% of revenue. In comparison there are other categories that account for 6.9% of revenue on 3.3% of impressions and 4.5% on revenue on 2.5% of impressions.

So, I went ahead and blocked the categories with horrible impression to revenue relationships. I figure that having more ads from more profitable categories being displayed will translate into more money. Since Adsense has much improved reporting in V3 it will be easy to see just how well my changes do in the future.

There is a 50 category limit on the number of Adsense categories that can be blocked.