Small Adsense Images within blog posts

For the longest time I had the largest available square (336 x 280) image Adsense unit on the right side of my blog above the navigation elements. Clickthrough sucked & the only reason it stayed there is because I was too lazy to change my layout.

A few weeks ago I finally did away with that image block & tried something new. I chose the smallest image Adsense unit (200 x 200) available and stuck it in the top-left corner of my posts with about a 20px margin around it.
Since I only ever have 3 posts on the front page at a time, I'm safe as far as the cap on ad units per-page goes. The labels lead to pages with more than 3 ads on them, but not many people seem to use the labels so I'm not going to worry about that for the time being.

Here's a screenshot of my placement.


Not only has clickthroughs increased, they've increased to a point that Adsense doesn't seem like a complete waste of time to me anymore.

I'm half tempted to actually put some effort into this now.

I forgot to mention, over the course of two weeks I tried a week with the text ads & a week with images only, the images outperformed text roughly 2:1

Well Good Luck to you

Here's a diagram of what I did now that both layouts have had a months time to sit.

I started with the layout in figure A & moved to figure B.
The click-through rate of layout B is more than double that of layout A. The cost-per-click with layout B seems to be going up every few days.

Today I moved to layout C which ads a 728x90 unit.
I've always thought people were crazy using these things, but after years of observation I'm still seeing the same people using them so they must be doing something other than sitting there looking pretty.

Checked your site, hmmm, maybe if you can make your ads more visible, lol, I didn't even notice your ads...

I guess I should mention that the 768x90 only shows up on individual blog posts.

I have 3 posts being displayed on the front page, so I can't show the 768x90 there without having more than 3 units on the same page.

The majority of the blogs traffic comes from search engines and lands on individual posts.

for me image ads always perform better, that's because "an image is worth thousand words" I guess someone has said

That leaderboard as a text and image did nothing today.
I think I'll give it another day or two then try image-only up there.

goodluck! inform us about the updates.

Image or Banners are always helpful and increase traffic on website in SERP's.

I usually used text ads and placed it at the upper part below the header. I got lots of clicks there compared to the ads on the side.

I ended up switching the leaderboard from figure C from text and images to images only & that sems to be doing a little better. I'm not quite sure though because I switched it too early I believe. I'm going to leave it be for a month and then switch it back.

Compared to the 200x200 in the top-left corner or posts though, it seems to be doing about the same bottom-line-wise.

One month of experimenting your ads is good because you will know and compare your previous and present income and which ads contributed well.