Why Google Image Ads Suck

I’ve been running Google image ads on my blog since the middle of march.  Not by choice mind you, but this Dodge ad has been appearing on my blog fairly regularly since then.

So this morning, I decided to check my Adsense reports to see what impact these image ads have had on my ad performance.  Here’s the data.

It’s not looking good. 

My click thrus have never been much to talk about, but they’ve been dropping pretty steadily since mid March. 

Is this related to the damn Dodge ad?  Who knows, but that’s the best conclusion I can come to.

Do I really care? 

Well I give all my adsense revenue to the Grameen Foundation which in turn uses it to help fund the phone ladies program in Uganda.  I don’t like the idea that the phone ladies are getting less money because of some stupid Dodge ad that doesn’t appeal to my readers and gets no click thru.

I have just changed my Adsense settings to stop running image ads.  We’ll see if that has any impact and report back later.

UPDATE:  I changed my Google Adsense settings to text ads only right after I posted this on Saturday morning.  36 hours later the graphical ads are still running.  Maybe it takes a while for this setting change to kick in. But that seems strange.