Like most of the bloggers and website owners, I have been testing many things related to my site and adsense on it in past couple of months that I will be sharing gradually here.
This time I’ll talk about my experience regarding removal of google image ads from the posts page. Although to some people it may be obvious that image ads take longer to load then then normal ones, but my opinion was that it shouldn’t affect much on google site performance testing much as it uses ajax to load the ads and also because it’s google’s own code and if it’s so crappy then google would probably have fixed it already.
But anyway, here is a graph from my Google webmaster tools site performance panel showing clear decrease in site load time in the end (the initial ups and down’s are related to various other changes that I made on the blog, bringing it from 10 second load time per page to almost 3.5 second)
The image clearly shows the steep drop in the load time of the page (almost 1 sec) once the image ads were removed. And important thing to note is that it didn’t affect my adsense income much. Because the text link unit gave me almost same ctr and cpm.
Does it mean that we shall shift to text ads only? ofcourse not! even I may not stick to this even! As i said earlier, it’s all hit and trial to find what works best for you! But this 1 second difference can bring a huge difference though! My site was slower than almost 75% sites before, and now google says it’s slower than 61% of sites, which means my site has crossed 14% sites (probably) competing with it in google search!