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I have set up a couple of adsense ad units on my site to display text-only ads from within google adsense interface. I then later check the ads, only to find out that image ads are displayed instead of text ads.

Is there a way to specifically force text-only ads on a site either through visiting a special adsense URL or by applying special adsense code?

The reason why I ask this is because when I test my pages with webpagetest.org, the text ads load significantly faster than the image ads. In fact, the image ads load 3x slower in comparison to the rest of any given page (which takes about 3/4 of a second to load).

This URL shows an example of how long the advertisement takes to load in comparison to the rest of the site content:

http://www.webpagetest.org/video/compare.php?tests=150913_5G_4A6-r%3A2-c%3A0&thumbSize=200&ival=100&end=visual

Clarification

I know via google I can specify the type but it only applies to the ad unit regardless of page its on.

I'd prefer changing individual ad unit types via code or by special URL for testing purposes regardless of the ad unit in use.

So if on one page, I specify I want text-based ads and on another page I specify I want image-based ads then it should be text-based ads for that one particular page and image-based ads on the other page, even if both pages share the same ad unit number.

The point is, I don't want to have to go into google's interface all the time to change the ad unit type.

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  • Image ads may be slower, but they make more money (so they say). The ones that really get my goat are the video ads. They chew up my pooter sumpin terrible. Makes for bad UX.
    – closetnoc
    Sep 13, 2015 at 3:37

1 Answer 1

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You can follow the instructions located at https://support.google.com/adsense/answer/30629?hl=en which specifically deal with configuring which types of ads to show in your ad units. Basically you can specify that you want to show text and image ads or text only ads. The thing to keep in mind though is that if you specify text only ads the revenue you make from the advertising units will be less than if you supported image as well as text ads. Further more there may be less commercial ads which are text only and the way that Google AdSense is setup if there are no revenue-generating ads you can either define to show a solid block of colour, or to show public service ads, neither of which generate revenue for you so the question to ask yourself is the reduction of revenue worth the marginal increase in speed.

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  • Please see my clarification section.
    – Mike -- No longer here
    Jul 8, 2016 at 0:06
  • Unfortunately there is no way to do what you are asking in the clarification section. One work around would be to create two different ad units with the same settings and simply gave one as text only and the other as image and text. Then you could simply alternate the ad unit code on the page to select which type to use but that would be the only way to achieve it. There is no way in the JavaScript to specify image or text based ads as this is controlled server side by AdSense servers.
    – Chris Rutherfurd
    Jul 8, 2016 at 0:14

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