Tips Adsense : Link Units — Great Little Stocking Fillers

An ad format that has already proved its worth, when used correctly, is link units. If you’ve ever bought Christmas presents for children, you’ve probably bought stocking fillers. You dole out hundreds of bucks on some state-of-the-art electronic gizmo, toss in a couple of toy cars that cost a dollar each just to fill up space and give the kid more to unwrap... then watch him spend 90 percent of his time playing with the car that cost 10 percent of your total gift budget. Ad Link units have the potential to be equally profitable. They’re very small, almost unnoticeable... but when used well, they can be extremely

effective. Ad Link units let you place a box on your site that contains four or five links. They come in sizes ranging from 20 x 90 to 200 x 90, and are really meant to be placed on a sidebar. Because you can place both Ad Link units as well as other ad units on the page, you might find that the choice helps: if a user doesn’t spot something interesting in one type of ad block, he might spot it on another.

Where Ad Links differ from other types of ads is that they only display a list of topics that Google believes are relevant to the content of your pages. They don’t display the ads themselves. When a visitor clicks on a topic, Google pops up a new window with targeted ads. It can be argued that the Ad Links are ineffective because like video ads, people have to go through two clicks in order for you to get paid. That’s right, once again, you’re only getting paid for the second click (but that does mean you can check to see which ads your users are being served.)

But it can also be argued that if someone is taking the time to click on a topic, then they are probably very interested in the link, and are likely to click an actual advertisement on the resulting page. Some people have found that just about everyone who clicks on an Ad Link will click on the ads that appear on the next page.

I have tested Ad Links on multiple sites and have seen vast differences in results. That makes it more difficult to say whether or not they are for you.

In the first case, I placed the Ad Links on an information-based site with a very general audience. The results were nothing to write home about. Let's just say that you could just about buy a large candy bar with the CPM I saw. In the second case, I placed the Ad Links on a product specific site with a narrow audience. The results were fantastic! We're talking about a CPM that is greater than what someone might make flipping burgers in one day. The conclusions should be obvious. If you’re going to use an Ad Links unit campaign. You need to put them:

1. On a site with a specific field of interest. A general site will give you general ads — and few clicks.

2. Above the fold with few other links. For Ad Links, this is crucial: If your users are going to click a link, it should be a link that gives you money.

It’s also a good idea to keep your Ad Link units for sites with high-paying keywords. If someone comes to your site seeking out information or a product on a top-notch keyword, they tend to be more likely to click as a result. There are two kinds of link units: vertical units and horizontal units. Vertical link units are great slotted into sidebars. They just look like a natural extension of the link list. But horizontal link units can be at least as effective. Since they were introduced, they really have become an extremely useful tool. Some users have reported increases in CTR as high as 200 percent using these units! Instead of piling the links one on top of the other—which is great for putting above lists of links but stand out too clearly when placed in text—the horizontal ads blend in perfectly when placed on pages with articles.

You can still only use one Ad Link unit per page and users still have to click twice before you get paid but they’re definitely worth slipping into a long article. You probably shouldn’t put them at the bottom of a page where they’ll be very easy to miss, but there are plenty of other places where these sorts of ads can work very, very well. For example, a horizontal ad unit can be a great alternative to a leaderboard. It’s much more subtle and takes up less space on the page — definitely something to experiment with to see which of the two brings you the highest revenues. Or you could use them to separate forum or blog entries. As a horizontal unit, they can be very effective as frames that give people somewhere easy to go when they reach the end of a text unit.

One great use for horizontal link units though is on directory pages. If you have a Web page that contains tables of links, slipping a horizontal link unit above or below them — or both — can make the ads look like a part of the directory. It almost makes you want to build a directory just to try it out!