Horizontal link units work best

I've been doing some experimentation with AdSense link units and I've concluded quite unscientifically that the horizontal link units work best. For those who don't know, a link unit is a two-stage ad delivery mechanism. Instead of showing individual ads on a page, a link unit shows ad topics. Clicking on an ad topic (it's a simple text link) brings the visitor to a full page of conventional text advertisements. The AdSense publisher only gets paid if the visitor then clicks one of those ads — the click on the topic link doesn't count for anything.

Like regular ad units, link units come in different formats. Initially, they were all vertically-oriented: one line of “Ads by Google” followed by four or five (it's configurable) ad topics. Then horizontal link units appeared: the “Ads by Google” tag and the links are together on a single line.

You can see horizontal link units in action on my two main sites, EricGiguere.com and MakeEasyMoneyWithGoogle.com. They fit well with the design of these sites, especially at the top of the page near the navigation banner. I chose contrasting colors to make it clear these aren't navigation links. You'll see many sites, however, blending the link unit colors to deliberately make them look like they're part of the site navigation.

As always, your results may vary. Don't be surprised if you see ad search boxes on pages like this rant against a cellphone provider I wrote. I think the search box looks a bit crowded, so I may have to use a custom channel to track that page specifically to see if actually generates any income — I think it's an easier sell to get visitors to click links than to explicitly search for ads.

Eric Giguere is the author of Make Easy Money with Google, the first introductory AdSense book.

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