Optimizing Google Adsense Link Units

Recently a new update to link units have been implemented which, based on their research, will hopefully yield even higher CTR for bloggers and publishers:

We’ve heard feedback from publishers that it isn’t clear why they should choose to show four versus five terms in their link units. Most people pick one of these options by guessing the expected performance. We’ve actually found that link units with four terms almost always perform better than five.

As a result, we’re reducing the number of topics in all link units to four for horizontal orientations and three for vertical orientations. If you’re currently using link units, this change will happen automatically. We’re also slightly increasing spacing between and font size of each term.

Not too bad! I do use them here and their situated after the content and before the comment layer:

The challenge with Link Units is that it can be a challenge to find a great place to put them, especially in an optimal fashion.

But if you can blend them well with your design and navigation you could have a huge winner.

One of the Google Adsense Units that we haven’t mentioned much is the “Link Unit” option which many bloggers often fail to use at all or simply use ignorantly without much gain.

Check out these two examples:

Well place on the left navigation.

As you can see the text link units are well placed in the top left on the vertical navigation. It looks natural and matches the rest of the websites colors!

Here’s a great one for top navigation:

As you can see the link units right below the logo match with the overall site and go well with the flow of the content and presentation.

Well done!

But it’s good to know that it requires the user to not only click once but twice – you see, clicking a link unit jumps you to a page that looks like this:

Requires two clicks.

And if the user clicks on one of the links on the Google Link Page then you’ll get paid.

That’s why many publishers ignore link units because it requires the end-user to click twice – although, I believe that if done well it can pay off big time.