adlinks much better targetted than ads

anyone else seeing this regularly?

[danny]

Is anyone else regularly seeing pages where the AdLink targetting is spot on but AdSense ads aren't relevant at all?

To give one example, I have a review of "The Evolution of Plants", on which the AdLinks are for "Fossil Record", "DNA Evolution", "Permian", and "Bible Science". Apart from possible concerns about the last one, that's pretty good targetting.

The ads, though are for "food facts", UPSes, and education coaching. Not good.

[hunderdown]

Danny, I have only used Adlinks on my home page, other than a few short experiments elsewhere, but I have noticed something like that.

On my home page, I get Adlinks that are nicely targetted to the overall theme of the site, rather than picking up on specific keywords on the page. And so I'm inclined to think that the "focus" of the Adlinks targetting is wider than than for ad blocks. That would make sense, considering that AdLinks take a visitor TO a specific set of ads.

And that means that they do work differently and are best used in somewhat different situations. In the case you cite, use AdLinks, since it ties in better. Your experience makes me think I should be trying AdLinks on more pages....

[david_uk]

I'd say that my main block ads are very well targeted. I also have an adlinks unit on the main page and the ads tend to be mostly on target with a couple of them wandering off to semi-related topics. I personally think that's not such a bad thing as long as the targeting isn't too weird.

I did an experiment yesterday of adding a second ad block to my main page to see what ads appeared, and none of the ads in the adlinks unit appeared in it. They picked affilliates and MFA's for the block. They were bang on target but clearly really crappy earners that would send the site smart pricing into freefall.

Maybe the best strategy for more than one ad unit on a page is to have one main block and an adlinks unit? I have found that on the pages I've tried adlinks on it's been worthwhile. I'll have to get round to putting a few more up sometime :)

[jetteroheller]

53,5% of my revenues are from the AdLinks

[Scurramunga]

It all depends on your particular website. Different webmasters have reported varying results.

I find that adlinks don't work well for me at all, yet ad blocks show more relevant ads and yield very high CTR and eCPM.

[Hobbs]

Maybe the best strategy for more than one ad unit on a page is to have one main block and an adlinks unit?

There is a serious flaw/risk in this theory David, which is lowering your CTR & CPM due to the un-clicked linkunit that counts as an impression. I am a successful one adunit per page publisher after much trial and error.

Google has been pushing for linkunits in all its case studies, but until they stop counting them in the impressions they are a liability, if you are like me, and a good percentage of your earnings comes from site targeted advertisers at a good CPM rate, you do not want to risk lowering your CPM.

So why shouldn't link units be counted in the impressions?
Because the display of ads is not on our sites but on Google's pages, the conversion or lack of it is there too, the choice of ads and their order, the page layout ... is all on Google's pages, so why should I get a lower ctr and lower cpm when Google does not convert on its own pages?

[david_uk]

Ah - I shouldn't post with a hangover. I should of course have made the point that if the adlinks unit doesn't pay it's way then dump it. In my case, having an adlinks unit on my main earning page has been a success, whereas having a second block was a failure.

[deviantlnx]

So what type of adlinks are you having the most success with, vertical or horizontal?

[jetteroheller]

Maybe the best strategy for more than one ad unit on a page is to have one main block and an adlinks unit?

That's my strategy since May 2005

120x90 AdLink
300x250 in navigation area