Ad Links are beating Ad Unit

At least in my little test

[farmboy]

File this away in the FWIW department.

I have a site where my logo/site name is at the top of the page.

Just below that I put a horizontal Ad Links display and just below the links is a leaderboard. I put this layout on the site 30 days ago.

As of today, the CTR for links is 3 times that of the Ad unit and the actual earnings is almost 4 times that of the Ad unit.

FarmBoy

[onlineleben]

Have the same with a link unit in upper left and a leaderboard at the bottom. Link unit outperforms more than 3 times.

[joaquin112]

I did the same in one of my sites. It seems a bit spammy, but the CTR is impressive.

[MThiessen]

I did this before on a high traffic site. The income surge was initially impressive, but soon tapered off to "not noticable".

The reason being (I think) is it "looks" like a text nav bar. This causes users to click thinking they are navigating your site. This is generally not a good thing and may effect your conversion causing you to get smartpriced.

Link units can increase revenue consistantly "if" you are not positioning it to mimick your site's navigation.

[farmboy]

Link units can increase revenue consistantly "if" you are not positioning it to mimick your site's navigation.

I'm not positioning it to mimick navigation.

The links provide visitors more options than just a 2 ,3 or 4 individual ads. I wish they would allow more than one link unit in a page.

FarmBoy

[farmboy]

By the way, I'm expanding my testing to other sites where, on select pages, I'm removing all Ad Units from the pages and replacing them with the 1 Link Unit allowed on the page.

It's very early, but the results are impressive as of now.

FarmBoy

[netmeg]

I wish I could get link units to perform well for me, but they never seem to.

[MThiessen]

I have a site where my logo/site name is at the top of the page.

Just below that I put a horizontal Ad Links display and just below the links is a leaderboard.

That sounds like a classic position for a top of page text link navigation...

I'm not positioning it to mimick navigation.

Maybe not intentionally, but the above quotes seem to contradict one another. It sounds like the top link unit is positioned where an ordinary text nav bar would be.

If you notice the success of this trailing off after about a month that will be a good sign to let you know your visitors are getting fooled by this.

I advise caution. If your visitors did not "mean" to leave your site, they may hit "back" instantly. If they do this enough your conversion will go down, which may kick in smartpricing. It may be hard to get out of smartpricing once it starts, and this may cost you more money then it makes in the long run.

[Huntster]

I mix it up, but it all comes down to targeting for me and the information it's displaying (duh! obvioulsy), but sometimes the links target real well for me, other times I just don't like what they are displaying. Since they display more terms, when they are off target - it just looks weak and stupid. I find they work best on only very specific topic/keywordy pages. I wouldn't put them on my home pages or generic pages. I'm guessing some do and that could be the reason for the poor numbers across the board vs. ad units. Just my opinion.

When link units target well in my niches - they are fabulous and my ctr is great, and better than the ads.

My ad units are more consistant in targeting...usually. I probably have a 70/30 ratio in favor of ad units. Some of that is based on me having older ads on older pages that I have out there before the link ads came out. 10% of my ads are on pages I own that I could barely find now if I tried! I'm an old timer with adsense...and not the best with my own reporting and I still haven't used Channels - if you could believe that.

[farmboy]

Maybe not intentionally, but the above quotes seem to contradict one another. It sounds like the top link unit is positioned where an ordinary text nav bar would be.

Only if you assume that I, or anyone else, follows some boring old ordinary page layout.

FarmBoy