Forum Moderators: martinibuster

Message Too Old, No Replies

Responsive Links

         

levo

9:47 pm on Dec 15, 2015 (gmt 0)

WebmasterWorld Senior Member 10+ Year Member Top Contributors Of The Month



We have a new ad unit. There is a new "Responsive Links" option under "new ad unit" menu.

breeks

11:58 pm on Dec 15, 2015 (gmt 0)

WebmasterWorld Senior Member 10+ Year Member Top Contributors Of The Month



Got one cooking to see what it looks like :)

breeks

12:39 am on Dec 16, 2015 (gmt 0)

WebmasterWorld Senior Member 10+ Year Member Top Contributors Of The Month



Same old tired design but Responsive. Was hoping for an updated modern looking link unit. Too much to ask for :)

netmeg

3:47 pm on Dec 16, 2015 (gmt 0)

WebmasterWorld Senior Member 10+ Year Member Top Contributors Of The Month



What would you have them to do to update the link unit? A link is a link. But I admit I wouldn't mind seeing something new. AdSense in general is pretty stale in how it looks.

But I'm glad they have a responsive one and I'll definitely be testing it.

farmboy

9:19 pm on Dec 16, 2015 (gmt 0)

WebmasterWorld Senior Member 10+ Year Member Top Contributors Of The Month



I just published one on a site. Looks interesting so far, I will have to see how it looks later today.


FarmBoy

farmboy

3:16 pm on Dec 17, 2015 (gmt 0)

WebmasterWorld Senior Member 10+ Year Member Top Contributors Of The Month



It's been about 18 hours since I published the responsive links. Two observations:

1. The content of the ads looks good as of now. Related to the content of the page instead of some "generic" ads.

2. I put the responsive links under and the same width as a 320x100 unit, but the width of the responsive links doesn't seem to have expanded to the 300 width, it's about half the width.

Interesting.


FarmBoy

LuckyD

9:51 pm on Dec 17, 2015 (gmt 0)

10+ Year Member Top Contributors Of The Month



Damn those solve lots of problems for me! Link units have been performing very well for me, so I'll check back with the results. Serving 90k of them every day, so I'll get results soon

Broadway

5:54 pm on Dec 31, 2015 (gmt 0)

WebmasterWorld Senior Member 10+ Year Member Top Contributors Of The Month



This seems to be a not-ready-for-primetime feature.

There doesn't seem to be anything new here in terms of the format served "responsively."

On wide screens they seem to serve the single-line 15px tall horizontal style.
On small screens they switch to the three-stacked 90px vertical.

The font they use for the horizontal format is substantially (as in substantially) smaller than what they use for the verticals. So what might look good on one type of screen will look like a goofy adlink on the other (well, at least they're consistent in that fact).

Sure, most responsive websites (including me) change their font size according to the device's screen size. But I can't imagine anyone is using anything similar to what these units serve up.

The whole issue of a lack of responsive adlink units only had to do with the 15px tall horizontal units.
If you like using the 90px ones, that was always a possibility regardless of screen size.

I would have thought that Adsense would have designed a responsive unit that gracefully transformed from one horizontal (15px) line to either a shorter 15px or maybe a two-line 30px, and of course using at least some similar font for both forms.
For whatever reason, that seems not to be their vision.

I tried to limit the height of the ad's container to see if that would provide for a single-line ad link unit on both desktop and mobile. But what they do is force a 90px ad into your 15px tall defined area. As a result it overlaps the text below. (Actually I tried 15, 20, 35 pixel heights. All produced the same result.)

Adsense has no problem giving me everthing I don't want. Hey Adsense, how about someone who actually uses these ad units designing them?

Broadway

6:14 pm on Dec 31, 2015 (gmt 0)

WebmasterWorld Senior Member 10+ Year Member Top Contributors Of The Month



I got to thinking about this.
This "new" feature is simply serving up two forms of what already existed.
Which is a dumbed-down version of what the responsive code for the regular ads does. (At least that code respects the width and height declarations you make for the container div. And it actually, on occasion, actually serves a new ad format that makes use of every bit of real estate you give it.)
So basically, wasn't this Adlinks thing just an afternoon coding project for one of the Adsense high school interns?
And that took like a year after the regular-ads responsive code to finally come out?
Wow.

breeks

4:35 pm on Jan 1, 2016 (gmt 0)

WebmasterWorld Senior Member 10+ Year Member Top Contributors Of The Month



They could have done a lot more with the link units but I guess it was just not important enough.

MsHuggys

11:06 pm on Jan 1, 2016 (gmt 0)

10+ Year Member



I haven't posted for years here. I come I read and leave. But, now, it's time to post again.

We have found from one site to another we own, we only get paid for maximum 10-50% of the ad clicks, depending on traffic level. We have changed the design over and over, it's mobile friendly, active view is good. But, some days 120 clicks will only tally up to less than a dozen. A dozen clicks will produce one or none paid clicks for days on end, depending on the website. Typically, we got paid for 90%-100% of the clicks, every year for ten years. You expect some clicks in error, always had been. But they were the exception not the rule. It's doesn't make sense that 90+% are not counted, where the traffic is active surfing humans.

I have been lurking here for nine months, seeing other long time WW members saying the same thing and read, hoping somebody here would have a solution. I haven't seen one given as a real possibility, given our logs and history with Adsense. Adsense advisers gave us reasons that didn't test out as viable. They were excuses without foundation, science couldn't back them up.

Our traffic is all organic, high quality traffic. We do over two million page views a year across our network of websites. I have been with Adsense for over eleven years. The change in clicks not counted increased some in 2014, but since April has been getting worse by the month. We are down to 10% of previous years' revenue.

Nothing left to lose, we tried another ad provider in Nov. We have tested three of 60 sites we own. So far, the revenue change has been tremendous. Site #1 was making pennies a week is now making dollars per week. Site #2, the larger test website which is still not one of our top 10 websites was making pennies a day, now making dollars a day. We didn't test our biggest sites, not wanting to risk too much. At least they were making money. The first two test websites, we had nothing to lose. They hit rock bottom. The third site we just added today, had been making $400-600 a month in 2014 and early 2015 with no change in traffic levels (8,000-14,000 views monthly) and was down to single digit earnings. It's already doing better than a full week of Adsense, with a change for only a few hours today. We have quit counting pennies and begun counting dollars again.

We are moving all 60 websites, which are a diverse range of niches, over 90% inbound traffic from U.S. UK, CA and AU, out of the Adsense program in Q1, one by one. Thought it was us and tried everything we could for nine months. It's not us. Something is broken in Adsense (at least for some of us), otherwise only changing ad servers wouldn't make this tremendous difference. Adsense promises of big changes coming in 2016 are too little too late.