Google have also launched a new form of text advertising today – Adsense Ad Links where by readers of your pages are offered a list of topics that are relevant to your page which they can click to find relevant ads for that topic. Its a pretty interesting system that actually gives readers the chance to CHOOSE to see ads. I’m yet to try it out but will see what its like shortly.
‘Ad Links are a new form of text advertising that we’re offering to our AdSense publishers. Using the same contextual targeting algorithm that targets Google ads to your content pages, Ad Links units display a list of topics that are relevant to your page. Each topic, when clicked, brings the user to a page of related advertisements.
The result is advertisements that are closely targeted to the interests of your users. By selecting the topics through interaction with the ad unit, users are presented with useful information in the form of related advertisements. Their direct involvement with the evolution of the ad unit guarantees an interest in the ads that are presented.’
Update: Just looking over this option now – they offer you a few options of sizes and formats. You can display 4 or 5 links in four different sizes (120×90, 160×90, 180×90 and 200×90). I’ve added one to my sidebar to see how it goes. If you do, make sure you set it up as its own channel so that you can track its results to measure if its worth doing.
In reading through the conditions of use of Ad links its worth noting some of the following:
– publishers receive payment not for the initial click on the topics in the links, but for clicks on ads after the initial click
– they are also testing (on about 2% of all ads shown) ad links and normal adsense ads combined into the one unit. A number of us have observed that they have been testing this previously also).
– in your statistics for that channel/ad an ‘impression will be logged each time an Ad Links unit is shown, and an additional impression will be reported when a page of ads is loaded due to a click on an Ad Link topic’. Clicks will only be counted for clicks on ads, not clicks on the initial topic.
– you may only place one of these Ad Link ads per page in addition to the normal limit of three Adsense ad units per page.
– the ad filter option does not filter ads shown using this system
– if Adsense cannot find a relevant topic for your blog and you don’t specify an alt ad it will serve a search box instead.
