This One Tip Might Boost Your Earnings From Adsense Link Units

Apart from the regular ad units of Google Adsense, link units are another great way to fill up empty space in your website and earn a decent revenue. The advantage of link units over the regular Adsense units is that they don’t consume heavy space on the design, can fit in specific areas and blend nicely with the theme or template of your website.

If you are an Adsense publisher and have used both regular Google Adsense units and Google Adsense link units, you might have observed that the regular Ad units perform far better than the Ad links. This is because the link units take the user to a separate page which is not a part of your website, while the Google Ad units offer revenue for direct clicks.

In short, Adsense link units have 2 funnels for the conversion while Ad units have just one. So the conversion rate for Ad units is far better than link units.

Having said this, I have seen that many bloggers or web publishers do not optimize their Adsense link units to the fullest. Let’s quickly take an example

My friend Tanmay Ahmed writes a tech blog at TechTipsgeek.com. He is using an Adsense link unit near the navigational area of his website, as seen in the following image

Tanmay is using a good color combination for the Ad link unit – the same background as his template and properly blending the ads with the design. However, here is a small mistake which he is ignoring.

On the target page, he is using the same colors as of the Ad link units. To elaborate the case – his ad link units have the background color brown while the link color is Green. The target advertisement page is also having the same color combination – brown background and green links. Following is an example:

We have been testing through Adsense ads on this site from the last two years and from our experiments, we have seen that Adsense link units perform better when the background color is white and the link color is blue. This is irrespective of how the Advertisement is shown in the template, what I am referring here is the color combination on the actual Ad page and not on the ad unit shown on your website.

For example: In this site, we use a horizontal link unit near the navigational area, with a grey background and black link as the color. But on the target page, we use a White/blue color combination. Following is an example case:

How To Use A Different Color Combination For The Link Unit Page

By default, the link unit page follows the same color combination of your Adsense link unit i.e the page background equals the background of the link unit while the link color on the ad page equals the color of the link in the Adsense link unit (used in the template). However, there is a simple setting which can be used to use a different color for Adsense link units.

When you are creating a new Adsense link unit, be sure to uncheck the selection “Reuse colors on ad pages”.

This will always use a white background and a blue link combination on the resulting ad pages, regardless of whatever color palette you are using for the Ad unit itself. As an example: you might choose a grey/red combination for the color palette but the resulting page will still continue to show a White/Blue combination.

Why Go With White And Blue ?

Two reasons.

1. Most web users associate the color “Blue” with a link. Learn from majority of websites like Google, Bing, MSN, Facebook – why is it that each of these sites use Blue for the link color ?

2. White is the most “Eye soothing” background and common users have a “feel good” factor with the White/Blue combination.

Conclusion

We have performed Adsense split testing on this site several times and have seen that the conversion rate is much higher, when you’re using white background and blue links on the target page of Adsense link units.

Last of all, me saying that different color on the resulting ad pages might not just work for you. At the end of the day, you have to test, experiment and track the results for your specific site and see which setup brings more conversions. Remember that every site has a different user base and what works wonderful for one site might be disastrous for another.

Do let me know your thoughts and ideas in the comments section.

Related reading: Implement Adsense revenue sharing in WordPress and Blogger