I’ve been using Google Adsense for years and I’ve learned a lot about how the variations in your Adsense units can affect your overall revenue. Two types of ad units that are very popular with Google Adsense are “link units” and “themed ad units”. Never heard of those before? Well let me explain. These two ad unit types are used to focus ads based on the content of your website or for special occasions. But that’s just the tip of the iceberg …

Let’s start off with “themed ad units”. What are these all about? These types of ads can be used on your website to promote special occasions. For example, you can have ads that will display products around Christmas time, Valentine’s Day, New Year’s Day, etc. You can consider these types of ads as “occasion specific” and are focused on particular themes at particular times of the year.

Now bear in mind of course that these ads will only appear if they are available from your advertisers. If there are no ads that are “occasion specific” then other ads may appear on your site – but this of course all depends on your Adsense settings. You would also need to bear in mind that the ads that appear for these occasions are “location specific”. After all, not every country in the world puts high priority on occasions like Christmas, Valentine’s Day, New Year’s, etc, so don’t expect these ads to show up in every location where your website is viewed. Keep these things in mind if you intend to use “theme ad units” on your website. Now let’s look at “link units” and see what they can do for you.

Depending on the placement of your ads and the content of your pages, you may wish to use “link units” as a viable alternative. The first difference that you would notice with “link units” compared to other ad units is that you would not get paid when a user initiates a click on this ad unit (it simply opens up a new page with ads), you would get paid however if a user clicks on any of the ads in the new ad page – in other words, a user has to initiate two (2) steps in order for you to get paid. Now some webmasters may think that giving the user this “extra step” is a waste of time, but in reality, this is a way of ensuring that the user is really interested in the ad being offered – and that they did not simply click on it by accident (hey, it happens sometimes.

Because these link unit results are based on a specific topic that the user wishes to view (because they clicked on your link unit ad first) the resulting ads displayed are more meaningful to the user. This ad unit is very useful if you have webpages that focus on specific topics. So look at your webpages and see which ones would benefit from “link unit” ads.

So what do you think about Google’s ad unit structure. Does it work for you? What strategies do you use? Do you use Google Adsense or do you use another company? I’d love to hear your views about this topic.