Hybrid Ads: Links in AdSense Ad Units

Hybrid Ads: Links in AdSense Ad Units

Google is continuously trying different ways to improve the earnings of their AdSense ad units. One of the things they’ve been doing recently is embedding link units right into regular ad units, efficiently integrate the two into a hybrid kind of ad unit. Here’s what it looks like, a screenshot taken from this very blog over the weekend:

You won’t see these too often. Google does split testing on these kinds of changes to see if they work or not. Sad to say, there is no way for you to opt out of these tests, which means that any AdSense publisher can become a guinea pig for Google’s experimentation. Other publishers have reported being strained to display CPA (cost per action) ads, for example.

In any case, if you doubt why your ads look different sometimes, that’s why… if these hybrid ads prove to be successful, expect them to be rolled out across the network. They might be made optional in that case. (And they really only work with the banner ads — they need lots of horizontal space.)