Two days ago, I decided to try Google Link Units. I’ve always been put off by them because you require two clicks on the link unit to earn money. Anyway, I thought I’d give them another go as I wanted to test whether I could get better targeted ads through the link units. Unpleasantly, I found out that my overall CTR for adsense had decreased which meant my earnings went down as well. My CTR decreased by as much as 4%!
My opinion on this is that visitors to my site saw the link units which were better targeted than the actual adsense ads and clicked on them instead. However link units will display a list of related ads on the category which has been clicked and the results page for these ads are not very pretty at all – it’s like google search results page which is nothing like the theme of my site. Therefore the visitors couldn’t be bothered to click on the ads again which meant my earnings were affected.
All in all, I really think that Link Units are a waste of time unless you put them down your webpage as an exit point.