AdSense Ad Variations: Link Units And Them ed Ad Units.

Moving on from the s pecial cases - Alternate Ads and PSAs- let’s check out two

important AdSense variations:


Link units and themed ad units are two variations of AdSense Ads that are meant

to further increase the quality of AdSense Ads that get served on webs ites. Let’s

take a quick look to see w hat ‘Link units ’ and ‘themed Ad units’ actually are:

Themed Ad Units: A s their name suggests, themed ad units are the ad units

that are based on partic ular themes. These themes could be depic ted by colors

or special type of graphics that are representative of the event or oc casion

portrayed by the theme. The events and oc casions could be things like

Christmas , New Year’s Day, etc. Of course, the themed Ads can only be

displayed if they are available from the advertis ers and if you have enabled the

themed Ads on your AdSens e account (in ‘Ad Type Preferences’). Also, since the

events vary across different locations, the themed Ads are displayed based on

the location of the website visitor. Besides this minor difference, themed ad units

work in the same way as the normal ad units.

Link Units: Link units are another useful way of advertising through AdSens e

program. Though the basic premise remains the same (i.e. targeted advertising),

the way link units operate is slightly different. Link units are meant to provide

even more meaningful advertisements to the website visitors by presenting them

with a list of topics (ad keyw ords) to choose from. T he website visitors are then

presented with only those Ads that are related to the topic selected by them;

hence making their website visit more meaningful. T he list of topics pres ented to

the website visitor is based on the website content. So, the topics are relevant to

the context of website. However, the ‘clic ks’ on the topics doesn’t make any

revenue for you; it’s the clicks on the Ads for that topic that earns you revenue.


As far as implementing of Link units is concerned, it’s done in the same way as

other AdSense type products -- you copy and paste AdSense code in the html

code of your webpage. Note that you are allowed to implement only one link unit

per web page.