Horizontal AdLinks Vs. Vertical AdLinks Vs. Ad Units And Ad Performance From Oct To December 2005

How well do certain ads perform? Are vertical ads better than horizontal ads? Where do AdLinks fit into this? Do AdLinks perform well?

To answer these questions I have gone through the data for the past 3 months and come to the conclusion that vertical AdLinks perform abysmally. I have had a vertical AdLinks spot on the right navbar of Diggers Realm since April 10, 2005 and have always known it was an under-performer. I decided to see how much of an under-performer it was and in the process break down the performance of the other AdSense units above the fold.

I don't have a ton of data on an AdLinks move I made a few days ago, but I do have enough data to know that it has been fruitless. The vertical AdLinks are ugly and don't fit within the design well, but I have stuck with them for a long time. I decided to try a horizontal AdLink instead of a vertical one and to slip it in under the header ad unit so it wasn't in the way too much.

So, I moved the right navbar AdLink over as you can see above.

What was the result of this as far as performance? Nothing! There was absolutely no change at all in the performance of this horizontal AdLink unit against the right navbar vertical AdLink unit.

To put it into perspective I put together a chart of ad unit performance for the last 3 months of 2005 on Diggers Realm. Now there is one caveat to the data below. As I mentioned -- and visually show with images -- in my article "A Calculator For Properly Pricing Your BlogAds And Sponsorships" when BlogAds are running on Diggers Realm it pushes the left navbar AdSense ad unit down the page. This downward shift of the ad unit causes a decrease in the performance of the left navbar ad unit when BlogAds are running. So the data below, while highly skewed towards the header ad, needs to be tempered with the realization that the left navbar ad is put at a disadvantage in performance for part of the time.

As you can see the vertical AdLink unit performed horribly. Now realize this is not a comparison of clicks! This is a comparison of revenue, which is what really matters in the end. The AdLink unit may actually perform admirably as far as clicks versus the other ad units, but with AdLinks when someone clicks it the click isn't recorded. The end user is brought to a search results page which they then have to click one of those presented results in order for the publisher to receive any revenue from the click.

So there is no fair way to compare actual click through results of ad units against AdLinks. In the end it doesn't matter though because the revenue derived is what counts. With the horizontal AdLinks unit performing no better I can only come to the conclusion that AdLink units in these positions on Diggers Realm are useless and that these ad positions could be better used by some other type of advertising -- or none at all.

This entry is in the following archive(s):
Advertising Archive
Analysis Of Changes Archive
Google AdSense Archive

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