If you're using link units, you know that they're a great way to earn additional revenue from the smaller spaces on your site. We've made a few updates to this ad type in the past, but today, we're giving link units a well-deserved facelift. We decided that it was time to reevaluate the layout of the link unit and the landing page in order to give this ad type both a modern look and a great performance boost. Here’s an overview of what’s changing.

The link unit
We’ve heard feedback from publishers that it isn’t clear why they should choose to show four versus five terms in their link units. Most people pick one of these options by guessing the expected performance. We’ve actually found that link units with four terms almost always perform better than five. As a result, we’re reducing the number of topics in all link units to four for horizontal orientations and three for vertical orientations. If you’re currently using link units, this change will happen automatically. We’re also slightly increasing spacing between and font size of each term.

The ad page
Following the general makeover of Google pages, we’re giving link unit landing pages a fresh look as well. The color scheme, orientation, fonts, and number of ads are being updated to the following:

We’ll continue to work on improving link units and hope to share more exciting news soon! In the meantime, we recommend viewing this video to learn how to utilize link units.

Posted by William Chang - AdSense Engineering