Got the following email from Google Adsense a few minutes ago.
Hi,
As a publisher using link units on your pages, we’re writing to let you know about a recently resolved reporting issue that affected your account.
We discovered an issue with the way earnings from link units were being shown in publisher accounts, which resulted in some of your ad unit earnings being incorrectly attributed to link units instead. However, this was only a reporting display issue and so your overall earnings and payments were not affected. We’ve resolved the issue, and as a result, you may now notice slight differences when you look at reports for previous months. Specifically, when you generate separate reports for link units and ad units, you may see that earnings from link units on a particular day have decreased, but that the ad unit earnings for the same day have increased by the same amount.
Again, please be assured that your aggregate earnings and payments were unaffected, so you’ve been credited for all valid clicks and impressions. In addition, this issue has not affected your ad performance in any way.
Your reports will now accurately reflect your earnings from link units and ad units — we apologize for the inconvenience and any confusion caused.
Sincerely,
The Google AdSense Team
What this means is that Adsense apparently made an error in recording our earnings. Instead of crediting the ad units, some earnings were credited for link units.
What are Google Adsense link units?
Link units are the listing of topics which, when clicked, will show a page of related ads. We don’t earn yet when these topics are clicked. We get to earn only when the ads on the resulting page are clicked. On this blog, the Adsense link units are located under the PMT Archives section on the sidebar, right under the dropdown options Choose Article Category and Select Month of Publication.
Although there was an error in attributing the earnings to the appropriate unit, Google promised there was no effect on our past total earnings. Meaning, the earnings were just reallocated but the total amount remains unchanged.
Intrigued, I logged on to my Adsense account to see how the link units are performing.
Income from Link Units vs. Total Adsense Income
Although the link units’ daily performance seems to be erratic (there are days when it’s really high and also days when it’s low), on the average it accounts for only 6.7% of my total daily Adsense earnings.
This only goes to show that they’re not really the best performing ad categories in Google Adsense.
I’m not sure if removing them would cause an increase in the income performance of the ad units but, right now, I’m not keen on trying this experiment yet. For now, I’m ok with the link units contributing even a small percentage of my Adsense income.
How about you? Are you having success with your Adsense link units?
yap! i’ve got one too..
Google is indeed not perfect after all. They do make mistakes. I just wonder how many gross mistakes they just keep secret from us.
In an earning site of mine, I only use the big wide blocks mostly. This ad link unit is just too ‘Ads by Google’-conspicuous. That’s a phrase that causes blindness.
.-= James M.´s latest blog ..Track Cell Phone =-.
I got that email today too. And TODAY, my earnings have dropped dramatically. I’m not to happy about it. At least Google didn’t take away from my past earnings. But this definitely effects our future earnings. I for one, am not very pleased.
i also got this same mail
heeee. rest muna adsense ko… oh well… anyway, for those of you guys who want to make money from facebook, check my latest blogpost… (mali ang sinasabi ng comentluv)
@James M, last year, the Google Adsense team sent me an email saying they are to disable my Adsense account. I emailed back to ask them the reason why. They told me to just ignore the previous message because they maid a mistake in sending the email. Whew! I wrote about it here: Google Adsense team makes mistakes too
@Joseppi, there was no impact on earnings in the succeeding days after I got that email. But in the last few days, I’m seeing a decline in Adsense earnings, probably because of the Christmas holidays.
@ice_hot, what happened? I checked your blog and wala ngang Adsense ads ngayon. Permanent ban ba o temporary lang?
lol..nagkakamali talaga especially these holiday season masyadong marami kasi mga tao sa web.
.-= jonharules´s latest blog ..Will Noah Cyrus be Like Miley? =-.
Yeah I am wondering whether taking them out would somehow
increase the performance of the other ads, but I tend to
doubt it. Hey, six nearly seven percent is better than
nothing. I’ve been reading up on this seo stuff hopefully
I’ll start getting some clicks too from my homework.
Thanks for the tips. XOXO Patty Pasadena (my site is
MatureBeauty.com)
I had a few AdSense link units on my personal blog that didn’t convert very well so I switched them out for traditional banners which seemed to perform better. Overall though I think link units perform well when embedded seamlessly in articles near the top or bottom of written content. Seems like link units don’t work as well in sidebars (at least not for me).
After reading many forums and blog posting now i decided to put ads unit only instead of wasting spaces for link units. yup this is my personal decision for now..
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