OffshoreBankingCentral.com Brings Home The Bacon

25.5 OffshoreBankingCentral.com Brings Home The Bacon

One of the great things about optimizing your AdSense ads is that with a little bit of thought, you can really come up with some very clever ways of blending the ads into the page.

Fig. 25.5 A link unit disguised as a nav bar at OffshoreBankingCentral.com?

It’s easier to do this with some ads than others.

Leaderboard text links, for example, can be very useful. A lot of people turn their nose up at horizontal text links. They think that because they’re so small not enough people will see them to click on them. While vertical link units can be easily integrated into a list of links, there’s no good place to put a horizontal unit.

That’s a big mistake.

OffshoreBankingCentral.com shows just how powerful a well-blended horizontal link unit can be.

This site has two sets of ads: a vertical ad unit on the left separated from the rest of the page with a gray background (I’d be interested to know how well those ads perform but I suspect they’d do better with a white background); and horizontal link unit at the top of the page.

That link unit just does an outstanding job.

The unit displays four links right beneath the navigation bar. Each one of those links contains either the word “offshore” or the word “banking.” Even though “Ads by Google” is still there right next to those links, they still look like another line of navigation links leading to relevant parts of the site.

I think there’s a very valuable lesson there about the value of link units.

While it’s true that link units contain very little information, used correctly that can be an asset. Had there been another line or two describing the site those links lead to, it would have been clear that those links are ads. As it is, they’re perfectly blended.

How can you copy what Offshore Banking Central did?

Easy. Create a very simple navigation bar made up of links rather than tabs and place your horizontal link unit directly beneath it. You’ll need to make sure that you’re hitting the keywords in just the way you want but if you pull it off, you should see some fantastic results.