Have you enabled AdSense shopping links on your website to make more money online from AdSense ads? AdSense shopping links are a new way to earn AdSense income by displaying shopping ads on websites.
I enabled the new AdSense shopping links from the Adsense Labs on our website in this hope and was disappointed by the way the AdSense code was displayed as well as the type of ads that were shown!
AdSense shopping links
Here’s a screenshot of a particular article on our website where you can see multiple new links with dotted underlines with a search icon by the side.
Since these new search links seemed novel to the user, they will be tempted to click it of course. Upon clicking these links a large panel slides into view from the right side which shows these shopping ads.
So in this example, there are 3 links even in this short paragraph I am showing. There are many more on this article like this! Lets see what happens when I click on them. (Note never do this adsense mistake of clicking your own adsense ads. Clicking on search links is not clicking on final ads which make income.)
1. When I click the Apple keyword link, the shopping ads page which popped up showed no content and no ads and was just a poor user experience.
2. When I clicked on the iPad keyword it showed me iPad shopping links which were basically one text link to the general shopping website.
3. The third keyword which I clicked on was Microsoft it showed for image ads with prices below which basically would have taken users to a shopping website.
Should you use AdSense shopping link ads?
Unless you are running a shopping site that is heavily targeted selling goods and services such as gadget blogs or other affiliate marketing websites, you might not have enough ad inventory with supported keywords.
So while the AdSense shopping links engine will mark a large number of your product’s keywords as potential shopping links; clicking on them will lead to useful ads (much like Public Service Ads) and will lead to a poor user experience. This also heavily depends on which country you are seeing these ads in, as it’s possible US advertisers will show these shopping ads in the US if they ship in the US only. Seeing these ads from India will show blank ads.
Yet they need to control how many text links ads like these with search icons should be shown (much like Adense auto ads does). My site pages are full of them, destroying the user experience, and taking away the internal link clicks and other valuable Adsense display ad clicks. Unless users get to see useful attractive shopping ads and these units have a high CTR and make a lot more income, they do not seem valuable enough to spoil the user experience.
Turn off AdSense shopping links
AdSense shopping links are an AdSense labs feature and can be easily turned on and off from your AdSense Administration panel.
Go to Optimization > Labs
AdSense shopping ads were not turned on by default on my website and I had turned them on in the hope of experimenting with AdSense to earn more income. However, the user experience was known as not good on our website, especially because we are not a product-focused gadget blog where it might work better.
So do try AdSense shopping links and see if you like the shopping ads on your website and if they do perform better and make you more income online. Although I do not see how to track their income seperately.