Hybrid AdSense Text + Link Ads Spotted

I believe I’ve read about this so-called hybrid AdSense ads before. The ads are your normal contextual text ad formats with a line of link ads at the bottom.

Got a screen shot here on my blog a while ago.

Top those familiar AdSense ads, you won’t notice anything different with this one below:

They just look like two ad blocks — one regular text ads and another link ad at the bottom.

Actually, it’s a hybrid. Both ads appear from a single ad code. If you click on any of the link ads, the text ads will change and will display more relevant ads. I believe it’s a good move and here’s the reasoning behind this one:

• AdSense bots aren’t perfect. They might crawl and entire page and determine the overall theme or topic based on several factors — domain, title, keyword density, keywords on URL, among other contextual signatures.
• Contents on some pages may give mixed signals to the AdSense bots as to the context and will display varying ads. This could cause in lower relevance and lower click-throughs.
• Appending text link modifiers or filters at the bottom of the ads will allow visitors to narrow the context of the entire page and thereby showing more relevant ads.
• Higher relevance could mean higher CTR. Better returns.

Note however that the text filters below the text ads are merely modifiers. Like the Link Ad units, Publishers do not earn from direct clicks but from clicks on the text ads resulting from the modified ads. Pretty clever move, IMO. Problem though is that these hybrid ads are not displayed consistently which means you can’t really track their performance. However, I still believe they will contribute to a higher overall page CTR.