Last month — and late June — we have seen some occurences of combined AdSense ad units. The image was shown on the top of the usual text ad units. Placing attention grabbing image(s) around AdSense ads has been known to increase click-through.

Google seems to like this idea and begun to test it.

While browsing some sites, I noticed other variations of the ad units. It is now somewhat different from the first combined ad unit.

• Applied to leaderboard ad format - Combined ad units now available for both vertical and horizontal ads.

• Added More sponsored links… - The live link (see the red arrow) brings me to Google to get more ads.

There are other formats are currently under testing. At least on one occasion I saw ad units without “Ads by Google” in them.

Clearly labeling ads as such is ethically required. So perhaps Google is to allow publishers to label their own ad units soon, like it used to be?