nathanso - 5:42 am on Jul 19, 2005 (gmt 0)

I've been working hard over the past four months trying to maximize the ad revenue from my 8-year old sports/recreation oriented forum site that runs on a BBS of my own construction. My site has great organic PR in all the major SE's and logs about 150K page impressions and 33K sessions per month. But getting cash out has been challenging to say the least. Since there are few forums that compete with mine, I'm here to share my best practices in hopes that others will do the same.

I've been selling graphic banners direct to small businesses in my niche for the last 4-5 years, first 468x60 across the top, and later/currently 150x600 wide skyscrapers running down the left margin of each forum's posts. I sell these banners for between $20 and $50 per month, mostly to vendors who actively participate in my forums. I get $100/month for my home page slots (2), and I offer sizable discounts for longer ad runs up to 12-months.

After leveling out on banner ad sales, I turned to PPC programs and tried *many* until discovering that, for my forum at least, AdSense was head and shoulders above the rest. More on AdSense below.

I tried Amazon single-product ads and got a few conversions, but it took a lot of work to keep the ads fresh (people stopped clicking on the same ads after about a week), and the commission was low compared to AdSense. I canned the Amazon ads after about a month, and well before reaching the $25 level to get paid. :(

The remainder of this post will focus on my AdSense tuning.

Since I had previously carved out a left margin for my own ads, publishing AdSense 160x600 wide skyscrapers took little effort. I decided not to trump my existing banner advertisers' ads with AdSense ads so I programmed the rotation to place the AdSense ads below my last paid advertisers' ad. Thus far there have been zero complaints from incumbent direct advertisers.

But the AS wide skies weren't performing all that well, producing page CTR's less than 1% and earning only a couple of bux a day. I followed advice posted here on WW and started playing with colors and the like, finally settling on an AdSense supplied 4-theme rotation using the two forum colors on my site and their inverse. This perked things up a bit and I occasionally saw a fin per day.

Following more WW wisdom, I delved into links units, publishing a 120x90 link unit block in the top-right of every page on my site, borderless and colored to match the site. These unassuming ads did remarkably well, sometimes outperforming the wide skys, sometimes not. But payout wise, I was still unable to afford lunch each day.

Next I tried the new 468x15 link units, placed just beneath the text of the most recent post in each forum. I was initially worried about member push-back but none materialized. But for whatever reason, G wasn't serving many ads to this space, and I'd sometimes see only one or two ads in the link unit, even after I discontinued the 120x90 above. And too many times, G would serve no ads at all into this space which caused it to perform poorly.

Since my forum pages are quite tall, I next tried 2, 3, and even 4 wide skys per page, all stacked up in the left margin. G didn't like serving me 4 or even 3 wide skys per page (blank spaces would appear instead of ads) so I reverted to 2 per page and got a small bump in revenue.

My current and best results have come from placing a good old-fashioned 468x60 borderless banner just below the text of the most recent post. The ad is colored to match the font and bg colors in the post. To get G to serve this ad consistently I had to kill the link units at top-right, but the results have been very encouraging, and now, combined with the single wide sky per page, I'm knocking on sawbuck territory!

"Would you like soup with your lunch today, sir?"

"Why yes, I think I would!"