skyhawk133 - 11:30 pm on Sep 5, 2006 (gmt 0)

When you have a forum, you can't look at your CTR and your eCPM. They will always be diluted because of the constant repeat visits. You have to find a better way to measure AdSense in your forums. A good way is to create a channel and track FIRST TIME visitors, RETURN visitors, and MEMBERS.

I find across the board, I get around 2% CTR and about $5 CPM which makes it well worth it in my forums. Of course my earnings on non-forum pages "appear" higher, but in fact, they are only slightly so because of better ad targetting.

I would highly suggest following googles suggestion of using the large box (336x280) above the fold for NON-MEMBERS and limiting your ad units to 2 for non members and only 1 for members. This will ensure you get the absolute highest payout for clicks from members.

You must rotate in other ads though to fight ad blindness, rotate ad colors, and constantly measure your performance to find what works best. You'll find that what works best 1 week may not work best the next because members become blind... rotate in new color schemes every week or so.

I can definitley understand where some forums just simply will not make it with AdSense though. If you have little/no organic traffic, especially organic traffic that isn't already blind to ads, then AdSense probably isn't your slice of cake. You'll have to find a CPM network or start generating more organic traffic for your site.

Don't think though that you can't make $1000+/mo off a relatively small forum.