Optimizing for banners

Is it easy to re-design the layout of phpBB?

[buksida]

Have been running adsense on my site for over a year now and its steadily increasing which I'm not complaining about.

The most popular part of the site is by far the forum which also has an adsense leaderboard at the bottom. I've noticed that the forum gets over 60% of the ad impressions but generates less than 10% of the revenue.

I know that ads in forums dont generally do as well so was wondering if it was worth the effort or how easy would it be to redesign it to make the ads more prominent. Would like to incorporate a 120x600 tower unit down the side ... maybe it'll get clicked more? Does anyone have experience with this and did it make a difference to revenue generated?

[rogerd]

Forums are notoriously bad for CTR, although their high pageviews may still allow profitability.

I haven't tested this, but I think a side-position would outperform a bottom leaderboard. Some of the variables that might affect this:
- are newest posts listed at the top or bottom? They will probably get the most views as repeat thread viewers zoom past the old stuff or link directly to the last post.
- what other clutter is there? E.g., a "quick post" text box and/or forum legends at the bottom will push a bottom leaderboard farther out of view.

You can use channels to test the performance of the different positions. Considering the legendary "banner blindness" of forum readers, though, you probably want to get the ads as close to the fresh content as possible.