Forum Moderators: martinibuster
Right at a week ago, I finally added AdSense ads to the forums area of this site in order to raise funds for upgrading the bandwidth. Currently, I'm getting 70k-90k impressions, but my CTR is very low -- usually 0.1%.
Now, I have read about forums and their inherant inability to generate a good CTR. However, my ads are currently very irrelevant to not only the topics (threads) or forums, but also to the site. Some ads will be relevant to the site, but many are not. Additionally, the AdSense crawler seems to have zero effect on the actual threads.
So, while I'm not expecting to get rich here, I would think I could improve my CTR somewhat if I could just get my ads to be relevant.
Here are a few thoughts that I had.
1) URLs. I know my URLs need to be consistent, and they are for the most part. Here are some examples:
Boards Index
www.mysite.com/boards.asp
URL for Off-Topic Movies/Music/Books Board Board
www.mysite.com/boards.asp?BoardID=93
URL to first page of specific movie sticky
www.mysite.com/thread_messages.asp?ThreadID=198971&PageNumber=1
2) Membership. Currently, there are a few boards that certain members (staff) only have access to, but I'm not concerned about the ads on those boards. But all public boards are accessible to both members and non-members. And, the URLs are the same whether or not you are signed in.
3) Section Targeting. I have added AdSense section tags to explicitly ignore everything except real content -- thread topics and posts/replies. I have also added tags around the real content to weight those heavier.
4) Meta Tags/Title. I have updated my meta tags so that the topic is included in the title and keywords. I will probably also embed the title in the URL for added targeting, but only once I see *any* improvement from the above changes.
5) Timeing. I made the mistake of doing this stuff *after* I had already added AdSense to my site, and the crawler had indexed my site (and ads started showing up). However, many new threads are created each day, which I would *think* would be equivelant to an unindexed page -- but ads show up immediately for new threads, and they are again *not* relevant to the thread (or the site, for that matter). If it were a matter of AdSense already having indexed my site w/ poor targeting, I would think new threads would require new indexing, thus relevant ads.
It seems like I'm missing something simple here, as I would think my relevance would be at least somewhat better than it is. So I'm hoping this post will generate some suggestions.
Thanks so much in advance for any feedback you may offer.
1) Hardcore gamers are not your average computer user. These are the types of guys who know the reasons why some Intel chips use HT Technology. They are not the types to click on ads in a forum. Even if those ads are relevant to their threads.
2) I would think that there are few relevant ads targeted towards online gaming communities, like Counter-Strike clans. Probably not a lot of sites advertising sprays and bots!
This is just my opinion. Of course, you could be into a totally different type of gaming...(ie. Playstation, XBox, etc.)
I think it all depends on the average age of users in your community, but also the fact that most forums do not have a lot of CTR.
I think the former two you can get through Amazon.com's affiliate program for sure. In the end, I you'll get more that way rather than the few cents you get per click with adsense.
This particular video game is not your typical video game -- nor is this your typical video game website. It is very interactive (other than forums). The target audience ranges from 10 to 40+, and many (as much as 25-30%) of our members are female.
Without giving too many details, I would say most fans of this game will not likely be found playing FPSes or MMORPGs (meaning that this site is quite unique). It is *not* a PC game, but rather a console game.
My point is, that I think our site holds an online niche, as there are not many other sites that are competing with our site for this particular game.
I'm thinking that if I can fix the relevance issue, the off-topic boards may generate more clicks, as they may provide relevant links to other sites that are unrelated to ours. And our off-topic boards are actually quite active -- almost as active as our on-topic boards.
Having said that, I have taken your suggestion and applied for Amazon's assosiate program -- thanks for the tip.
But, if I continue getting ads that have nothing to do with the site, I may have to remove AdSense altogether, which I don't want to do, because right now it's actually generating decent revenue, and that's even without them being relevant.
It could also be that your site is being site targeted by some advertisers (so that some not-exactly-relevant CPM ads show).
When I browsed your site, I saw ads that were relevant to the game, so maybe it's already fixing itself.
One thing you should read is the Adsense Heatspot tips for ad placement in forums:
[adsense.blogspot.com...]
edit: you may want to change the text on your site that draws attention to the ads. There's a part in the Adsense TOS that mentions not bringing attention to the ads (and some of the language on your site might be seen as encouraging visitors to click...even though you ask them not to).
Under Incentives in the Polices area:
[google.com...]
Incentives
Web pages may not include incentives of any kind for users to click on ads. This includes encouraging users to click on the ads or to visit the advertisers' sites as well as drawing any undue attention to the ads. For example, your site cannot contain phrases such as "click here," "support us," "visit these links," or other similar language that could apply to any ad, regardless of content. These activities are strictly prohibited in order to avoid potential inflation of advertiser costs. In addition, publishers may not bring unnatural attention to sites displaying ads or referral buttons through unsolicited mass emails or unwanted advertisements on third-party websites. Publishers are also not permitted to use deceptive or unnatural means to draw attention to or incite clicks on referral buttons.
I put those parts in bold.
I know your intent was probably to keep your loyal members from going click happy or something, but you may be doing just the opposite.
I heeded your advice and removed the content highlighting the ads. Thanks for pointing that out.
We've actually had about 50% of the ads relating to the game or to the system, but the other 50% have nothing at all to do with anything on the site (other than the fact that they share a common keyword), and 0% of them ever relate to message board topics.
I'm ok w/ the 50% relating to the site, but ideally, I'd like to get the ads to somehow be relevant to the thread topics when a user enters a thread -- particularly on the off-topic board.
Any other ideas along those lines?
Thanks again for your help.
I've just opened a forum on my travel related site.
The way i'm doing the urls is search-engine-friendly with rewrite to get rid of the querystring, so they read something like:
www.mysite.com/board/countryname_here/id_url-friendly-topic-here
so if a user posts a questions like where's a good hotel in mars? the url looks like:
www.mysite.com/board/mars/54_wheres-a-good-hotel-in-mars
Country name and posting topic are also worked into the page title and description (in the headers)
While it is early days (forum has only been live a few days) I'm yet to see an irrelevant advert...
Now getting someone to click on one -- that's a whole other game!
