Forum Moderators: martinibuster
It’s a known fact that Forums don’t perform so good
I tried many things, mainly copying what others are doing on their forums, I tried all the positions and colors, leaderboard was the size (almost all forums use the same size) I always used.
I used to change the position and/or colors every now and then and improve for few days.
Normal days to me were less then 10$ (sometimes even less then 5$), good days were around 15$.
I read and tested and read and tested and read and tested, but mainly I was doing what other are doing. A picture above the ads, Ads after first post, ads after last post I even tried to make the ads look like a post. (everything within the T.O.S.)
I was almost convinced that this is the maximum I can get from my Forum. 250$ monthly was what I used to look for.
Last Saturday I decided to change everything, I replaced the leaderbord with medium rectangle and blended it nicely in the overall design of the forum and made it 100% (adding additional things in the remaining part of the 100%)
I was so happy since the design was looking very professional and I didn’t receive any complains from the members (even the regulars) about it.
First day I broke the record (record since day one), second day I broke the record of the previous day, third day I broke the record of the previous day with a big difference, forth day was same like the previous day, fifth day was same like the first two days and today, with around 5 hours remaining to end the day, I broke everything and made almost what I used to make in 10 days!
I’m no talking about doubling, I’m talking about X10!
Now I know that things will clam down a bit after the visitors get used to it (ads blind) but when I used to change colors and positions I used to improve maximum X2, this time around its X10! And the CTR didn’t improve much , but eCPM improved dramatically!
I would like to thank all those who used to advise us by saying “test, test and more test”, now I tell you all the same “test, test and more test”!
And the CTR didn’t improve much , but eCPM improved dramatically!
Last Saturday I decided to change everything, I replaced the leaderbord with medium rectangle and blended it nicely in the overall design of the forum and made it 100% (adding additional things in the remaining part of the 100%)
Where did you place this medium rectangle? After the last post or above the first post (or somewhere totally different)?
Normal days to me were less then 10$
I'll earn more than that from AdSense while typing in this post.
Forget the forums, you need content pages, people don't click ads in forums as much as other types of sites, waste of time.
I agree with the greatpretender. If your CTR did not improve, how can you say that the new placement helped? I mean, people are still clicking your ads with the same frequency as before. For some reason, you get more cents now per click that's all. It's interesting that you get 10x more per click though. Interesting. I doubt though that ad position has anything to do with cost per click (CPC).
Anyway, very strange case IMO. But congratulations! I hope for your that eCPM stays that high.
The biggest gain I ever got was adding Google Ads to my ARCHIVE! (I am using vBulletin for my forum software)
I would love to see your forum and see what you did as well and show you mine please PM me if you would like to trade links.
The biggest gain I ever got was adding Google Ads to my ARCHIVE!
Makes perfect since to me as people are looking for something in the archive, and maybe the ads relate to what they are looking for opposed to your average member chit-chatting in the forums that are probably blind to the ads.
My theory is that forums that do well with adsende get a lot of visitors that aren't members, more people looking for something specific than looking to have a conversation.
would you mind typing a couple dozen of posts a day for me
Depends, what's the topic of the forum and will we rotate your adsense and mine on my threads? ;)
Wow, how did you modify your archive templates? I've been looking around and I don't see it as a template in vBulletin. That's brilliant.
It definitely pays to test and to put a channel on each ad section to gauge how effective the change was. The page CTR on my forums is 0.4% and below (for different placements) which is OK for forums I suppose. Luckily, the popularity and page impressions still make AdSense very profitable.
I assume it is a combination of banner blindness and the fact that they were searching for info that just happened to be on an ad featured on the website.
Through testing on my forum, I've found that users who are signed up never click on ads. Ever. It is the anonymous people who get in though google and other sources that click on the ads.
On the forum that I run, I don't even show adsense ads to my logged in viewers. They only show to the "lurkers" who seem to be looking for the information posted there. I also run adsense in the "archives". Both seem to work well.
For my logged in forum members, I only show ads from the advertisers that pay me directly.
