Adsense in Forums: What Should I Know Before I Implement?

[adamnichols45]

I have read before that they do not work well!

I want to include them on a travel forum.

Any words of wisdom to be had?

[hal12b]

I have AdSense on a few forums and it is true for me that the CTR is pitiful.

[adamnichols45]

What are your earnings like?

[martinibuster]

Optimize your forum so that it ranks well, as unique visitors is what you want to attract. The topic of forum optimization is a bit detailed but let's skip over that and go into something else that's related...

Focus on your Forum Post Titles, Dammit!
Did I get your attention? ;)
I can't believe how many forum operators sleep through this very important aspect of running a forum. Rewrite member post titles so that they are COHERENT and MEAN SOMETHING. "Help," and "I've got a Question" type titles are not going to help your forum rank well so why do forum operators not edit them to something meaningful? Edit those titles! ;)

Plus, make sure that forum titles become the title tags. Titles are really important for your rankings, and it's probably where those who are getting less than 5% CTR need help.

Don't Read this if you're Satisfied with your Forum CTRs
If you are serious about obtaining higher CTRs on a forum then do yourself a huge favor and read this:
[webmasterworld.com...]

Boosting your unique visitors is crucial imo, because they are likely more inclined to click on an ad, as opposed to a longtime visitor. Keep those uniques up!

My CTR on forums is probably better than the CTR on the average website, so I don't believe the conventional idea that FORUM=Low CTRs, anymore.

[hal12b]

*****What are your earnings like?****

Let me just say this - my CTR on all of my other web sites are close to 10% some even 15%-20%

My discussion forum web site borderlines 2%.

[ronburk]

Ya want a really big hint that you're probably not going to act on? Here goes:

Go look at a bunch of forums. They're all extremely similar. Look at some common factors.

• meaningless URLs, lost SEO opportunity.
  
• lousy titles (or machine-generated!) titles.
  
• content not too coherent; threads spin off topic; threads can be broken across pages at arbitrary (e.g., 10 messages) points, not logical points.
  
• little cross-linking.
  
• little or no editing -- people just spew content out, a few people read it, then nobody does.
  

Now go look at Wikipedia.

• meaningful URLs, SEO opportunity not lost there.
  
• well-chosen titles; another SEO score.
  
• content kept coherent; off-topic content moved to an appropriate place; pages broken up by logical topic if they get too big.
  
• tons of cross-linking.
  
• lots of editing; stuff gets read, then read again, then linked to, then linked to some more.
  

What does Wikipedia have to do with designing a forum? Both are examples of getting other people to generate content for you. But Wikipedia has no trouble with SEO at all, where as most forums... not doing so good.

The point: rethink the the basic process and presentation of what a forum should look like and how it should work. Make it more like Wikipedia, and less like 10,000 forums that already exist out there.

Programming skill will be required; the reason most forums look alike is, nobody designs forums -- they just grab off-the-shelf forum software and that's why they pretty much all look the same (and are pretty much all lousy bets for AdSense).