Adsense Placement In Forums

Good/bad idea?

[Opera14]

Hi, I have recently placed an adsense banner in my forums. Now, since doing this, my page impressions have gone up massively, but the amount of clicks haven't.

I have simply placed a horizontal leader board below the menubar.

So from here, I have two questions. Firstly, the ads do not appear to be relevant (about cricket), it's more...IPB hosting, ecommerce, that kinda stuff. I'm unsure of how to ammend this. Should I have more ads on the forums? And, where is the best place to put them on forums, I have experimented, but whatever I've tried doesn't seem to work.

Secondly, should I abolish placing ads on forums alltogether? Obviously, there will be far more impressions, and the same users using it, who probably won't click on the ads as much.

To be honest, I'm leaning towards not placing ads on my forums, but I just wanted a second opinion.

[petra]

I was one of the proponents of adsense on forums. Most people here advised against it. I recently removed it from the forums and focused it onto the main site, and my CTR, eCPM and Earnings all sky-rocketed.

What you should do is drive your forum traffic to articles within your main site and place the ads there. That way you're sure to only recieve targetted traffic.

Good luck!

[edited by: petra at 11:33 am (utc) on April 6, 2006]

[wheelie34]

if you do a bit of research here on WW you will see most say its no worth it, I myself havent tried but the consensus is, it aint worth it.

[Opera14]

Thanks for the advice, and the redirecting forum users to articles is just what I had in mind!

[trillianjedi]

For the targetting, have a look in the AdSense Help for "Section targetting" and try guiding the AS bot to the topmost post in a thread.

Most of the problems with AdSense on forums is the regulars don't click. If you have a well-designed forum that gets good SE traffic then you can make good money with AdSense on it.

A useful trick you can do is to set a cookie and not display AdSense to the regulars. That will give you a more realistic view of how the ads are performing.

Redirecting to other content pages on site is a great way to target traffic to your own pages, but don't rule out AdSense on forums just because a few found it didn't work for them. As with all things AdSense, mileage does tend to vary, but there's a lot you can do to improve the situation and it's definitely worth doing that before writing it off.

TJ