Forum Moderators: martinibuster
One of my sites is a very succesful (in it's niche) "hobby" site. It's 2.5 years old. I run it with a mate.
It's had AdSense on it for about a year. We have an active forum with a couple of thousand members and currently about 12k posts, with a current average of about 30 posts a day.
Daily page views about 7-8,000. This one is not a big money spinner and was never intended to be. But it's something I'm kind of passionate about and has some excellent content and a great and extremely extensive widgets reviews section (the largest on the web by a margin).
A large chunk of our page views is SE traffic to the forum threads (I'm lucky in having some great contributors and mods - our threads are of the highest quality).
We had two aims when we put AdSense on it. First, to have the site pay for itself (I'm sure this is on many webmasters agendas) and secondly as an experimental zone to play around with variations in Ad placement on forums for other, more lucrative, projects.
The Forum Problem
We have two channels set for banners (top right of page) and left hand margin (below navigation, and often below the fold).
As is the case I'm sure with many hobby sites, you have a core (in our case about 50) of members who seemingly are just there all the time, posting and chatting to other members in the forum. These are the guys that don't click (Ad "blindness").
SE referral traffic "clients" do sometimes click. CTR is low though at about 0.8%. Taking a guesstimate at conversions, knowing the smart pricing model, I would say they don't convert. The site was however breaking even. Just.
The Experiment
Given that this site didn't really matter too much, it's playtime with the ads. What can we do to increase our CTR, or even possibly lower it, but increase conversions for the AdWords advertisers and increase our overall EPC - keeping everyone happy with our performance?
Considering the options, and not wanting to make the ads too "in yer face" for users, and also not wishing to change too much, we plumbed for the following (acting purely on a hunch):-
The Results
CTR has skyrocketed. I'm not going to say too much about figures to keep inline with the AdSense TOS, but the bottom line is that the bottom line has increased. Substantially enough to take a comfortably breaking even site into the comfortably profitable zone. AdSense page views are, naturally, down but the overall money generated is very up.
After a months testing, I'm convinced in my own mind that it's stable. It certainly shows no sign of slacking up. I believe that what's actually happening in practice is that much more of the SE referral traffic, which I'm sure in my interpretation of our log files is revisiting the site once discovering us, is beginning to click and actually, possibly, beginning to convert. And I think the regulars are no longer blind to the ads.
There you have it. If you run a community based site with a low CTR, it's worth a go. I suspect you have to be a little creative with what you display in the AdSense "space" - that is what I think is reducing the effect of Ad "blindness" - people, including the regulars, are now actively looking to see what crops up there next.
TJ
will a click an AdSense cause me to lose that visitor for ever?The last question is quite interesting to me. Depending on that answer I would act one way or a completely different one instead. It would be nice to know whether people opened the ads in a different window or not, for example.
If you have a web site where people enter on a specific entry page, visit at most 2 pages, then exit, you can't, obviously, use the show-the-tenth-banner approach.
One idea I had was to create a page where there are two places where I can put banners, but I fill only one of them with the banner and the other one with "interesting spots". This would (should?, could?) reduce banner blindness while still avoiding to show less banners than page-views.
Just had a look at my web logs. My main banner that earns me 80% of my adsense income is on the main index page, yet despite that I'm seeing a return visitor rate of about 35% based on uniques / total visitors. I'm not sure that 1 in 10 would work for me, as I see that 10.97 page views per visitor.
I can't think of anywhere I could effectively use the technique on my site, but it is certainly very interesting.
What I don't get is how you were able to determine that?
I'm afraid I don't have a magic scientific formula.
Anything with AdSense experimentation is a bit hit and miss - I tend to look at bottom line results (of course).
I also look at the product of eCPM and CTR. If I lower my CTR, yet increase eCPM, for example, then I consider that a good thing, but only where the bottom line is also increased. Obviously the overall aim is to increase both.
TJ
