Forum Moderators: martinibuster
There are two parts of the site; Areas where I manage the content (which is mostly dynamic) and areas where users manage the content.
Right now I use adsense on the areas of the site I control, and I get anywhere from 600,000 to 1 million adsense impressions per day, which accounts for roughly 1% of my total impressions. I had around 115 million impressions in June.
I have hundreds of thousands of people coming to my site every day, but adsense doesn't seem to pull relevant ads. I am getting around 0.04 to 0.09 CPM, and a low CTR (0.1%). I did some testing and wrote a large paragraph with targeted content. Within a few days I was getting relevant ads, a clickthrough rate of 0.9% and a CPM of around $0.40-0.50. I left the content there and within around 3 days it was giving me 0.07-0.09 CPM again.
I applied for adsense premium and was denied. The thing is, I could give adsense a general idea on each page of what sort of keywords would return the most relevant ads, but it doesn't seem like there is any way to do that short of being a premium member.
I have looked for alternitives but have had somewhat of a lack of interest from possible ad networks due to all of my user created content.
Should I be sticking with AdSense and trying to optimize my pages or should I be trying to find more of a traditional ad network to work with?
Otherwise, check out banner ad networks like Burst, Tribal Fusion, Fastclick, etc. that serve CPM ads and your site will do well with them.
Are they suited for a wide variety of site-types?
From postings in the Burst forum, I've seen many folks say they do well with the banner ad networks, especially the CPM campaigns, but earn nada from Adsense. Though the poster has already said that networks showed "somewhat of a lack of interest", so I doubt that this is the route for him to go.
Kind of sad to think that here you are getting 115 million impressions in a month, and you can't even convert that traffic to cold hard cash. If I only have his traffic, I can buy an island for myself and retire :o)
It's all about the spider food, if your meta tags, titles, <H1>, <H2>, alt-text, etc. are all properly keyworded PER PAGE you'll get relevant ads. I would also check to make sure both the google bot and media bot have BOTH visited the pages, if not, you'll probably get generic ads about your topic or worse yet random ads. If you have random forum type content with threads that don't reinforce the page topics then it probably won't work too good.
Alternatively, look for direct sponsors for your site that will pay for branding on 115 million impressions.
Perhaps when micropayments or payments via sms takes hold you'll be in a position to sell a lot of very low cost "stuff".
Suggestion: Maybe since your visitor demographic isn't the credit card crowd - but they likely would like to have something that would allow them to make purchases online - you might be able to hook up with a micropayments/similar service provider?
"Hey, mom, do you think I can have an online credit account that's good for maybe $20/month"?
I'd start working around that idea. I'm certain there are players that would love to get more youngins enabled to pay for stuff online. Likely big bucks if you strike the right partnership.
Make this work and send me 1%net/year and we'll both be happy for the work we put into the plan. ;0)
