Optimizing Adsense on my Forum

Trying to make adsense work on my forum

[osewa77]

Hello,

I recently started running adsense on a forum of mine; a regional forum.

First, I tried putting leaderboard ads the bottom of each page. I got a certain clicktrhough ratio.

Then I put the ads at the top of each page, and I got about the same clickthrough ratio, except that most of the clicks were coming from the ads on top!

So I removed the ads at the bottom of the page and made less. In retrospect, this seems to be expected.

So my question is this: what's the best place to put the ads in a site like a discussion forum?

And why is it that when I have ads at the top and bottom of the forum pages only the ones on top get clicked?

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The other problem I have stems from the fact that my forum is a regional forum.

Despite the fact that all the pages are open to the adsense bot, about 50%-70% of the adsense pages on the site show ads like "travel to XYZ" "cheap flights to XYZ" (where XYZ is the name of my country).

How can I make adsense show ads more that are related to the individual topic under discussion? I fear that people, especially the regulars, might start being 'blind' to the ads if they see the same ads almost every page of the forum.

Help!
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Thanks.

[barnest2]

I've seen other people mention that they've had great success with Adsense in forums by putting the ads just after the first post in each thread.

[vabtz]

my experience has been as close to the discussion as possible.

look at the heat maps on google.

[shortbus1662]

what kind of forum software are you using?

Can you customize the meta data to fit each specific forum?

Have you tried implementing a side bar and using a skyscraper ad?

[Aldie]

I've tried the leaderboard after first post, but the complaints from the users outweighed the revenue of the clickthrus (which was negligible).

[osewa77]

Someone adviced me to include a more targetted h1 tag on my pages and I've done that. The <h1> tag now has thread_title instead of forum_name and the region name is no longer appended.

[vabtz]

I use benign cloaking as well to help me get targeted ad's.

I found that the extra html mad it confusing for the bot to decide what the topic was. It would get tripped up by things such as signitures, usernames, stuff in the header.

I made a template for my forum that stripped out all the unnessacary information and html and I present that to the mediabot. It increased my targeting accuracy quite a bit.

The nice side effects of this are I have a format to feed small screen devices that reads reasonably well and is very light in weight and since I feed the same template to the SE bots my indexed pages have increase dramatically.

[vabtz]

one more thing mod_rewrite helps too