Forum Moderators: martinibuster
1. Topic is important.
If your forum is focused on car loans or investing your going to get better payoffs per click than if its about music. This is simple to understand so it should need no more explanation.
If your forum is in a low CPC ( cost per click ) topic then try putting in a for sale section, jobs section, an a wanted section. These will help build some better paying traffic for you.
2. Ugly URLS have got to go.
ModRewrite is a must ( assuming your using apache ), you have to have easily crawlable urls to get fully indexed in the search engines. Most of your clicks are going to happen by people reffered to your site not by your normal users, so the search engine referrrals are what are going to pay for the forum. Also your targeting will improve if your urls are simpler.
3. Regular users don't click.
Regular users of your forum are their to talk to other people not click your advertisements. Once you accept this and move on you'll be better off. I tested this several times by the following:
- showing ads to all users
- showing ads to only users referred to the site
- showing ads to only users not logged in.
The results were that regardless of who I displayed the ad's to I always received the same number of clicks. With this in mind I chose to stop showing ads to logged in users all together.
4. Position the ads right.
Use the heatmap over in the google optimization tips page. It works.
5. Cloak your content. ( WARNING: This is considered risky by some )
Cloaking is presenting different data to different users based on what you know about them.
Most forum software uses large html templates and presents unrelated text to the topic of the thread to the requester. This screws up targeting of the advertisements sometimes since often times the extraneous information outweighs the thread. Cloaking allows you to make sure the content outweighs the html and other crud.
What I do is remove all unnecessary information ( signatures, profile links, etc ) and present only the bare minimum to the adsense ( and all bots for that matter ) bot. This increased the accuracy of my targeting. Do this at your own risk. My recommendation would be to make sure the page is useful if it was sent to a regular browser and do not stuff keywords... just present the same data you would normally, albeit with a lighter html presentation. As an added bonus you can use this for cell phones and other small screen devices.
6. Don't hold your breath.
While all the tips did help me I still don't make much from the forum sections of my sites. You would do better to add a content section if you don't already have one and work on articles.
Best of luck!
I have one 700x90 ad block right under the title of the topic, before the posts themselves start outputting. The unintended benefit of this, I noticed, is that the ads actually appear for a second or longer, with nothing else on the page, while the posts are downloaded and rendered in the big HTML table below. It actually forces people to look at the ads for at least a second, which is pretty neat.
I have tried adding additional ad blocks to the forum pages with virtually no success, and in most cases, a decline of CTR and hence a decline in earnings.
I also offer my members the ability to donate money directly in exchange for having no ads shown for an entire year.
insert an ad into each post.
limit the number of posts to 3 per page (as to comply with Adsense TOS)
Really? That's pretty suprising to me. So places like ValueClick and DoubleClick specify you can't place their ads on your forum pages? Is it just because the conversion rates are too low?
So here's my next question then - if conversion rates are so low, why is anyone bothering with forums and communities? Are you making money on subscriptions? Or is it just in support of other parts of your site that do make money?
Also, what about places my MySpace which are pretty much one big forum? I here they serve a TON of CPM ad banners and make good money doing it, because their content is so targeted ... because of their user profiles. I would think that would actually be a good thing for forums then ... targeted advertising ...higher CPMs. Not the case?
:-\
I do the money for ad free thing to, how long have yours been running for?
So places like ValueClick and DoubleClick specify you can't place their ads on your forum pages? Is it just because the conversion rates are too low?
So here's my next question then - if conversion rates are so low, why is anyone bothering with forums and communities? Are you making money on subscriptions? Or is it just in support of other parts of your site that do make money?
I would never start a site based on a a forum again but I would add a forum to a site with a decent amount of traffic ( 2-3 thousand uniques a day ) just to help improve the stickness of the site and get people talking abou it. ( as mentioned by Cheeser )
1. It can make adsense $ - it sits about in the middle for channel earnings on my site.
2. It draws traffic which can be funneled into internal pages. In my experience it's easier to grow forum traffic than traffic to static HTML pages.
3. It gives you a brand that people will turn to when they are looking for information on a particular topic.
4. You can do affiliate marketing or other private-sale advertising on the forum.
In short, you can make good money on a forum - maybe not as efficiently as on static pages, but if the forum grows well the revenue stream will grow with it.
Thanks in advance
