Fighting back against irrelivant ads on a PHPBB Forum

phpbb forum with spammy phpbb ads

[NoLimits]

The primary problem I am having on my forum is summarized below:

1. I found an excellent place for advertisements and have implemented an ad in that position.

2. For the first week my results were excellent - targeted ads with a VERY high CTR for this particular forum.

3. Because of how popular this one spot became, I removed ads from "higher up" on the page - in an attempt to give the EPC a nudge.

4. This worked effectively, slightly increasing EPC, either by coincidence or otherwise.

5. All of a sudden, I can't buy a targeted ad. I just added an Auger company to my filter list - and now all I can get to come up in this particular (most visited) section of my forum is PHP Auction ads, and similar PHP/MYSQL adverts.

6. I have edited the default code of the forum so that it is stripped as many "php" or "forum", etc type keywords that I would suspect to trigger ads of this nature.

7. I have tried adding tergeted text above and below the ad and I am still unable to get anything other than PHP adverts.

8. I do not use session id's

I'd love to get a targeted ad back on this page as it was doing quite well while it was targeted.

(Also, my niche isn't too small as to not have ads to display - G has no problem matching content to ads on my Content pages, or the rest of my forum)

Any suggestions, or steps I can take to improve the situation would be greatly appreciated.

Thank you,
NL

[Jenstar]

First of all, the media partners bot will visit pages about once a month.

Because of how popular this one spot became, I removed ads from "higher up" on the page - in an attempt to give the EPC a nudge.

Chances are the "higher up" ads were first in the html code, and for targeting were further away from some of the forum prominent keywords. When the mediabot came back for targeting after a month, the keyword proximity had changed, meaning slightly different targeting - and in this case, it picked up the php and forum-type words. And it might have picked up on those types of keywords for your themed ads.

6. I have edited the default code of the forum so that it is stripped as many "php" or "forum", etc type keywords that I would suspect to trigger ads of this nature.

How long has it been since you did that? You should hopefully see better targeting in under a month after those changes. Are new threads/urls showing better targeting since the changes (check for the mediabot visit to make sure it isn't themed ads)?

[Shenron]

Hello,

Can you give us a screenshot of your ad to share with us this so excellent place. I'm looking for a good place but I did not find anything. Your help is greatly appreciated.

Thanks

[aeiouy]

" First of all, the media partners bot will visit pages about once a month."

I don't know, media partners must love me. They normally visit a changed page within minutes of it being viewed after it is changed.

[Jenstar]

No screenshots please :) There is a lot of how-to info for doing various placements on phpBB message boards right at the phpBB support site [phpbb.com].

[aeiouy]

By the way, a few things you can do is make sure you edit the overallfooter.tpl and remove the commented text... Not the actual copyright display and stuff but all that text tends to trigger polish ads all over phpbb.

Also make the phpbb links on the bottom into a gif image. I did this and it helps a lot. Their Copyright is still there... but the text is not on the bottom of every page.

One thing that is a bit more extreme but has worked for me is I renamed my view topic files with some keywords in order to give it a push in the right direction. people don't read the urls that far in anyways, and it has helped.

Also check out About2Know's SEO MODS for PHPBB. They have some that send all guests, including the robots to html files. In the modrewrite of these mods you can use the modrewrite to rename those files as well and insert keywords in there too.

I know get fairly targeted ads on my forum in phpbb and they are then influenced by the text in the messages themselves for variety.

I really wish adsense had some software filters where you could opt in for a specific filter for a specific piece of software to eliminate certain words from you adsense determination. So you could apply a phpbb filter and it would ignore all words that trigger the normal ads you see in a phbb configuration.

[NoLimits]

[quote=jenstar]How long has it been since you did that? You should hopefully see better targeting in under a month after those changes. Are new threads/urls showing better targeting since the changes (check for the mediabot visit to make sure it isn't themed ads)?[/quote]

Probably only an hour or so prior to making my initial post.
Since then, I have seen a small amount of targeted ad's being thrown in. Still seeing about 95% php/mysql related adverts.

I have not yet edited the "overall_footer.tpl" file - and will proceed to do so. I did edit the overall_header.tpl file.

Perhaps I just need to be more diligent in eliminating php related keywords from any place possible (alt text, comments, etc)

I will do some more editing and report back. Thank you for your help and suggestions thus far! Greatly appreciated.

- NL

[safeascake]

i have a test forum with phpbb and i placed a banner in the center of the top and it came up pritty clean with my site! hope that helps i didnt make any changes to the code just had alot of keywords in the front page! but i did notice that deeper in i go more php adds i get

[Heartlander]

I manage a number of phpbb sites- simply sticky me with your site url, and I will give you some very successful tips relevant to your particular site.