Adsense on a forum - viable?

adsense forum

[DalGulDan]

I'm still quite new to Google Adsense, and I was wondering if anyone here has had any success by putting Adsense ads on a discussion forum?

Would Adsense use the content of the topic being viewed to generate it's ads? If it did, then it could potentially be quite effective, given that the ads being displayed would be relevant to whatever topic was being viewed at the time.

I thought i'd post a query here rather than experimenting straight away, has anyone had any luck doing this?

[Jenstar]

Yes, many people have great success running AdSense on forums. You just need to ensure that the URLs are spiderable. If there are session IDs, you will be unable to run AdSense until you remove them.

[ChrisKud5]

You just need to ensure that the URLs are spiderable. If there are session IDs, you will be unable to run AdSense until you remove them.

Not true, before I added the Googlebot "mod" to my PHPbb forum i was getting targeted ads with session IDs. These ads were not just inherited ads from the main page, but specific to each topic (the topics were very different, and very different ads were hosted on each topic page)

Having session IDs in a URL has nothng to do with getting targeted, paying ads in a forum.

What type of forum are you using?

[edited by: Jenstar at 10:38 pm (utc) on Jan. 18, 2004]
[edit reason] Fixed quote tags [/edit]

[Jenstar]

Yes, with phpbb you can use the Googlebot mod, however many other types of message boards do use session IDs and most don't have any kind of Googlebot hack available. I believe VBulletin also has a hack available. Unless they have updated the hack recently, it does have to be modified for the mediabot.

The issue with SIDs is that mediabot believes each thread with a unique session ID as a new URL. And since most wouldn't view the same URL with the same session ID, PSAs are all that are seen. So either the session IDs have to be removed, or the mediabot has to be tricked to think that there aren't any.

[matthew288]

I use Adsense on some forums. It helped my CTR a lot when I configured it to only show ads on threads. Showing it on the message index was really decreasing the CTR and I think it's wise to avoid showing them on pages like Member Lists and users' personal Control Panels.

[CPCretirement]

In my experience the CTR is much lower on forums than on pure content sites. You can still do quite well though.

[DalGulDan]

I'm currently using an Invision Power Board, I think IPB was updated in version 1.2 to allow Googlebot to spider the forum threads, so that should in theory mean that Adsense will work okay.

I tend to agree that only displaying ads on threads would be a good idea, any placed on the board index, memberlist or other similar sections will probably be ignored by most users, and wouldn't receive many clickthroughs.

[ByronM]

I run an Invision board and adsense picks up everything just fine. One thing - you don't have to be logged in or require session info unless your trying to hit a non public page. So why is a hack necessary?

I use the site header that is the same across every app on my website so people don't necessarily care about having an ad on everything. Not really an easy way to keep my site format if i don't do it this way.

I think as long as your consistent and not "in your face" advertising they won't care.