tips on adding adsense to forum pages?

[newbies]

Hi there,

I put a 468X60 banner at the top of my forum pages except search, login pages and I found it performs very badly in terms of CTR compared to other content pages (static) using a skycraper.

I would to know how you depoly adsense in your forum pages.

thanks.

Newbies

[Fischerlaender]

IMHO a bad CTR is a typical "feature" for forums. On one of my sites the CTR on the forum pages is nearly not existent compared to the rest of the site.

I think this has to do with the typical users of a forum who are mostly regular users - and they don't click on an ad.

[richmondsteve]

newbies, in general I'd expect CTR for a content page to outperform CTR for a forum page and CTR for a skyscraper to outperform CTR for a banner. To build on what Fischerlaender said, if a forum page is long you may want to consider placing the ad block at the bottom of the page or inline in the middle. Think about your users - they're probably more likely to click an ad that interests them after they've either read the forum page in full or read some of it and lost interest. By then they'd have to remember the ad at the top of the page and they might have to scroll up to get to it.

In any case, if your forum users tend to be regulars and/or tend to read lots of forum pages I'd expect that CTR would be low since due to looking at many pages per session, possibly seeing the same ads over and over, getting blind to ads, and possibly not being in a mode where they're less interested in products/services than someone visting a content/info. page since they're there to read and discuss.