Forum CTR

[badass101]

Hi all,

Those of you who run forums, what kind of CTR do you see?
I'm seeing usually less than 0.5% with an ad leaderboard below the 1st post, a leaderboard on the frontpage above the forum lists, and a banner above the post listings on the right hand side.

The ads are the same colour scheme as the site, and only shown to guests.
The site is a fairly specific tech site, but pulls in quite good adverts that are useful to the visitors.

Anyone got any tips to improve CTR?
Oh, the site gets 800 visitors a day (some are members) so the impressions for the ads is approx. 1,400 a day.

Thanks

Craig

[synth78]

Yeh, your right on target,

we started several months ago, and are now getting ctr of about 1.7,

But anywhere from .3 to 1.5 is generally normal,

Were sitting around the 10US, and have calculated that revenue increases generally 2US/month,

This seems to be very consstent,
but mind you, you must make your forum HTML'ised, with any mod of your choice, this will give you a super dooper se ranking,

When we changed our forum, to html, it just took off, hope this helps

s

[ned911]

I've had the best luck with AdLinks on the first page. Just put image/text ads back in the topic and forum pages to test the CPM ads.

[badass101]

Funny you say about the html archive of the forum - I've not done this yet - in fact, I'm using phpBB with a few SEO modifications (things moved, sessions hacked out, etc) but it's pretty vanilla.
I've not even re-written the URL's

If I create an html version of the forum, what's the best way to avoid duplicate penalties for content already in Google? (there's a good thousand pages indexed!)