Adsense in forums

I would like this thread to be dedicated to people with forums

[bouche]

My site is mainly a community forums site with a news portal.

I'm curious if there are ways to maximize adsense in forums. Currently, I've got adsense showing on my main portal page above any news posts and also at the top of any forum page.

If I was to add adsense to the footer of the pages too would that mess up the math? I'm assuming that 2 displays per page would negatively impact earnings.

Also, I would like to add the google search to my template as well. How does that work with adsense ads?

[caspita]

I also hvae the tipical forum :

index
1. forum-1
a. topic-a1 (page1, page2, pagen)
b. topic-b1 (page1, page2, pagen)
2. forum-2
a. topic-a2 (page1, page2, pagen)
b. topic-b2 (page1, page2, pagen)

I used to have an Ad Unit for each type of page.

Ad Unit at the top for index.
Ad Unit at the right side for forum-n page (liting topics)
Ad Unit for discusion pages at the bottom.

All of the using a common channel. Following some advice here, I separated the channels, using a single channel per Ad Unit, I was able to find out that the only thing I was getting from Ad Unit in discussion pages (pagen) was Ad Impresions .. very low CTR < 0.1 .. and only once in while EPC was above 0.10 cents. I decided the to take out the AdUnit from discussion page and left only the other two, the overall EPC has been growing gradually, I guess I was helping smart pricing to push me down because the low CTR in the discussion pages. Now my EPC is much better and because is easier to be on top of the topic titles than on the post content, I think I can taget better Ads.

My advice would be to uses the same, meaning, to use your channels to do your own experiment and get your own conclusions leading you to your own actions. Because of course every forum could be different.

[Swordfish]

I use adsense in my forums. CTR is low. I may try ad links... i'll post results.

Mike

[Naveenn]

CTR in community forums is pretty low. I have a community with 30K+ members, very few click (CTR 0.01) . Too many impressions for nothing. Most of the time adsense wont even show ads.

[kenchix1]

I tried adlinks after every first message of the thread, in my experience it makes the income worst than ever.

[woodrow222]

I've found it's best to only show ads to the guests and not to registered members.

[j4mes]

I put mine at the very bottom of each thread, and nowhere else on the page.

People who actually read through the whole lot are more likely to be interested in the links there since they've stuck around, and people who don't won't see the ads.

Seems to work OK.

[hyperkik]

I put mine at the very bottom of each thread, and nowhere else on the page.

I am experimenting with that on forum threads.

Google's optimization service recommended putting the ads after the first reply in a thread. (I haven't tried that.)

[radix]

Do you remember that at the beginnings Google did not allow forum sites to participate in AdSense?

I'm not sure why, but one reason could be this. In AdWords, keywords with poor performance (CTRwise) get removed. There were different min. CTR rates for search results and content network sites. Did not check it recently, it was something like 2% for search, 1% for AdSense (I might be wrong, could be 1% and 0.5%).

So, if you have a CTR of 0.01%, your site might have a negative effect on the advertizer, as his ads might be stopped.

Might be offtopic here, I thought I'd share just in case someone did not know it.

[hyperkik]

With the caveat that my forums are less discussion-oriented and more of a "knowledge base" - an initial question, as much of an answer as possible, and perhaps some additional exchange or commentary - I found the experiment described above to be very effective. (Forum users who are not logged in are presented with a 300x250 medium rectangle of ads, following the last post in the thread.)

[Jenstar]

My CTR on one forum went up after I allowed image ads (placed after the first post of every thread).