Forum wars

[jdvjdv]

Does anyone have any experience running either phpbb or invision power board with adsense? Currently I have a long standing forum that runs phpbb (latest version) with adsense and I am thinking, due to the forum size, that upgrading to invision powerboard might be a good idea. I am wondering what sort of effect this might have on earnings.

Cheers in advance for any knowledgeable folks' thoughts.

[PalX]

I had a phpbb and switched to vBulletin, i have more then 3000 members and my earnings are just enough to receive a cheque at the end of each month, so since you decided to buy a forum, i strongly advise you to use vBulletin instead of invision power board

[DXL]

If we weren't speaking about Adsense, I'd say go to Invision. I've maintained about seven Invision boards, including 2 personal ones, and I couldn't be happier.

With respect to adsense, it took me just a few minutes to add the coding to a few areas (you can edit html via the boards control panel rather than FTP and/or using an html editor on your PC). I only just added the channel info to the coding yesterday, though, so I don't really know how much revenue the forums contributed (but at first glance it seems to be a low CTR). But then again, I have adsense at the bottom of all pages, whereas other people running invision typically have a leaderboard up at the top.

Question: If the CTR is low for my forum compared to the rest of the site (but the impressions high, higher than the total # of impressions for the rest of the site), should I completely pull adsense from my forum just to improve overall CTR?

[jdvjdv]

Thanks for replies, and I dont think improving your CTR by removing ads will increase your revenue, but I may be wrong.

[willmullis]

I disagree. I run a forum and have noticed the higher CTR I get the higher my EPC is. What I have done is only show the ads to Guests because they are much more likely to click on an ad then a member who has seen it a million times. My earnings are much better with fewer impressions and my members don't have to see the ads. Win-Win situation :)

[thatphonesite]

I use Invision Power Board for a large phone site, and have a very extensive AdSense implementation, that I have had no problem at all with.

P

[aeiouy]

Are you looking to find out how well people running various boards are doing with ads or are you more interested in how easy/difficult it is to implement ads on various boards?

[TheRookie]

I use phpBB with AdSense. I installed a mod which puts AdSense after the first post, and it gives you many options:

Display ad after X post or display ad EVERY X posts

Ad can fall inline with topic or look like an actual post

Whether to display ads to guests or regular users

Exclude certain user groups

And not show ads to people with a certain number of posts

[DXL]

I recently changed the ads on my forum so that guests see them at the top of each page, but once you log in you don't see them. But my board has more lurkers than actually registered members who sign on.