Optimization tips for forums

The AdSense heatmap for forums

[caspita]

Hi all,

I was just giving a look to [adsense.blogspot.com...] and found that they have just release a similar heatmap but this time for forums with tips.

I didn't see a topic about this so I was wondering if somebody else noticed it ;-).

Still reading over there, so, I'll give my opinion later.

Enjoy,
CS.

[Eltiti]

Well, I certainly hadn't noticed it --good find, thanks!

[JuniorOptimizer]

The "trouble" with forums is that your best users are not going to click on many ads. If you're a forum, many of your users are repeat visitors and won't click on anything.

I think CPM is a better bet than AdSense for forums. Especially if your forum is relatively big (20,000+ pageviews a day).

[Eltiti]

your best users are not going to click on many ads

Agreed. Hence tip 5, "Opt-in to image ads"! ;-)

[caspita]

Actually I was going to said the same, as per the tips they admit that repeat users will stop clicking so GG recomends CPM for forums.

Personally I also think that this CPM recomendation and the 'new' CPM minimum being 0.25 now let's see that GG is having a little trouble getting advertisers into this type of Ads.

One more thing is that reading the tips didn't really offered anything new for me, I already knew all these tips and more from different discussions here en WebmasterWorld, but anyway, interesting to see the 'heatmap' which at least we know it comes from a good source :-).

CS.

[Nicke]

I can say that removing the skyscraper from the right side (Which I used for ages) to a leaderboard under the navigation bar and one additional one at the end of the thread doubled my income from Adsense.

So I am very happy with my improvement.

The heat map says a skyscraper at the left side would improve most, but it would really make the forum look very ugly.

[Nicke]

To JuniorOptimizer;

The forum draws lot of traffic to my website and the guests always outnumber the regular members of my forum (E.g. 40 reg. members online while I have e.g. 120 guests). (Not counting with Inktomi spiders who can be 150-200 guests alone)

I guess it is mainly my guests who clicks on ads and not the regular members.

My forum have about 20,000 pageviews/day and 10,000 registered members.

[AdSenseAdvisor]

I'm glad you enjoyed the Inside AdSense post on optimizing forums.

I've passed your feedback along to the AdSense support representative who wrote this post. She'll be interested in seeing your commentary. :)

[newbies]

Most of my site's traffic lands on my forum, but I removed adsense from it. Why? because the forum gets a very low CTR (1-2%) which dilutes my overall CTR. Although the forum can generate about $30/day, without it, my overall CRT goes up and so does page eCPM and total earning.

A strange but real observation.

I hope that Google doesn't determine EPC on CTR so I could put adsense back to my forum.

[caspita]

What I have done is display the Ads only in the general index and forum index pages for my forum. Avoiding the posting pages because my time to keep watching every post and making sure nobody comments anything unusual or start talking about cliks or the Ads.

I have more control on my index pages where I can edit an re-word every title for the new posts keeping the pages on good optimization for the Ads. Also the effect of low CTR gets minimized when you do not display the Ads in the posting pages. And people almost 'always' goes to an index page after reading a post.