Large Forums, Getting Bad CTR!

I really need help increasing my CPC and CTR.

I run www.yurx.com

At the moment my CTR is at about 0.5%. Unfortunately, Im also making under $.05 per click.

I've already installed vbAdManagement.

Could I have some tips in increasing my CTR and CPC?

Would really appreciate it.

Thanks

 

First of all, most forums do recieve very low CTR (so this is normal).

There's nothing you can really do, you already have well blended ads... you can try to ad a unit in the header area.. Also why not try using adsense link units as well?

 

I noticed that, why is that? Is it because forum members are busy talking and answering questions?

 

Yeah most forum people will have come from search to find specific information or to talk and will not be interested in the adverts usually...Personally I blank out all adverts on this forum without reading them so most people who are internet savvy enough to post in a forum will be doing the same...

 

0.5 is okay for forums. I had managed forums with less than 0.3. You can not do much about it, if you have already blended the ads. Only suggestion i can give is to bring the ads into the content area.

This is due to the fact that forum mebers are regulars, and they get ad blind. Also, almost all forums having same layour doesn't help.

 

I get ~ .2 on a site with 100k+ impressions
What I found is changing the link colors in ads increase clicks by almost 25% for about a day. I usually rotate the colors twice a week or so.

 

So change the color of links twice a weed should help?

Thanks

 

It did on my forums. I went for max blending on the static pages and the color change set up on the forums

 

Is that 100K daily or monthly figure?

 

Depending on the level of interactivity and depth of topics on your forum, you might be better off pushing ebooks.

 

It's difficult with forums; once you arrange the ads so that they can be noticed, it becomes a distraction.
I would reccomend Volvo's suggestion.

 

yea i get 30,000 impressions a day and i have a ctr around 0.5 and only make about 5 bucks a day.....when with this amount of impressions i should be making 50-70 bucks a day.

I decided i needed to implement something else to help gain more money. So i opened a ftp where members could upload cds(with no copyright and belonging to no record companies) and charge them a 30 dollar access fee. So far i have almost 1000 cds in there and only sold a couple subscriptions but 1 subscription a day is more than enough extra 30 bucks a day(thats dealing nothing with ads)

 

changing up to different ad layouts every week worked for me too but i got tired of switching the ads up on all my templates every week so i eventually stuck with one. Try yahoo publisher network, i make more with them then i make with google.

Also check out adbrite i get about 3.50 a day just from cpm with them, thats not including the clicks

 

I recently changed the ad format to using the medium rectangle (300x250 I think) and got a significant increase in adsense income (from $6-$15/day on about 9000 impressions). The slight downside is that the ads are more annoying to members, but I haven't had any complaints. I also started selling memberships where premium members see the forums without ads (when logged in).

The link color rotation sounds like a good idea, I'll look into that.

 

100k a ms. So about 864,000,000,000 impressions a day LOL

Who are you again?

 

Sounds like quite alot of impressions .

Thanks

 

I know. I bought 80k impressions on this one forum in Adwords and I got a 0.2% CTR! This same ad brought in a 2% ctr in Google search engine.