Combat Ad Blindness in Forums

Are you growing tired of little revenue for your efforts on those forums?
Assuming you are implementing the "in-line banner" effect that puts a banner ad under the first post of every thread- try something a little different, and you may be amazed at the difference in CTR.

In addition to showing ads in that spot (that WILL get glossed over by regulars after a short time)- do a search and look for small copy and paste Quizzes and fast loading dhtml Games and the like.
If your members start making it a point to look there and possibly find something cool to play with, then you've just managed to at least get the eyeballs to come back to that page location.

Good luck- and tell us how it works out for you!

 

That's a good idea. Another is to vary the type of ads being served. Sometimes run banner only, others text, others the text and description.

 

Also try to rotate between text links, text ads, and image only ads. The change up normally can catch the eyes of long time members and suddenly clicks go up. If it gets slow...change them again.

 

Exactly....."different" is good, and if you can work it out to happen for you on a set basis (by hour/day...whatever), then you've opened up time to create more content or pages.

 

How often do you change your ads around? every month or every couple of weeks?

 

Steve- the inline banner mod for phpBB (and most other systems) allows you to simply put various ad codes in via the admin panel, and they are randomly presented under the topics in the forums.
Works well, as long as you always remember to keep from putting any conflicting ads in your topic header or similar.
Let this system work independantly on these pages with no other contextual ads.

 

So where would you have to place the ad codes if I have an invision free account for example?

 

Not sure what an Invision "free account" entails, as I've never used that system.
You might want to use a search engine for "Invision Board Inline Banner Mod", or similar.
Let me know how it works for you.