Increasing Clicks in a Forum?

I am now getting several hundred uniques a day on one of my forums by am only getting a small amount of Adsense clicks. I’ve placed code in the standard places, banner at the top and ads at the bottom of each thread. Does any one have any tips for ad placement and/or strategy for forums, vB especially?

 

( Ask your visitors to click to support the forum )

Just kidding, don't ever do that

Do you have targeted ads in every thread? That could be one problem in forums, ad relevancy sometimes is not good enough and so it gives a lousy CTR

 

Yes they come through very well, very relevant.

 

i have same problem very low click rate, i have 200 visitor a day, sometime less than 1 click.== 0 click, i wnat to know if any strategy to do better in vb forum

 

Doing something like this forums.steelersfever.com/forumdisplay.php?f=11 should help.

 

I run a few forums too, with over 5000 impressions per day and my ctr was very low....that's because frequent forum users are "trained" to ignore ads. So what to do? Take a page from the DP forum:

1) Look at the ads at the top..they don't blend. You don't want to blend forum ads.
2) Look for the "ads between posts" mod. This places an ad in-between posts on every page, essentially placing an ad where your visitor is reading.

Big advertising firms will always tell you that ads are intrusive...people don't know they are interested in a product until they "happen" to see an ad for it on TV. The same goes for ads that a potential visitor may or may not click on.

Best of luck to you.

Best Regards,
Darrell

 

Ow , ya actually i clicked on that ads too!!! I wonder if it's against the TOS? somehow the administrator put as 86 replies!!! OW!

 

Me too...
Hard to get a single click...whooo

 

I don't think it's against the TOS.
I haven't add this to my forums *yet*
Maybe it's time to ask google.

 

That's brilliant. Are you doing this in any of your forums?

The question becomes, how did he do that?
-It's not a sticky thread.
-There can't actually be 86 replies b/c you can't get into the forum.
-How do you manipulate the vB code to display all of the adsense ad?

I would imagine that this does violate the TOS. He is deceiving people to click on an ad that appears to be a thread. However it does say that it is an ad.

Thoughts?

 

You just have to be patient and wait. Just try some different blending modes. Such as the 768 banner at top. Change the color of the grey stripe to match the site and make the links stand out with a red or blue color maybe. Get creative with it.

 

I agree Darrell about not blending forum ads. We are so focused on browser through the posts that we skip right over blended ads.

Definitely something a little less subtle should increase forum CTR.

 

Perhaps your forum is very interesting and no one want's to leave it (i.e. click on ads). Suggestion - make it more boring

 

Concerning steelers fever, it might be against TOS because it is *in a sense*
labled under "Rating Thread / Thread Starter".

Also, I wonder if they get smartPriced because of the number of bounces it probably gets as people quickly hit the back button when they realize they've hit an ad.

 

That ad on the steelers site will most likely get them banned eventually. I would not recommend trying it.

 

I don't know but 200 unique visitors seems very low to get any relevant earnings. I have four blogs, one gets about 200 to 300 and I only get one click now and then.

 

What does anyone think about my placements on my forums? http://www.fashion-forums.com particularly the forum section?

 

good placement

 

it looks good. well blended.

 

Forums are always low CTR anyway, the best option i guess is to sell the ads directly out. hmm ..