My Tips for Google Adsense and Forums

Hey guys, hopefully this will help out anyone who is having trouble using Google Adsense on forums.

Firstly, I'd like to make some things clear...

For the amount of traffic and visits you get, you will not be turning huge profits like a non-forum website. Most of the visitors are returns, and are looking at posts, not advertisements. They don't like leaving the forum.

Forums do not = money! If you want to make money make an informative web site instead. Create forums because you like and can be part of the community. Use ads to help pay for hosting.

1. Grape Skin and purple/pink ads seem to work the best. I tried different colors and this one had the best results. An extra 30% by using that color. Also randomly rotating colors work well too. Pastels have the highest click through rate. Sharp, contrasting, bright colors don't perform well.

2. An ad on the forum index works very well. Make sure it is above the fold though. Ads at the bottom of the forum are confusing and seldolmy viewed or used.

a) If you want to place a vertical banner along the sides of your forum, you can do so. But it looks 'spammy' and cheapens the look of your forum unless it is very well blended.

3. Do not place ads on search forums, PM pages, registration pages, etc. Why? Because people aren't going to look for ads, they are there for a reason! It's also against the Terms of Service.

4. Banners displayed after the 1st post on each page in a thread work the best. vBulletin seems to have the best display for this, once you buy the vBulletin software you can visit the vBulletin.com forums and there is a very easy tutorial on how to display them.

Banners at the bottom of a thread do not work as well. It's a ratio of 15:1 in my case.

a) Don't make the in-thread ads, bright and distracting! No-no-no! You're a forum first, which means building a community. The ads are there to help support the content.

5. Use PhpAdsNew to deliver your ads in an iframe. This reduces some AJAX issues, especially with vBulletin and Invision Board. Don't alter the HTML to track clicks, because a) it doesn't work and b) it's against TOS.

6. Use the feature that enables you to show a different ad if Google can't provide any! Either display your own banners, or go for the collapsing one.

7. Don't oversaturate! 1 banner per page is enough, 1 link unit per page is enough.

8. Set up channels. Use 1 channel for the forum index. 1 channel for the in thread posts (use seperate channels if you plan on having them at different positions). Cut off channels that are not performing well, they're taking away from the ones that do perform well.

9. I've found that not mentioning "Sponsored Links" above an ad actually raises click-throughs. Just blend them in to your content. But don't trick people in to clicking.

10. I've seen on other forums that placing a banner on the header at the very top of the forum works. But only because people click it on accident to get back to the forum home page. It looks cheap.

11. Thin your forum! Wide forums are a bit too spread out for the eye. 758 pixels is a good width, and will display properly on 800px resolutions. This 'centers' around the advertisments as well, and they don't look lost. (Give users an option though if they do like the wider forum.)

12. Set up proper forum links. Google caches and views http://www.blah.com/forum/ differently from http://www.blah.com/forum/index.php, make sure you're pointing to the correct one. One of these might not have ads on them.

 

I do not believe this is against the tos anymore. They have removed it from there terms of service.

I have actually found a lot of success by posting a chitika mini mall ad after the LAST post on each thread.


Good tips though!

 

Thanks Really? I have Chitika as well, but I noticed the Google ads did not work well at the bottom.

 

Oh here's a good one too.

Sponsor a child with the income! Give some of the money back to charity. Be different and make a difference. It's a great way to let people who are wary about sponsorship make that leap. Everyone can send letters in as well and share photos and stories.

 

Great tips

 

is there a concensus that you can't make money with forums? i haven't found this to be the case...

 

Depends on the topic of your forum. But, forums are usually very server intensive, 40-50+ users warrants for a dedicated host.

 

Not always. As I said on another place, perhaps conversational style forums have usually low CTR, etc., but some message boards are working really well with AdSense -on the same level of other content pages- when they are very topic-centered and their typical user is a new visitor -specially on static html boards, search engine friendly- who posts just one or few messages (such as requests for information, and so on). In a successful example, the admin creates all threads as a complement to specific content pages, in a similar way to blog comments.

This is so because most forums are chat-style, for conversation, and many people don't want a forum like the ones I've mentioned above.

In this case, you may try something. If your forum is dynamic, show ads only to visitors, not to members. And see what happens.

 

That is definately not always the case with forums. If you put enough effort into a forum it can be very financially rewarding.

 

great tips SVZ thanks!
I especially like the idea of sponsoring a child with the money raised! I think I will do it if I do raise enough money

 

Thanks, the income has a little increased.

 

clicks per impression ratio on forums is very less ...
But forums indirectly help adsense. Forum means lot of user content which mean more pages for you... Use these forums pages to link to your revenue pages and help ur pages move up for the targetted keywords. This will indirectly help your adsense revenue.

 

hmmm that means kind of redesiging your site though no? I'm talking about mainly forum sites.

 

Pastel colors for ads is the best.

 

bump for whats his face

 

nice post! I will put this on my favorites!

 

aww thanks icfire

 

where can i found it ?

 

I've been quite successful with a fashion forum I have designed. Feel free to copy the ideas, after many changes I have found the current layout to be the best. I do need to add rotating colors though but i hate the colors going outside the design of the site. http://www.fashion-forums.com

 

good tips. thanks.