If you own a forum you know it is not common to have a decent CTR. I found a way to improve it, incrementing eCPM and visits in the process. In my case I use Google Analytics. You can apply the same logic with your own statistics software or whatever you use to analyze your traffic and Adsense results. Collect significant data. I find reasonable to wait at least a month after you started tracking data to obtain a proper analysis of traffic and clicks. A smaller time frame could lead you to erroneous conclusions. Check which keywords have the best results. I do this by checking ‘Overall Keyword Conversion’ under Marketing Optimization option in Google Analytics. Then I order the keywords by visits (I want to focus in those one that lead more visitors) and detect those with the greatest Goal/Visit ratio. Obviously, my Goal is defined as ‘Click in Adsense’. I use the script that you can find here at DP. For example, if I have a keyword that leads more than 100 visits in a month and this keyword has a Goal/Visit of more than 5%, I am very interested in it. Check all of the target keywords. If I am doing well (top 5 in Google results), I do nothing. But if I see that I can improve my position in the results, I continue with the following step. Do SEO for the pages associated to the target keywords. Do whatever you usually do. For instance, you can try to obtain links to those pages. I use the COOP because its fast and as the keywords for deep pages in forums usually are a phrase of two, three or more words, you will need very low weight to see changes. With a weight of 500 you should see significant improvements. Wait for another month and start a new cycle. I hope you find it useful. It took me a while to figure this mechanism out.
My forums have decent CTR because I have optimized my forum code (phpBB2) to get it displaying very relevant ads with zero wait time. A new topic is added, and the ads are relevant immediately. Most forums have awful relevancy, which reduces CTR significantly.
It depends on the forum. For my forums, I made sure that the URLs all included the forum title in them. AdSense seems to focus on the .php extension in my forums, so nothing but PHP ads would show up. Then it focused on View Forum > in the title, so forum ads showed up. I removed the View Forum from the title tags completely. Waste of space. Then I made sure all my forums URLs had the forum title in it (as simple as adding &title=[topic] to your code). This way, AdSense was able to pick up on the title of the post, voila! Instant good ads.
I have never had the PHP ads problem. But it is true you receive generic ads (related to my site, though) in new topics or old ones not visited very often. Removing 'View Forum' in the title is a good idea and I did it a long time ago. I will try the &title=[topic] idea. But I have over 200,000 pages indexed. What would Google do with the duplicated content? You know, the topics will be available with or without &title= Thanks.
The &title=[topic] shouldn't affect how your forum works, the code will ignore it, PROBABLY. Give it a try, just append &title=cat%20recipes or &title=dirty%20carpet and see what happens. If your code doesn't bounce, you're fine, and it should help build relevant ads (at least it does for me!) while still being safe.
Yes, dadasays, I know the forum will still work with the 'fake' appended variable. My concern is about Google as search engine. You know you will have to options for each page: with or without &title=[topic].
Implementing this technic my stats improved strongly from April to May. The CTR increased by 200% and the eCPM by 250%. I am starting a new cycle.
Sorry, my question is not very clear. I am reffering to adding &title=[topic] to get more relevant ads.
You will have to look in the source code, where the links are made. Sorry I cannot be more helpful, but I finally did not applied that hack. Only what I explained in the opening post.