Why are Adsense CTR's so poor on forums?!? I have some unbelievably poor performing forums, these are my worst. Even DP revenue sharing has given me a higher CTR premier league football forum 0.09% free-advertising-forum3 L i 0.08% MMO forum (728x90 text) 0.07% make-money-online.forum7 LR ti 0.06% free-advertising.forum3 LR-t&i 0.05% free-advertising.forum3 (link) 0.02% forums.digitalpoint.com 0.12% Have you got any tips to improve my CTR at forums? thanks in advance
Have a clean design, have ads appear randomly in between posts, and make an effort to blend the ads in to the color scheme.
There's nothing much you can do about it since forums always have the repeating visitors problem whereby they will grow numb on ads. Your only way is to work through on increasing the traffic.
If your CTR is that low then you need to go back to the drawing board. I have a Forum and my CTR on the Forum part of my site is about 1% (Entire site 2%)... sometimes as low as .75% somtimes as high as 1.25% and this is with about 35K page views a day in the forum. There is no reason your CTR should be that low, forum or no forum. For me it was countless hours of trial and error... finding just the right spots in php files to put the code.. I spent 4 hours last night trying to find the right spot in a file to put this link bar to make it appear where I wanted it to appear. I finally found the right spot and woke up this moring and already seeing results.
AdSense and all ads are meant for users who are looking for information and don't really care what site they get it from. However, forum users are there to visit forums, not look for information one-time and leave [usually].
Adsense do not perform better in forums. You can many posts by forum owners here with poor performance.
CTR rates are always lower on forum sites, you aren't doing anything wrong. http://free-adsense-tips200.blogspot.com/2009/05/why-are-ctrs-lower-for-forums.html There are always things you can do to improve rates, but they will always be lower on those type of sites (due to the nature).
thank you for all of your comments, i think what is clear now, is that I need to experiment with ad placement.
Yes and don't give up. You work hard enough on placement you should be able to average 1% or better in the forum part of a site. Don't listen to people that tell you it is a lost cause. It is a lost cause only when you give up. Experiment, experiment and expirement. I make about $500 or $600 a month off AdSense and 1/3 of it is from my forum. Another 1/3 is from my home page and the other 1/3 are various other pages throughout my site. I obviously appreciate the 1/3 from my forum. I am going to keep experimenting until I get the forum to 1.50 CTR and I will eventually reach that goal. If you forum is busy just the slightest increase from 1 to 1.25 CTR can make a huge difference in your earnings.
There is really nothing much you can do about it. Forums have always have a very low click through rate!
I suggest you try to put different ad units in your forum. Try different ad placements and see which combination works the best. Also, see if you can use 250*250 ad unit somewhere in your forum. This ad unit will help to increase CTR.
Im the same , football isnt the best way to go either , ive got 3 football forums and all are pretty crappy, two getting large traffic too. Have you brought any traffic ? higher page impressions from brought traffic will shoot the hell out of the stats
Also check out this, http://www.google.com/images/adsense/en_us/support/forum_en.jpg Image map for forums.
I have the same problem on my forum. Your best bet is to just let the ads go, and actually sell something to your forum users through the forum. Forums are very good for convincing people of buying a product, especially when you run them.
It all depends on the traffic, if you have high traffic you get more clicks and more revenue, repetitive visitors and everything doesn't count much I think.