Ad Placement on VB Forum +rep for good answers

Hi, I'm in the process of setting up a VBulletin forum for one of my sites + I was wondering which advertising network is best to use and what are the best places to put ads to maximise the revenue it makes.

I'll give +rep to anybody who can give me some tips based on experience they have had.

Thanks!

-Gaz

 

Depending on the content of the forum Adsense should work nicely. Take the placements of Digitalpoint as an example and you should see decent earnings provided you have active members and good traffic.

 

If, however, you choose to be more aggressive, ads may be placed in those auto-generated pseudo "ad posts" at the beginning of a thread. People interested in a thread first happen to look at the relevant links. Since the actual topics of those threads are out of your control, AdSense would be a solution to make the ads relevant.

 

I will suggesst writing articles and submitting them to as many Article directory's as you can.

 

rodster0001, okgaz say's he'll give people +rep. I have a feeling he's going to give you -rep for your post. Where does it say he's looking for ways to advertise his forums. He is asking to monetize it with ads and not advertise it.

I would go with the others and say Adsense. Don't over do the forums with ads. Just put one ad block up the top and one at the bottom. This is a very good way of positioning them. The reasons for this is because your visitor will see the ad up the top first before anything else. They then read the posts and then once they hit the bottom where they have finished reading, there will be another ad, which they may click on.

When putting ads on the forums, it's best to optimize them so that they look apart of your content within the forums. Eg. Using the same colors, font colors, etc. As Google is a contextual ads site, it will show the correct sort of ads for your content.

If you or anyone else here would like to join Adsense through my referral link, then that would be great. Just send me a PM and I will give you a link ASAP.

Hope you do well with your new forums and all the best!

 

Thanks for the advice John, sebastianrs & Crusader. Enjoy your + rep


@John:

I'm already a member of adsense otherwise I'd be happy to use your referal id. I think you are right about having an ad at the top and bottom, I don't want to place ads too agressively or it may put people off coming.

I think first of all I will try having a cpm ad at the top of the screen (since it has to be above the fold according to TOS) and an adsense ad at the bottom. I just added VB ad management to the forum so it's really easy to put them where I like now.


-Gaz

P.S. I wouldn't be as harsh to give -ve rep to rodster for misunderstanding the question, no +rep though.

 

From what I have heard, this is not from personal experience and so should be taken with a grain of salt, the people in the AdSense forum seem to say that AdSense does not work well with forums at all. Obviously you may be better off going to the AdSense forum and reading about it yourself, but that's just what I have read.

However, I'll be honest, I don't have the forum experience to be able to suggest a better alternative. I'll leave that up to the more experienced members

 

A forum can do very well with Google. You can get $2 - $6 eCPM if you have your forum well ranked within the search engine for it's pages and not have alot of members posting daily.

I was winding you up about rodster. I have never given anyone a -rep and I don't think I ever will.

As for the adsense and CPM, I would think that you could actually loose earnings this way, but you could try it. Don't forget that you will only end up getting around $0.10 - $0.40 CPM for a banner being shown. You can get a little more from the larger CPM networks, but then they are more strict and most of them don't allow you to put their ads within forums.

 

@john:

Too many posts can lower your CPM?

 

Yep, when you post you cause pageviews. When people want to post on your forum they are there to post. They browse the forums and post and not hardly click on ads. These cause pageviews which means a lower CPM. People that don't post and come from search engines for information they are more likely to click on the Ads giving a higher CPM as they click and don't use pageviews to post.

Hope you get what I mean.

 

https://www.google.com/adsense/support/bin/answer.py?answer=43868

and

http://www.vbulletin-faq.com/adsense.htm

Both seem to be the norm. Look at the heat maps, and that should give a fair idea as to which ads do best.

If you need help with placements, you may enjoy these v.Borg mods:
vB Ad Management 3.1 (Ad Sharing Edition)
Adsense as second post. 2 Sizes - Big for guests, small for members - Legacy Version
Geek Advertising Banner system RC1
vB.Sponsors - Forum and Category Sponsorship Ads with Statistics
(there are likely many more)

 

I have not ever seen them heat maps for forums before, thanks for letting us know about them. + 1 rep for you.

 

That's very useful Qrtztufre. Thanks!

 

Hey, not a problem, and thanks for the rep. Had I not just been on Adsense looking for the same thing I might not have known myself

I've not personally implemented ads on a forum yet, but if you do look at the maps you should notice they do seem to coincide with where your eyes tend to land while loading a new page, followed by where they wander while reading one.

As a side note, they also have heatmaps for blogging...but you'll need to hunt those down yourself as I've logged out of google for the day.
Q

 

okgaz,

I do a ton of custom vBulletin work and what not and I do deep AdSense integration all of the time, be sure to know that you should really use www.crazyegg.com. It will really help you know where to place ads and know the hot spots of your visitors.

Also keep in mind that since you are just getting ads going on your site that you always need to play with them for maximum revenue.

In all honesty, I wouldn't place too many adsense ads on the forum with it just starting up, when you get around 400 - 500 members toss up a few more .

All the best,
Kolby Bothe