Quick question. I belive we can't talk about our specific AdSense CTR, but does anyone know a rough estimate for what is an industry average, or a good CTR to aim for? Obviously not based on any data that would violate an AdSense TOS...
5-10% is very good and can be acheived on content pages (as apposed to forums) without anything fishy IMO.
You could get less than 1% by using a banner ad shape on a forum. If you have good content and use larger ad formats and blend the colors into your page, spdude's range is realistic. From what I've read, if you get a CTR over 20% you'd probably be considered suspect, if you get over 40% you are probably cheating.
Allright, very interesting, I'll see how it goes. You mentioned forum CTR being lower, and that makes sense of course. Would you say adsense is not the way to go for forums, or its fine, but the lower CTR is only to be expected?
It just depends on the forum.. but on some forums, the CTR is as low as 0.02%, and most of the time when its that low, you are better off with CPM. But I've heard of forums that get 2%.. not sure if its true or not though. Josh
Places like iVillage have custom forums that have more prominent ad placement to deal with the lower CTRs. Looks to me like they are going for CPM's instead of CTRs since there's only one message on each page. And then there's ezboard, which throws out every sort of ad out there that allows the advertiser to set cookies, do pop-ups, everything short of installing activex controls - which there have even been a few of those that came through. Forums are a great way to build a community, but not so much in the way of a revenue generator themselves IMO. You have to have content to go along with the Forum, and that content will generate your ad revenue for you.
Forums usually does not offer much CTR ratios! while constant pages and blogs have nice CTR! I had lest then 1% CTR on forum while on my directory i constantly recieved 5% CTR