Hi everyone, I am new to this forum, and sorry about my english... anyways, i have a website (online community, where they have their own profile, image gallery, guestboook and so on...) that got 3700members that continously log in to the website I have an avarage of 40members online 18hours a day and yet i only make $2 out of adsense everyday?? where do i go wrong? i know put the google search on each persons profile to hope that they search it, the main clicks comes from the adsense that popsup after they sign in to the community, hope to get some advice from you guys! Thanks Gimbo
Sites with repeat visitors (like a forum) are going to get a VERY small click through percentage. Also, you mention you are running AdSense on popups and/or on registration pages. You can't do either of those things without violating AdSense terms of service.
I think for this kind of site you will be much better off to try another ad company like Casale and Fastclick which offers CPM ads. ( I recently did a review about Casale on my blog if you are interested) This means you place banner ads on your site and for 1000 page views you get paid a certain amount regardless if people click on the ads. Otherwise, it's very hard to give you suggestions without seeing the site.
For that kind of site you'll usually do much better with a fixed fee advertising instead of CPC. Try www.adbrite.com or www.adengage.com.
also, depending on the niche, you might want to try some affiliate programs related to what your people are talking about. forums are weird animals.
And don't forget to use site targeting to make sure that the ads you do display are very relevant to the discussion at hand. But I think over time that forum users develop the equivalent of banner blindness such that any pay-per-click scheme isn't going to work well, not unless you regularly move the ads around, rotate colors, etc. But it's hard to do without angering your user base. A pay-per-impression model works better if you have lots of traffic, like the others have said.
I'll check into Casale and Fastclick does anyone have any experiense with these type of thing? i mean can u make som good buck with it?
Well, it depends on if your site is a forum or not. Some of those advertising networks don't allow you to place the banners on forums. If your site is another community driven site then you should do pretty well. I'm using it on some of my sites and have seen very nice returns.
Well you've done the hard part already Gimbo (generating traffic/repeat visitors) now it's just a matter of better monetizing that traffic. As already suggested, forum community sites have a very low CTR, so to combat this, have you thought of adding additional content pages to buildup your site? Visitors are much more likely to click on ads within article pages.
really appriciate all your guys help!! it's not a forum it's a different community, if anyone want the url i can PM it, don't want to post it in a public forum. I visited the two websited you recomended but didn't really understand what that was and how i can start making money out of that?
You need to register as a publisher with them. If your site gets accepted you are then allowed to place banner ads or use pop-unders on your site. You then get paid for the ads you display.
thanks man, so how much can you make out of this? how do you make the money... i mean do you get some cents for each time you show a banner? or when a person click on the banner? do you earn different for different banners shown? how much have you made with this program, i mean how much was your best month?
From what I've experienced, Fastclick and similar programs have very low payouts. IMHO, concentrate on better integrating adsense within your site.
You get paid a different eCPM for each banner. Let's say one campaign has an eCPM of $1.00 that means you earn $1 each time you show a 1000 of that banner. So if you show for example 100 banners of that campaign you earn $0.10. This is just for displaying the banner. The amount you generate will vary according to how much traffic you generate and can range from a few dollars to a few hundred dollars a month.
It depends on your website also, maybe the ads placement is not done correctly? Also, as in my case, my eCPM is quite terrible (but I have no control over it)