Hello DP, I just recently discovered these forums and have been reading threads several hours daily for the past week. I have a few questions. When I started my gaming website/forum about a year ago, I had no intention of integrating ads. It was merely a side project of mine for friends etc. Fast-forward a year and I'm getting 60-100k uniques per month. Naturally, costs are up and I need to subsidize them somehow. Enter Adsense. I implemented Ads about 3 weeks ago. I switched to image only, as it performs 10x better than text only, from what I've seen. And yes, I matched the ads to blend perfectly with the site's theme (even tried the blue links trick). But here's the problem. My CTR is 0.07%. From what I've read, that's abysmal. I'm using 2 horizontal banner ads in the forums. I know that my placement probably needs improvement, but I still don't understand how my CTR is so low. Should I switch to CPA? How do I improve how Adsense targets ads? I've already blocked some URLs, but I feel as though the targeting could be improved. Thank you much for your help.
Well this could be for a few reasons 1. Your audience has no intrest in ads 2. Your positioning like you said 3. You said it blends in so it doesn't catch the readers eye 4. Are your ads relevant to your webpage?
Yes, as you might have read already, the gaming niche pays very poorly (CPC), and the technical nature of your audience (playing video games means you're somewhat technical, at least way more than a perfect audience of non technical persons) makes it hard to have a high CTR and to finish it off you have a forum which is known to be extremely low CTR, because it has a lot of page impressions from returning users (regulars) So it ends up having your very low CTR. You can take good advice on ad placement from experienced forum owners, but your CTR will grow so much, there's a hard limit to it, be aware.. I think for forum CPM ads can pay much more because you're paid by the amount of displays without interaction from users. And CPM ads can be added to the page, they don't have to replace adsense ads. Also you can add very targeted CPA offers (affiliates programs) for your gaming audience, the hardest is to find the related CPA offers. So you'll increase your overall page eCPM by having multiple sources of income. Good luck.