Hi, Any suggestions on this, methods that have proven to have worked? I get ~7K visits each day (~4K unique), and I get 150 - 500 new registrations each day. People spend average of 12 minutes on my site. Google AdSense shows that my ads are getting 40K - 60K impressions each day. The bad part, I'm earning little over $5 a day with all this traffic. My CTR is 0.1x%! Sometimes it even goes to 0.0x%. If I had CTR of 1% or more, I think I could be earing hundreds of dollars a day. I tried various ad placements, so far the best results that I got was from top banner ad + "above the quick reply" banner ad. Starting today I'm only running top banner to see how that works. I have never tried using link units, how does that work with forums?
wow.. thats low.. I dont have forum site but all I can say is, my eye never catches the ads between posts.. always the top right corner.. like DP
Hmm, according to the Google's Adsense heat map, top-right corner, much llike the ad is placed here on DP, has very low CTR. Hence, I never tried that, and here I was thinking DP accidently put that ad up there lol. As a side question, why do you look at top right corner on forums? Because of the login/welcome box or because you got used to it at DP? Thanks for your input, I might try this right-top-corner ad next.
I guess thats because private msg details are there.. But it might be different location depending on your forum design.. You should also try reply from. Below the ext area or just above the title.. Just noticed now.. After I write, I read, so... important
From my experience and expertise you will not able to generate better CTR than a normal website owner in your Forum. However you must give a try to add Link unit at the bottom of your forum post and i hope it will work better (728 X 15).
Why not just slap them everywhere and see what works? It's not like you could do any worse (don't mean that to sound insulting)
Check vbulletin.org for my adsense Modifications for vBulletin Forums (check my Profile StarBuG) If you want a demo, check my patients questions forum (german): www.patientenfragen.net
Lol. Since i've got fixed width template, i've replaced my top graphical banner and put google ad in its place. Seemed to have increased the CTR by small fraction (still under 0.2x), but since this ad was the only one on the page, earnings increased, probably because of google's smart pricing. Had a record high of 62K impressions on the ads, according to google, made $10.xx for the day, I think that's still pretty pathetic ratio. I think I'm gonna take your advince and put max amount of ads on most pages and see how that works. I've tried this before to some degree, but even though I had more clicks (Around 100, from the usual 50-70), I actually made less money per click, thus making less money overall. But this time around I've got few more tricks that I've learned to try. Good luck to me hehe.
Well, I think I hit the jackpot on one of my ad placements. You know how you always have one ad that earns well above all other ads? Well since I started the website top banner has been my main source of revenue. However, I just found another sweet spot that actually does even better than the top banner. Inside forum post. At the beginning of first post on each page, there is a letterhead 728x90 img ad, it gets slightly higher CTR than top banner. All in all my CTR has doubled, I'm at 0.3x% now. I do have 3 or 4 ads that absolutely have no clicks so far. I'll let it run for another day just to make sure, but I suspect when I remove these bad ads CTR and earnings will increase. PS. So far nothing from the Link Units. I have 3 of them, one below my navbar, one on front page (upper left corner), and one in the footer. No earnings from them.
Whats your forum url? Above the first post will drive away a lot of your visitors. The goal is to keep them on your forum. Remember, every click on one of your ads is a visitor leaving your site!
My site is fairly contraversial, don't want to link to it, and whatever I do to the site my users are still happy that the site exists at all, they don't mind the ads much, as long as I maintain respectfull community I should be fine on that front. Point being, I have no competition at all, and HUGE demand for the information, hence, today I celebrate 1 month anniversary and I've got 8.5K registered members already, with 700+ inbound links (i didn't post any of them), 7K visits a day and increasing. I did get few e-mails/letters/faxes from few lawyers wanting me to shut the site down lol. My web host ruled in my favor and said I'm not breaking any laws, so for now I'm safe. Will be moving off-shore when I can afford reliable service.
Holy crap, just when I thought things can't get any better, they got 10 times more better. I implemented one of the integrations from here http://www.vbseo.com/f160/vbulletin-google-adsense-deep-integration-tutorial-6221/ I used the one that puts an AD where first thread is supposed to be. That ad made me $7+ in less than 2 hours (over 3% CTR, that's just mind blowing for me...if you read my first post), and this is during the slowest time (2am - 4am). I sent e-mail to google to varify if it complies with their policy. Man I hope it's not breaking any TOS, because this is pure money maker, might as well remove all other ads from the site.
Lol, I've actually removed that ad halfway through the day, because I was getting too many clicks. Don't want to set googl's alarm off in one day. I'll enabled it again when google day restarts lol. Trying to ease into high CTR. Made $40 with that ad alone, and it was during dead hours mostly.
Google answered and said that this was in violation of their terms and conditions. Too blended. I'll have to change tha ad so it actually stands out and clearly shows that it's google ad, but CTR went to hell. I'll let it run for another day or two and I'll probably end up removing it.