I am doing a forum soon and have decided on two places to put the ads, one in the actual posts and one below the options like 'user cp, search' etc...I want to also utilize the text ones, the ones that are just one row that starts with 'ads by google - link - link - link' - Where would it be best to place that one on a forum? Thanks
From my experience, ads after the first post performed horribly. I'm talking under 5 clicks per 20,000 impressions. The leader board up top produces my best income.
Forums in general get a much lower eCPM and i think I'm right in saying this. The clicks I do get from the forum though are on ads placed at the top, jsut under my banner. I have nothing else but you could consider adding the single row ones just below the first post of a thread. I hear they do good too and are not in the way.
Check out Google's Six AdSense optimization tips for forums. Google has developed a seperate heat map just for forums.
I have heard (from many) that a unit at the end of a thread is golden, since the user has read all there is, and is looking for somewhere to go - why not throw some adsense there and "help them help you"
interesting indeed - with a forum - thinnk about why users are there - if they are reading a forum post, they are AT the info they need, so they wont be clicking ads. BUT once they finished readin the thread, they MUST take an action - either hit "back" (too much work to move mouse way up) close the window (also too far for mouse to travel) so why not give them a nice big ad block at the bottom with relevant ads that might give them more info than they got from the blog - anyway, i have a few freinds who used this successfully. (keep in mind tho, forums are dogs when it comes to CTR - so don't expect this to preform as well as content pages, BUT, for a forum, itlll prob be your better preforming layouts.