How to increase My Forum CTR ?

the forums section of my website has a .80 CTR over the passed 6 months... I get about 8K to 10K page views a day on them. I use two Medium Sized Rectangles under the menu bar. If you have built up enough loyal members they will put up with them and the CTR is a lot better. Also, the new referral ads appear to be having a very postive effect on my earnings.

 

Exactly. Once you get to the point you're making about a grand in adsense revenue on a forum your traffic is probably where you need to be to get accepted into a CPM network.

Change the homepage from a forum to a CMS so it looks like a content site that happens to have a forum and your chances of getting approved in a CPM network go up dramatically.

CPM
Well placed affiliate campaigns
Premium Memberships

are all better ways (combined) to make money than CPC.

 

I 've got ads displaying to all non-members and members with < 25 posts. I have a double block of 728x90 under my first post of a thread and have blended them with the page colours. I no longer have adsense in the page header area as it isn't well targetted and receives few, low value clicks. A lot less page impressions, but CTR, eCPM have shot up with no drop in earnings. Less ads are best with forums in my experience.

 

It's not that easy to build your forum to that point but as others have already said it can be done.

 

i can't found full proof ad placements for my forum! i suppose those all hare theories!
actually i change my ad placements whenever the did not work for me! that is why i m mainting just a decent CTR

 

Its not really hard to place ads on forums. But you should be careful to not overdo it. For example, look at my forum:
geek4ums.com
I have a small ad on the homepage, and big ads on the topics and forum pages, because thats where the majority of the traffic is. In the topics and forums.

 

use random color as good as DP
and use ad section code for corolate ads....

 

The thing is, digitalpiont is a very busy forum that is based on a good niche, giving higher paying CPC.

Some forums does make some good money, but if you had a forums that had 100,000 pageviews a day and then a general content site that had 100,000 pageviews a day, then I would think that the general content site will earn more than double the amount of what the forum would earn.

 

Heres something I've been testing out lately, switching all the ads to image only ads for an entire day. I went from 2 clicks every 10 hours to 2 clicks an hour.

 

Try to move around the ads so that your frequent visitors do not become ad-blind.