Hi! I am running a vBulletin forum with discussions about every topic. I receive 10,000 visitors per day via Google. Recently I have been experimenting to find the best placement for the ads: above the post, below the first post, leaderboard on the left, but nothing really performs well. Even adding multiple ads doesn't help, visitors who don't click on the ads below each first post rarely choice to click on the ad at the end of a thread. The CTR is between 1,50% and 1,60%, recalculated by removing the hits from registered users. So now I am wondering, is that CTR average and okay for a forum? Do you know any magic placements to receive a better CTR? Something like 2,20% would make me very happy. Thanks!
If you have decent traffic to your site or blog and your AdSense income is low, try the following tips and see how your CTR increases dramatically. 1. Make your ads visible above the fold. Statistics have proved that ads which are visible without scrolling generates highest clicks. Another reason is that the ads will look like normal web links that visitors are used to click on them. Also the large rectangle ad format has proven to be the highest CTR generator. 2. Make your ads blend with your site content. Make sure that your ads background and border color are same as your content background. Ad text and URL should have the same color as that of the font color of your ads. And Make the link color to that of your web pages link color. 3. Make use of set of special comments to tell the Adsense spiders about your main content. This will help AdSense to serve more relevant ads based on your content. And more relevant content means more clicks. 4. Write keyword rich, grammatically correct juicy posts. This will make people read them and spiders will serve the best ads related to your keywords. Make sure you have some large content. Don't place ads on pages with 2 lines of content. 5. Make use of custom channels from your Adsense console. Analyze your stats and tweak settings so that you get the highest CTR. Keep records of all the changes you do and measure your results periodically. It does not apply to the forum site, but a general idea to increase the CTR I had a website whose CTR was less than 2%v and following these tips it increased to above 8 %. Might be it will be also helpful to you. Regards Tehmina