So, I just started with Adsense about 3 weeks ago for my site: www.OfficialDebate.com . According to my statistics software, for the month of January I received 35,000+ "hits" (I guess "hits" are defined differently by software package??). That has grown significantly from the month before. According to another statistics package, I received about 400 unique visitors for the month and that is rapidly growing too (month before was like 50 or something). Should I be doing okay with Adsense?? Cause I'm not seeing much so far....any suggestions?
Doing okay with 400 uniques? No. Not with a forum. Suggestions: Get more traffic... keep building up the forum. You need a lot of traffic to make things worthwhile... plus the way the ads are now aren't going to get you a decent CTR. I'm assuming it's ~1 (and under)% right now. Spend a month focussed more on driving people to the site because AdSense might not be worth it at this point. After you get a decent amount of traffic where the forum is active, you can then test the AdSense ads. What works with 20 people might not work with 500 people. You really need that extra traffic to test. I would use AdSense forum plugins and add them into the posts just like is done with this forum.
get more traffic and optimize your ad placement better and you'll do OK, get a bigger leaderboard on top, a rectangle on the bottom, maybe make the header smaller and put the leaderboard under the header just above the forum, with colors blended into the site...
yups true... i have a forum with a : 3400 member 11000 unique visitor 300000 pageview and I only make less than $40 for 6 month...it stinks... the problem with forum is, your visitor is a repeated visitor, and once they know there's an ads and grow accustomed to it, they will start to ignore it...and to make my condition worst, my forum is an IT Expert forum...which most of them probably use an ad blocker... but... you can create a custom ads placement...show more ads to non member...it's ok to play wild...try any placement you can think of... good luck....