Ok..so it seems I should definitely be getting more clicks. I tried putting them at the bottom of posts, but they are only relevant to the site title, but not the content of the posts. I'm sure I could get a lot more clicks if they were relevant to the posts.
they should be relevent to the entire bit of content on the page...however in a forum type situation conversation can meander quite quickly and it may take time for the ads relevancy to catch up with the conversation as the AdSense bot has to come and visit.