Hi all, just thought I'd see if any of you have tried something similar. I run adwords on my site, and thanks to channel data, I know that very few clicks come from my forums. If I get 20 clicks a day (which is pathetic in itself), one or two are from the forum and they are usually worth less then 10 cents each. I decided to replace google ads with Clicksor ads, just to see if I could sneak a few more cents out of my pathetic forum clicks. Also perhaps the different look of them will generate some click-happiness. I used the signup link from the keyword tracker, I figure if DP chose them over the alternatives, that's a good vote of confidence. However, they're not very well matched to my site at the moment. I've already got it set up so that registered users don't see forum ads at all, so I'm thinking about enabling the text-link ads which highlights words on the page and when people mouseover they get an ad...if anything, it might annoy some guests into registering to remove them. How is their payout? Remember, anything can be an improvement for me over adsense at this point (in this area of my site at least)
Don't take it as a vote of confidence. They suck. Been running them for over a year and these are my total stats... Impressions = 305,874 Clicks = 341 Click Through Ratio = 0.001% Referrals = 98 Total Earnings = $24.54
Wowsers, that's awful, for the stats you must get. Maybe YPN will accept me soon. I might as well just remove the (contextual) ads from my forums alltogether, might make my members happy at the expense of what, 20 cents a day? I've got 2,200 of them, maybe they'll start posting more. It would be a big perk over some other forums on related sites. No ads...(ok except our actual banner sponsors)
For forums, AdSense has been best for me. Especially now that I'm getting a lot of CPM ads flowing in since I put this up... http://www.digitalpoint.com/tools/keywords/advertising.php
Yep they suck, I dropped them after only a few days. Tons of impressions a few clicks and only a few cents.
Interesting, suggest that people target your site and they do! Unfortunately my potential sponsors are not so techno or high-budgeted to even use adwords. Many of my adsense ads are "buy Tuba at Ebay" or 1-800-instruments.com or whatever...totally generic ads which really aren't that "targeted." I do way better with my actual sponsors who I can speak with in person...they're so low-tech it's cute, I have to design all their banners...but good relationships are forming, and every few months I raise the price of banners on our site and we still get new sponsors...now what to do with the two year old people only paying $20/month when the new ones are paying 50? hmm?
i aslo don't like clicksor, too many impressions and clicks but few cents earnings. No way.......................
I think the overall look and feel of them is horrible in itself not to mention the horrible targeting and CPC.
The usability, look and fel of clicksor are very very cheap. The only 'good' thing is they pay $5 for every referral. That seems okay, but I haven't got paid yet, so wait till I report back. DP, how come with 98 referals you have only $24? You should have had at least 98*5=$490.00... ?
Clicksor only pays you the $5 when your referals make at least $50. Roze, just dump clicksor, it's really pathetic
I did, webmistress. I actually removed all PPC ads from my forums completely, except the banners we run from our in-industry sponsors. Nobody was clicking anyway, I haven't seen a drop in my clicks/day since I removed them. I thought saying "register to remove these ads" would be good incentive for them to join the forums, but new users held steady at about 5/day. So the final conclusion was: forum users don't click ads, why clutter up their screen?
That's good. yeah, forum users don't click much on ads because they basically become blind to them after a few visits. I'ver never clicked on any adsense ad on DP
Amen! I tried them for a few days, and even through those few days my stats were crap. I've done much better with adsense so far. I'm looking at other companies right now, though.
I dumped them after 1 week or so... My visitors were complaining and they weren't making lots of money for me anyway
Clicksor sucks for advertisers as well. We used to try them and I think 20 bucks that we paid was a waste. Seriously, adwords works much better in this respect. I also came to a conclusion that all clicksor referred visits were less than 10 sec like people didn't even wait for page to load but just to make a click and run away. From thousands of expressions we got ZERO new users when google brings us 2-5 subscribers for free service a day.