Ok, first of all I was in a rush posting this. So if there are articles or similiar threads to this I am sorry, please redirect me to these. Anyway... I own www.purefta.com and we are constantly earning good daily rates with Adsense. However, we are missing out hugely on additional income, due to our pathetic CTR. We never get higher than 1%.. often well below! Now I know it's a forum and CTR's are generally lower than websites, but can you offer any advice on improving this rate? The ads are really targeted so I don't see a problem there. At present, we have them in the header and footer (see purefta.com/forum) and also between some of the posts in threads. I was hoping you could lend some friendly advice on increasing my CTR. Any input is welcome!
How much money are you making monthly? Your forum would most likely have a greater potential earning more income through paid advertisers for a banner spot, versus adsense.
It varies, but we average anywhere from $30 to low-mid $xxx daily - depending on whether there are any major sporting events going on which would make people need to use their receivers more. Could private advertisers really match that? We currently charge them just $50/month for a header spot, and don't even sell out at that price.
Tried Adbrite for a week and noone bought the ads. Couldn't keep it on longer than that though, while noone buys it was getting me about $4/day, which is like 8 times less than my minimum daily earnings through adsense.
I have another suggestion. Move the adsense banner from the top of the page to right below the pureFTA banner/above the navigation bar.
Thanks for the suggestion. I will move it there and see how my results change, and I'll be sure to report back here with the results.
I will change it tommorow as we have had a traffic surge today and don't want to risk losing revenue (just in case it lowers CTR). More suggestions welcome if you anyone else has any.
Start privately selling ads to those displayed in AdSense, go to their sites and contact them. Sell CPC or CPM via Openads. Explain to them that Google takes a % share of their money, and how you both would benefit from direct ads. As of now, I think you have too many ads for a non-MFA site. You can limit some of them to only show to guests, as members would be blind to them and not click much anyway, this way you improve the experience for members.
The best ways to earn money on a forum - I have found - are Adsense Selling Private Ads Selling Links Selling Memberships
Thanks for your great suggestions! We could easily implement paid memberships, but all our rivals have done this and we are benefiting greatly by offering it free. We do get several donations daily though. As for all the other suggestions, I will be trying all of them!
You could try to offer a special membership in addition to your free membership. Those members could have special benefits, for example: access to special forums no one else can. It may influence more people to donate, because they get special features for it.
Thanks, we already have that in place where the sponsered google ads are between posts, but I may create a thread about paying for ad removal to make sure people know it's an option to them.
The forum was established late 2005. If I could improve one thing about it - that would be the post count. Yeah we have a great set of active members, and they make large donations to the site, but it would be nice for it to have more of a 'community' feel.
Ok, to further improve my CTR I have added Google ads on the left hand side of the forum too. Could you all take a look and tell me if you think they overdo it? Thanks!