My Tips for Google Adsense and Forums

November 8, 2005

Author: SVZ

Hey guys, hopefully this will help out anyone who is having trouble using Google Adsense on forums.

Firstly, I’d like to make some things clear…

For the amount of traffic and visits you get, you will not be turning huge profits like a non-forum website. Most of the visitors are returns, and are looking at posts, not advertisements. They don’t like leaving the forum.

Forums do not = money! If you want to make money make an informative web site instead. Create forums because you like and can be part of the community. Use ads to help pay for hosting.

1. Grape Skin and purple/pink ads seem to work the best. I tried different colors and this one had the best results. An extra 30% by using that color. Also randomly rotating colors work well too. Pastels have the highest click through rate. Sharp, contrasting, bright colors don’t perform well.

2. An ad on the forum index works very well. Make sure it is above the fold though. Ads at the bottom of the forum are confusing and seldolmy viewed or used.

a) If you want to place a vertical banner along the sides of your forum, you can do so. But it looks ’spammy’ and cheapens the look of your forum unless it is very well blended.

3. Do not place ads on search forums, PM pages, registration pages, etc. Why? Because people aren’t going to look for ads, they are there for a reason! It’s also against the Terms of Service.

4. Banners displayed after the 1st post on each page in a thread work the best. vBulletin seems to have the best display for this, once you buy the vBulletin software you can visit the vBulletin.com forums and there is a very easy tutorial on how to display them.

Banners at the bottom of a thread do not work as well. It’s a ratio of 15:1 in my case.

a) Don’t make the in-thread ads, bright and distracting! No-no-no! You’re a forum first, which means building a community. The ads are there to help support the content.

5. Use PhpAdsNew to deliver your ads in an iframe. This reduces some AJAX issues, especially with vBulletin and Invision Board. Don’t alter the HTML to track clicks, because a) it doesn’t work and b) it’s against TOS.

6. Use the feature that enables you to show a different ad if Google can’t provide any! Either display your own banners, or go for the collapsing one.

7. Don’t oversaturate! 1 banner per page is enough, 1 link unit per page is enough.

8. Set up channels. Use 1 channel for the forum index. 1 channel for the in thread posts (use seperate channels if you plan on having them at different positions). Cut off channels that are not performing well, they’re taking away from the ones that do perform well.

9. I’ve found that not mentioning “Sponsored Links” above an ad actually raises click-throughs. Just blend them in to your content. But don’t trick people in to clicking.

10. I’ve seen on other forums that placing a banner on the header at the very top of the forum works. But only because people click it on accident to get back to the forum home page. It looks cheap.

11. Thin your forum! Wide forums are a bit too spread out for the eye. 758 pixels is a good width, and will display properly on 800px resolutions. This ‘centers’ around the advertisments as well, and they don’t look lost. (Give users an option though if they do like the wider forum.)

12. Set up proper forum links. Google caches and views http://www.blah.com/forum/ differently from http://www.blah.com/forum/index.php, make sure you’re pointing to the correct one. One of these might not have ads on them.