8 Tips: Increasing Your Forums AdSense Revenue

I often see badly placed AdSense ads on forums and a lot of people seem clueless as to why AdSense isn't performing for them. I realise that integrating AdSense into your forum can be a bit daunting so I've compiled some tips below (Inspired by Everton's Increasing AdSense CTR/CPM post this morning).

If I've made any glaring errors (surely not!) or if I've missed something so obvious that it should be in there, let me know by commenting and I'll amend.

1. Show Ads to Guests, Registered Users or Both?
The first thing you need to establish is whether you want to show ads to registered users, guests or both of them. Registered users are much less likely to click on the advertising as they'll be there for discussion, and it's been documented that visitors from search engines (i.e. Google) are much more likely to click on ads. These people, in my opinion, should be the primary target of the ads.

Why not create a channel for ads shown to registered users and those shown to users logged in as guest. This will give you a better idea of how visitors treat your ads. You could even have a channel for users that found the ad via a search engine! If I get any requests I'll write an article on how to do that as it'll vary from board to board. I currently PHPBB and I've also created a new forum from scratch for my upcoming website so that everything is more manageable (and I don't do PHP!).

2. Blend Your Ads.
Better integrate your ads using the same style fonts and link colours as the rest of your content. Also, give ad ad the same background and border colour as the area that the ad is placed, for example: use white if it's on a white background or if it's in a TD/DIV with a background of #CCCCCC use that!

Note: I prefer to use the same link colour with ad units as I do throughout the site. Some people have disagreed with me on that one but I've found that it works better for me and my users. Again… use channels to figure out the best method for you.

3. Don't Go Overboard!
Yes, you can have 3 ads per page… but do you REALLY need to? I always think it's a waste having an ad in the top right of the page - I'd never click that, and if it's coming in first in the code then it'll be showing the highest paid ads.

4. Experiment With Ad Placement
I've found that placing a leaderboard after the first post to be most effective placement for me. That won't necessarily be the case for you, and if you do nothing else, experiment with placement.

I'd advise giving each test placement at LEAST 3 days. See Google's forum heat map for placement ideas and a few more tips.

5. Banish Horrid URL’s Forever!
There is no excuse for horrid looking URL's. Not only do they look nasty but they can confuse bots. What does that mean? Well, if AdSense can't view the content as it should be viewed, it will end up serving irrelevant ads or even defaults. This is unlikely to affect you, but it is something so simple to do you should have done it already.

Make sure your forum doesn't display session id's in the URL. This is a big no no and you will most probably have problems with Google indexing if you have a user's session id in the URL. Also, try make sure there are no id fields in the URL at all i.e. instead of using "&userid=1" use "&user=1".

For further reading, look up mod_rewrite (UNIX) or ISAPI rewrite (Windows) and search your forum software support forums for "session id" or "sessionid" url removal.

6. Use the Competitive Ad Filter and Try adsblacklist.com
Google “ensures that your site always displays the ads representing the highest revenue potential for you” – that may be the case, but some ads shown will be crappy "made for AdSense sites" and you’d be best to block them all together. For more information on this see John Chow’s Guide.

7. Basic SEO
It goes without saying that you should make sure your page's title tag contain the topic title and as little else as possible.

For example: The PhpBB default "view topic" title tag layout is as follows:

"#sitename# :: View topic - #topic title#" 

It would be much more effective, for both SEO purposes and attracting clicks from search engine listings, if the title tag was more like this:

"#topic title# | #site name#"

That's just an example, you don't need to include the site name and you don't need to use a "|", you can use whatever you want… just remember: keep it short and to the point!

8. Section Targeting
I'd always advise using section targeting, whether on a forum, website or blog. As we all know, forums are especially difficult to optimise for due to the large amount of text on a page that isn't relevant to the topic. For example date and time of posts, links to members, register, login etc.

In my latest forum I've made sure that all the header links and user details are excluded via section targeting so that only the post content is read by the AdSense bot. This means that the ads will be as relevant to the topic as possible.

You can read about section targeting via AdSense help.

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That concludes my AdSense tips for forums. If there's enough interest I may discuss other ways of generating money with forums and general forum management… we shall see.

This entry was posted on Sunday, January 7th, 2007 at 7:09 pm and is filed under Internet, Money Making. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.