adsense
 

is it really that bad ??

i have about 800 members on board per day and have added adsense last week with no payment made then today i made 0.20c.

Hardly seems worth usign adsense tbh - cause the normal adverts dont work and people simply wont click on banners for refferals.

you will see the first results in 3 or 4 months, not before... it take time for google to crawl your pages to display the proper banners... if you do not have a lot of different topics, people will always see the same kind of banners, so it is sure they will not click on them...

did you read the adsense documentation for that?

Yeah, first 2 months were slow, now I get like 14$ a day.

the thing is im undecided as what is best.Banners are refferals etc whereas Adsence for content is ads based upon what is on the current page but my ads for contents alwasy show up as text and not banners.

i have adsense on my blog as you can see... i never had a single click on it... not a penny... but i do not care... Google crawl my site twice for the same content, because i post a lot on it and the adsense is viewed by 1000 persons per day... i have keywords that worth the display of the adsense...

i do not care about the incomes because it is not the adsense goal... my blog is well known now.

i even have made a album review last week, the author contacted me back for the pleasure of it... just cool ;) he said he found my link in his own adsense references...

well im hoping to cover some of the board cost and was told google adsense was one way of doing it so any help or tips etc on how to go about it would be greatly recieved m8

Just place it in subtle spots through out the forum, and make them blend in with your style.

If you can't recover hosting costs thru adsense, its either not optimized correctly, or you're hosting package is larger then you need

Forums typically have a much lower CTR. I have a CTR of about .30-.45% :( Placement and other factors also matter.

I agree because the majority of forums have absolute nonsense for posts. Only about 3% of posts made every year on most message boards are probably worth any "value" to the site.

That being said, no one is going to click on an ad that is referencing a pointless topic.

Most forums see 1% to 2% most the time

Its real simple the more traffic the more clicks..

so if forums are the worst then how do i improve it.
Also how can i just get ads which are relevant to me - and i dont mean refferal ads either cause no one will click on them anyway

build static html pages that have good content and link to them for reading by your members, have articles, news anything like that.

Increase your page SEO, if google sends traffic to your pages and those visitors click a link you'll get more money. Don't waste your time with refferal ads, unless you know your members are willing to spend money on the items.

Adsense has worked well for me, it wasn't instant but after a few months it started to take off. Adding VBSEO was an additional boost that I would highly recommend, the combination of the two really pays off. I use the regular ads, the referral ads never really paid off for me.

Well I went to your site and clicked on 2 ads :D

ive made $3 in about 3 months - im going to sell my board soon as the potential for it being a big earner is well vast.

and how much are you planning to ask or how much had you invested?:rolleyes:

well it dont matter how much ive invested because money cant buy you decent members :)
But $3 on adsense is extremely high and if it carrries on at this rate i may put down a small deposit on a ferrari .

Jokes aside though - maybe im not getting as much out of adsense as i should do.I get the code from adsense and add it under my navbar and ive added it on forumdisplay etc yet the fee is small.Im proberly making about 71cents per day if im lucky.

Of the 20,000 visits or so for my forum since it started, I accumulated 7.34 $

adsense is nonsense, and I am considering removing it.

Honestly, I am puzzled how is it accepted 'legally' that Google doesn't explain to the website owners HOW MUCH they get per click, view, etc, in details and before signing up.

This camouflage situation is really illegitimate, and only google benefits from it.

Any good alternatives?

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Do like I will do, just remove it. Looks pretty much like spam, most often irrelevant, and doesn't pay as much as you can imagine.

You're speaking from the point of view of an owner of a very small site, though. Your stats:

It's not nonsense, it's just that your site is small and your traffic (by comparison) is very low. You can't really expect to get a lot of revenue with only 200 members and 20k views. For bigger, busier sites, it's certainly worth it. I do agree that it's not worth running on low traffic sites - the payout isn't worth putting ads on your site when you're trying to build a memberbase. For big sites however, it does pay pretty well. I've broken $300/mo and there are guys out there who've done that much in a single day off of Adsense. It's all about traffic, and figuring out what ad placements work best on your site.

You can't just toss up a board and throw ads up and expect good results. You really have to work at it to find out what ad locations and formations work best on your content, pay close attention to your CTR and constantly optimize to make the most of it.

Edit: I'm not sure if you've already taken it down, but I'm on your site as a guest right now and I see no ads at all on your forumhome, and only a single text unit at the very bottom of your postbit. The best performing spots have historically been the upper/upper-left areas. Nobody's clicking your ads because even guests usually don't see them.

i have 9000 members with about 1000 logging in per day and i dont earn anything - like i say maybe i aint picking the correct ads or something.
Id like it to earn but sadly it dont.

I dont see movie banners in google adsense as that is mainly what my board is about - am i missing something here ?

I'd have to see your site to tell, but if you aren't getting ads relevant to your content, that'd be a reason why. If you're getting 1k logged in, I have to assume your uniques are pretty high as well. Adjust your layout, SEO your boards and optimize. You should be $5-10 a day with those numbers easily.

Also, you can run CJ ads along with adsense too, and in my experience they work very well.

You probably need to better optimize your boards then, and use adsense section targeting if you've got a member base that size.

Like chris said, increasing your SEO work, and some other things will leader to you increasing your eCPM and thats a little known secret to increase that, and you'll start making a gold mine :)

what is CJ ads ? - also how do i use adsense section targeting as i have not see this option.
Also i dont have SEO installed as its quite expensive if it dont work and see i cant get adsense to work proper then i dont see SEO working for me.Seriously i have really bad luck with things like this.

here is what it looks like at moment.

Page impressions Clicks Page CTR Page eCPM [?] Earnings AdSense for Content top channels
573,706 209 0.04% $0.05 $****

Honestly it sounds like you need to make the decision as to wether your forum is worth it, to you, to put some cash into. If you run a big board, you really should run vbSEO. It's worth it, but it also sounds like you're not looking to do a lot of actual work after the install.

There is no one-click solution, everything you do to improve SEO has to work together. If you just install vBSEO out of the box, you will most likely get decent results, but not nearly as well as if you take the time and really dig into it, and other methods of improving your site's SEO. I don't know how long you've been running Adsense for, but if it's longer than a couple of weeks and you still aren't seeing relevant ads, then it's possible that your SEO is so bad that even the Adsense spider can't determine what the actual topic of your site is.

I'm not trying to turn this into a plug for vBSEO - I'm extremely satisfied with it, so I'll leave it at that, but it definitely sounds like there's a content issue with your board. Where are your ad locations, and what formats are you running?

Also, adsense alone isn't the only answer. I offer and ad-free site as a "perk" for being a contributing member, for example. Small donations of $5/10, they add up, and it's up to you to decide what you want to do with it. I personally put it right back into the forums with things like vbseo, photoplog pro, gars, etc, etc.

CJ = Commission junction. http://www.cj.com

i appreciate your advice and yeah you are proberly right - i aint put much throught into it.I throught i would pick some adsense content and just add the code to the board but seems there is a lot more to it than that.
ALso as for content the adverts never ever match the content of the threads its above so why is that happening.I can afford SEO but if i buy that theres no gurantee thats going to change anything as its just soemthing new to learn and i not even suzzed out how to get relevant ads which is relevant to my board on my site.
Seems i have to go with what ever ads google throws up on my board.

The best advice that I can give you (imo, of course) is to make sure you're showing maximum ad units to guests at all times. How you treat members is up to you, but I have pretty good results with the way my site's setup right now. (guests: all, members: navbar/link unit below the post, contribs: nothing).

Good luck. :)

kk cheers chris.One last thing - im on vb3.6.8 so if i purchased seo is it just a plugin i use and add to admincp etc and from there i can edit certain options etc ?
Also how does SEO affect what adsense will display ?

SEO effects what adsense displays because the spiders will be able to tell what your pages are about better via tags on your page, the domain url (thread titles) and lots of other little things.

I don't want to get this thread closed. :cool: Yeah, it's cake to install. Check their site. ;)

You need to place your ads in the correct place. Places where people will click.

Try using the "Competive ad filter" to filter out undesired ads.

I know a lot of admins, and on a very active forum -- you can easily get $400-500 per month.

Regards Jason :)

I saw someone offering people money to post last year (well, a prize for the best poster). Just quoting you for truth and amusing myself with happy memories of a failed imitator.

Rapscallion