Adsense integration together with nice welcome message - StarBuG optimized blending
 

Introduction:
I am StarBuG, a clinical Physician for Children, and I am running several health Forums to support patients with medical questions. During the many years I am running my Forums I constantly worked on optimizing my Advertising integrations to maximize my earnings and the user experience using my forums. The click through rates for my Adsense integrations are good to very good for forums and may increase due to further optimizations so mark this mod as installed if you use it to make sure you always use the best optimized version of my adsense integration.

What this mod does:
This mod adds a Google Adsense large rectangle below the navbar together with an eye catching welcome message and a call to action (registration). This ad is the best performing ad on my forum. I run a forum with a fixed width and I think that on a fluid style this mod wont look that good but give it a try if you want.

Installation instructions:

in the template navbar find:

and add below:

in template additional.css add:




Additional Comments:
Make sure you change all lines marked RED to fit your forum.
Of course you should customize the welcome text to fit your forum and change the colors and size of the welcome box to fit your forums theme.

Screenshot:
https://vborg.vbsupport.ru/external/2010/09/16.png

More of my Adsense Integrations:

• Adsense Integration as last post - StarBuG optimized blending
• Adsense Integration above similar threads - StarBuG optimized blending
• Adsense Integration as second post - StarBuG optimized blending

Demo:
Patientenfragen.net - we have the answers

Of course feedback is welcome and if you have suggestions to further improve CTR please let me know!

ps: The welcome text in the screenshot is an automatic translation by google that's why it is hard to read :p

StarBuG

https://vborg.vbsupport.ru/

Google isn't paying you enough money! Discover WHY!

2 days ago I made a big change to my website that hopefully will increase my earnings a lot over time.

So far I made extensive use of Adsense channels to track each of my Ads separately.
I also activated "placement targeting" for the best performing ad placements.

However I did not realize the full potential of "placement targeting" until 3days after I talked to my direct advertising marketer.

Q: What is the main goal of an advertiser?
A: To show there ads to their target group which most likely will convert

Q: Is wider or narrower targeting more effective?
A: I think it depends but mostly the more narrow the target group is, the better the Ads perform

Just as info to you:
CPM prices for a very narrow targeting e.g. topics about "cough" or "skin rash" are 40-50$ (campaigns that my direct advertising marketer runs)
Campaigns that are not that narrow e.g. health only get 10-20$ CPM.
Yes, it makes that much of a difference.

So what did I do?

I created a separate channel for each forum category that is interesting to advertisers e.g. health, diseases, nutrition, alternative medicine, etc. for the ad in this welcome message.
Each of these channels was selected for placement targeting and got a description that outlined the topics in which these ads will be shown.

Then I created several large rectangle ads and assigned each one a category channel I created before.

Now each thread in a specific forum shows the Ad with the channel that was created for this specific forum.
(At the bottom you'll find the condition chain I created to show different ad channel in each forum)

Now each advertiser can narrow down the placement targeting on my website to a certain topic which suites his campaign best.
For example an advertiser who is selling homeopathy can now target his Ads to my forum "alternative medicine" and his ads are only shown to people interested in "alternative medicine".
This way conversion and CTR should increase quite a bit and a lot more advertisers should use placement targeting on my website over time and with that increase my earnings.

To understand the naming concept for channels that I use read my post: Google Adsense - The Secret to using Channels

Remember if you create these channels activate placement targeting for each channel and use a informative description!
I used:

and here is the condition code you can wrap around the above posted mod code:




What are your thoughts on this topic?
How do you handle placement targeting?

Installed rated and nominated.. Ive been looking for this for a cpl years now.. Thanks you very very much.. This little hack will finally complete my customizations!!!

Not really installed yet but clicked anyways because one way or another im going to make this work on my fluid style..

can ya please post a url up vondoom once you have done it so i can see what it looks like on a fluid theme

Sure im using it now, just click the doberman-chat link in my sig! Im still putting some thought into how to make it fluid. But i have no complaints. I think for now the 1024px compromise will work out fine for me.

http://img409.imageshack.us/img409/2...10155444sm.jpg

Iv not tried it yet but how abouts if you move it and put it so the sidebar goes along side it.

Doesn't seem to be working on savs.co.uk.

Does this line need changing to just show if the visitor is a guest?

Just remove
and the only condition is that only guests see it

Dear StarBuG :)

Your forum is well organized, Good luck with it.
i am eager to know how you have 2 languages interface ?

Thank you so much for this modification

i use vbenterprisetranslator.com but there are hacks available here for free too

And thank you ;)

Dear friend, please state this in the first post
Remove It works only when I delete it.....

Thanks , looking for other modifications :)

remove = delete ;)

Any way to post this great mod for vb 3.8.x ?

I don't run any 3.8 version anymore, sorry

Awe weak..... (-:

Do it yourself ;)

Shouldn't be hard to adapt.

Wrap it in a table create 2 tds both 50% width and put the content in it.
The css formating can stay

It's easy ;)

wow.. optimize thanks you very good

installed ,,, so great

Hello, for some reason this only shows up after log out and not before log in. Did I do something wrong?

If you want it to show for members and guests remove:

Thanks very much for sharing this. I looked at your site a while ago and thought I'd like that registration box - very kind of you for sharing!

For those not sure, make sure you don't have any welcome notices for guests because if you do it wont show!

Thanks from me too. I've been trying and trying but I can't get this to display correctly. I haven't bothered with colours etc yet but as you can see, there is a large gap between the two halves.

I have a fluid design and normally have a custom notice showing for guests (this is definitely set to inactive currently). http://www.vbseo.com/f28/how-make-yo...rs-image-7549/

The template edits in accordance with your instructions above are all in place. Would you have any idea why might be causing the welcome message to be displaying like this?

Thanks

Edit: okay, I see the answer now :) "and I think that on a fluid style this mod wont look that good but give it a try if you want"' I can get it looking better (second picture below) but when I log out of the forum the 'all cookies cleared' notice stops the ads from displaying. I'll keep fiddling with this but if anyone can help with a fix for fluid width forums that would be a great help! Thanks

can you post how to do this.

Don't replace the fixed width with a 100% width otherwise you get the "large gab" effect your are getting right now.

Hi,

Thanks. I haven't changed anything to be honest. I just inserted the code as you posted it.

I did get it to sort of work on fuid styles, But there are two separate CSS attributes one for the ad and one for the welcome text. I was able to make the welcome half fluid But on lower res screens the two halfs would stack and that wasnt the outcome i was hoping for so i set it back to static for the time being.. Either way im getting good clicks from this.

Yeah the CTR is quite good for forums :p

2nd post updated.

Optimization for using the full potential of "placement targeting" described.

I hope you like it!
Feedback is very welcome

Nice mod. Installed!

I first had problems, as I didn't noticed to "deactivate" the standard guest notice.

It works very good now, and I'm looking forward to get more clicks. ;)

Edit:

I'm running Photopost Gallery on my forums and I recognized, that the additional.css wasn't loaded automatically. It was missing in the header-inc.php. You have to add the red code.

For some reason I can't get to the border to show. It's not the same color as the background, so im not sure what the problem is.

Hello, thank you for sharing this excellent mod, is there a way of adding another advertising block at the side of the first one.

When I try to add it in the navbar template after the first advert, it just adds the second add below rather than at the side of the 1st add.

Many thanks.

Looks neat StarBuG. Do you know if this combination performs better than 2 large rectangles next to each other? (as suggested by many forum ad placement tutorials).

Thanks for the good add on for my guests. ;)

I have a fluid theme and i try to put it in a table. But then have a problem with the background from forum. the background stop direkt under your add on.

what is the right way?

Sorry about my english and i dont know so much about html and css.

Thanks

I can't get the two to be on the same rectangle.

The adsense will be on top of the Please Register blah blah blah, instead of everything looks "horizontal" it looks like "vertical", the Adsense in top of the invitation to join the site instead of been side by side.

Help Please.

Also, how can I make a border to wrap the whole thing like StarBug did on his site?

Thanks so much.

Which border?

use float:left; as additional CSS command for the first Ad, that should do the trick.

Did not try that but I hate it to slap ADs into my users faces.
I want to at least offer them something which is the welcome and call to action.
But that is my approach, feel free to test other ways.

Sounds like you forgot to add the code into the additional.css template.
Without the CSS the mod wont work.

No I dind't forgot StarBug, in fact I actually changed the colors and all. But it just won't work side by side but rather one in top of the other and it does looks pretty awful. :(

PS. I copied the following, one into the Navbar and the other into the additional.ccs template

Send me your link and I take a look.

But I guess that your welcome text is larger then 460px and that is causing the problem

I've been using this (and your other enhancements for second and last posts) for the last few weeks and they are performing much better than anything else I've tried. The welcome message has performed particularly well so thank you very much for sharing your ideas StarBuG. The only change I made was to enter an extra line at the end of the welcome text to tell people to scroll down the page :)

You are welcome

As a German I just hope that you don't uphold nor emphasise the stupid ideology from the topic of your forum.
We all need to learn from our history otherwise it will repeat itself in our future and effect us and our children for the worse.

I also hope that you considered the Google program policies:

My forum doesn't contain 'ideology'. It's a militaria forum for collectors - something which is stated quite clearly in the box you designed and which I'm quite sure you looked at...

However, even if it were the type of forum you mentioned it would frankly have absolutely nothing to do with you. How dare you even mention that in this thread.