Google AdSense

Has anyone found a viable alternative to these people?

I don't understand their formula for figuring out what they owe you. When I contracted with them a year ago they were paying me $12 to $15 per day and at times $20. Over time their payments decreased and decreased and decreased all the while my traffic going up.

They've now gotten to the point that if I see $4 in a day I think I've hit the jackpot, and I know better than that. My traffic today is approximately 60% greater today than it was a year ago when they were paying $12. To give a more recent example last month my traffic (even according to their BS o meter) was 30% lower than my traffic to this point this month has been yet Google had tallied about 25% more pay last month than so far this month.

I'm about to tell them to take their crap and stick it where the sun doesn't shine if their payments do not improve in the near future.

Skip

[Skipsoutdoors]

That was kind of what I did with the reason the forum home displays the categories and forums in a list as opposed to all the forums. Our load times are pretty fast given what we are serving. I went through it in the spring and dropped my bandwidth usage by 1/3 doing it the way I did it by taking the images off the forum home and still keeping the category tabs having related forums and listing like they used to on forum home, just less forums. Those little arrows and bullet points and locks and such aren't much but by the time they load 57 times each on forum home it's a lot too much.

The colors are a little wild, but at one time we had a camo background. It was too difficult to load so the idea was to create a background with camo colors in html. I also like the fact that it's a fairly distinctive color set. That way it doesn't look like the other 6,799 hunting forums on the net.

The traffic's not the issue. Google screwing me on payment for their ads is.

The way I look at it is this. I buy ads for my daytime business in a local news paper. An ad of any reasonable size costs $150 or so. This newspaper has about 3500 subscribers and publishes weekly or 4 times a month. There are roughly 45 pages to the newspaper and no guarantee that all of the 3500 people will see my ad. More to the point, most people who read a newspaper only read about 1/3 of the paper. So if my ad is in the sports section, the people who read the headlines, business news, and lifestyle section do not see it.

With close to 6000 uniques viewing per month, that's equivalent to a newspaper with nearly twice the number of subscribers as the News Journal I advertise in. Those 6000 people make about 30,000 visits on the website in a month. Roughly equivalent to twice the size of the newspaper's monthly reads from subscribers. Those same subscribers viewed 700,000 pages this month - way above the newspaper's rate. The advantage of this style advertising is since the same ad blocks appear on every page, people can't miss them. It's not like I put google's ad in the Georgia Land Lease forum and it only got viewed by 150 people this week.

If Google would advertise something hunters would be interested in IE: Treestands, bows, etc they might get a little more activity. I don't know any hunter that's interested in a bullet proof vest that Google insists on advertising.

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[jeremyalyea]

I know it has been said already. But you should consider a new skin. It would probably be worthwhile to consider paying someone to create a custom skin for you if you are serious about your site.

[SEOvB]

Originally Posted by Skipsoutdoors

If Google would advertise something hunters would be interested in IE: Treestands, bows, etc they might get a little more activity. I don't know any hunter that's interested in a bullet proof vest that Google insists on advertising.

Skip

Here sounds like a large problem itself then. You aren't getting targeted ads to your site. You need to move the ad blocks around some put them closer to the content instead of at the top and you should start seeing improvements.

Switching the color of the ads from time to time maybe worth your time as well.

[Dean C]

Originally Posted by Skipsoutdoors

We have a lot of older members with short arm disease. The larger bolder font is easier for them to read.

99.99% of the return visitors enter at a forum level, I've thought of eliminating the home page altogether. We have a high rate of return visitors. Many have been on the forums for 4 or 5 years.

Skip

If a user has problems reading fonts on the web, they should increase their global font-size, not have you increase the font-size for ALL users who use your website.

Now, to answer your question. I think part of it is how competitive the advertising market has got over the last couple of years. Advertisers are willing to pay less, users are becoming more adverse to advertising that isn't relevant to them.

I have to be honest too, as a user who has just come to your site, if I had an interest in outdoor sports, i'd close it almost straight away. The design is horrificly bad. Light text on dark backgrounds is much harder to read on the web, and on top of that you have these horribly big fonts. Yes, you may have to cater for disabled users, but accessibility can be provided by using ems for font-sizes, and then the user can increase their browser font-size and enjoy a pleasurable experience across all their sites, and not have EXTRA big font sizes on yours.

A good accessible, usable design will make your advertising seem less intrusive, and users will click on your ads more as they won't stick out like a sore thumb.

[linesider]

Skip, the other problem with Adsense and our types of outdoor sport/rec boards seems to be that there are a lot of boards out there getting tons of hits a day and burning though potential advertisers.

How about looking into swapping some ad space reserved for Google and selling advertising space to someone else direct - that way yu make all of the coin

[amnesia623]

I would first look at what changes you have made to the forum when you started seeing a decline in revenue. Did you install a new skin or make a major change?

Then I would look into why your ads aren't getting targeted. There are some tags you can use (found here.

Also, please rethink your color scheme. Make it more natural looking with text colors that 'pop' from their backgrounds. You can use this tool http://www.colorschemer.com/online.html or go to http://www.colorschemer.com/schemes/ to help you if you need it.

If you know you're going to have users with accessibility issues, create another template for them. Don't force all your users to look at the adjusted template as it might appear unprofessional.

You have a good forum going! Stick with it, try some changes, and you're revenue will increase.

[engedi05]

Originally Posted by Skipsoutdoors

About 230,000 hits/day on 35,000 page turns/day 1000+ uniques.

Skip

No offense here.. If your traffic is really that much, why your alexa ranking is at 7 Million? Btw those rate, your alexa ranking should be around few thousand only.

[hotcouponworld]

A couple of things here....

Google provides a "heat map" which will actually give you advice where they think the best place in a forum for ads are - yours are not in the places they suggest. We put our ad in a corner once - it was freakin' siberia for google and we fixed it right away.

We've done the VBSEO and that has helped some.

As for alexa - they suck. They don't track forums very well that I've seen. We've embedded software from quantcast.com in our forum - much more accurate which is nice - I direct advertisers there so they can get a true description of what's going on at our site.

But location location location, and your ads are in the wrong spot. Just my .02c!