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Maximizing Adsense Revenue
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amykhar
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amykhar amykhar is offline 08-27-2005, 10:00 PM

Ad banners used to be a good source of income. That's not as true these days, but you can still easily cover basic hosting costs for a small forum with careful attention to your banners.

It takes more than slapping a banner in your header template. It takes a bit of time, patience and effort on your part to achieve optimal banner placement.

Luckily, if you use Google Adsense banners, you have some tools that can help.

The first is a very good document that shows where ad banners generally are the most effective:

https://www.google.com/support/adsen...page=tips.html

The second is the ability for you to control the color of your ad banners. Colors can be used to make the ad banners appear like part of the content. Or, they can be used to make the ad pop out of the page.

The third option is the wide variety of sizes that you can use. Having more choices than typical 468x60 banner ads means that you can work relevant ads into your content without looking like a banner farm.

The fourth option allows you to use alternate ads instead of google's public service banners. Why show ads for free?

Finally, Google gives you the ability to create custom channels. These channels will help you monitor the performance of each ad banner on the page.

Ad Placement
I have found that ads are vital in 2 places.
1. On the archive pages. Most of my guest traffic hits my archives first. If they don't find what they are looking for at my site, the google banner often gives them another viable site to check out. So, they click the ad and away they go.
2. In the postbit template of the first post on the page. (Ideally, the banner should be in the postbit of the LAST post on the page. More readers see the last post than the first. But, putting a banner there causes all sorts of grief for firefox and opera users if they try to use the quick reply box.)

What works for me, might not work for you
That's where custom channels come in.

Google allows you to create custom channels. I have several created - one for each placement of an ad banner in a template. Some examples of channel names are: postbit, header, archiveside, archivebottom, forumdisplay, etc.

After you create your custom channel, get the ad code based on that channel and place it in the proper template.

For example, in my forumdisplay, I use a link-type banner. I set that banner to my forumdisplay channel, then grab the code and paste it in my forumdisplay template.

I can now track the impressions banners on my forumdisplay pages receive and how many times they are clicked. Based on those numbers, I can adjust placement of the ad, colors of the ad, or even the size of the ad.

Google helps take the guesswork out of earning money from banners. I have found that using the tips outlined above, my google revenue has gone up 3,000 percent! Yes, 3,000 percent. Before I started working with google's placement tools, I earned pennies every month. Now, I am covering my hosting costs.

It is well worth any effort you will expend.

Amy
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  #32  
Old 12-12-2005, 02:38 AM
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Quote:
Originally Posted by 1996 328ti
I believe you can have 3 channels per page. Just create another channel and copy the code. I have 3 channels on my page.
I don't see what you mean unless you are refering to having three seperate banners. I have included a sample of the code from my web page but have changed the numbers to hide my information. Could you please explain how to and where to put the other two channels in it.


Code:
<script type="text/javascript"><!--
google_ad_client = "pub-1234567";
google_ad_width = 468;
google_ad_height = 60;
google_ad_format = "468x60_as";
google_ad_type = "text_image";
google_ad_channel ="1234567";
google_page_url = document.location;
google_color_border = "669966";
google_color_bg = "99CC99";
google_color_link = "000000";
google_color_url = "00008B";
google_color_text = "336633";
//--></script>
<script type="text/javascript"
src="http://pagead2.googlesyndication.com/pagead/show_ads.js">
</script>
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  #33  
Old 12-16-2005, 09:45 PM
djmini djmini is offline
 
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added quite nice!
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  #34  
Old 12-18-2005, 11:44 PM
Sychev_S Sychev_S is offline
 
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Quote:
Originally Posted by Damian
Have you looked at Section targeting?
http://www.google.com/support/adsens...y?answer=23168

For example, you can downplay the area in your postbit that affects your contextual ads by doing something like this:

HTML Code:
<!-- google_ad_section_start(weight=ignore) -->
<div id="postmenu_$post[postid]" align="center">
				<if condition="$show['profile']">
				<a class="bigusername" href="member.php?$session[sessionurl]u=$post[userid]">$post[musername]</a>
				<script type="text/javascript"> vbmenu_register("postmenu_$post[postid]", true); </script>
				<else />
				$post[musername]
				</if>
			</div>
<!-- google_ad_section_end(weight=ignore) -->
Adding the code tells google media bot to ignore this area when matching ads to your site's content. (in this case the username)

You can also emphasize the message area of the postbit to help with the ads.
THANK YOU! That pretty much did the trick! :up:
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  #35  
Old 12-19-2005, 03:50 PM
dinodonk dinodonk is offline
 
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section targeting is usefull.. but i am not using weight=ignore
just adding <!-- google_ad_section_start --> and <!-- google_ad_section_end --> between the post on postbit template
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  #36  
Old 12-30-2005, 01:36 AM
cgchris99 cgchris99 is offline
 
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A couple of questions.
1) on the newest adsense/archive plugin, it shows 3 ads. top, bottom and right column. It appears that my eCPM has gone down even though my impressions are up. Any thoughts?

2) Do I need to modify both the postbit and postbit legacy templates to display ads in my threads? If yes, can you explain.

Thanks
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  #37  
Old 04-04-2006, 08:24 PM
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Here ya go - We just wrote a hack that can easily place ads in the 3.54 archive...

EZ Archive Ads System

All nicely controlled via the admin cp
~
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  #38  
Old 03-20-2007, 02:11 PM
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DiSpy DiSpy is offline
 
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I know this is a really old topic, but I could use some help... (please?)

I've run phpBB forums for many years now, and I have just bought vBulletin and am going to combine 2 phpBB databases into one larger vBulletin forum for my site.

The main (old) phpBB site is located here: http://noated.net/forum/

As you can see, I have been using adwords and banners from the amazon affiliate program for many years. I have almost 20k registered users on the site, but am making only about $10/month from the ads. I have placed them in the topics, posts, redirect pages, etc... but no one ever seems to be clicking them.

As I switch over to vB I would like to know the BEST ways to increase my earnings. I've downloaded the mod to place ads in the archives (the one reccomended here), am creating channels to evaluate each ad, and would like some advice from you guys here on which other mods/methods are best? Or if I need to hardcode them in (that's fine too)? I have read the articles on google's site about placement, and will be making a few placement adjustments on the new site. What other advice can you guys who actually are making money give me?

Please help... One of my main goals for the site is to just have it pay for itself, that's the main reason for the switch to vB and a "subscription" model I will be implementing ($1/month for value-added services). Plus it's just better code.

THANK YOU!
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  #39  
Old 03-20-2007, 10:17 PM
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A while back, AdSense looked at our site and made some optimization recommendations. You can take a look if you like, to get some ideas.

I'm using a Custom OpenAds for vBulletin module that I wrote to serve our ads, but we run a fair amount of AdSense ads and our revenue quadrupled after we made changes in position and color.
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  #40  
Old 03-20-2007, 10:26 PM
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Google is okay with this kind of ad placement?

http://forum.voxilla.com/asterisk-su...tml#post100320
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  #41  
Old 03-21-2007, 04:34 AM
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Google rule for ads is, On any given page, you're welcome to place up to three standard ad units and one ad unit.
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