Best forum placement tips from AdSense

Date October 10, 2005

In their most recent blog entry, AdSense offers up an AdSense heat map specifically for forums, likely as a result of their forum optimization tests that some publishers were participating in this summer.

forumheatmap.JPG

I would be curious to see how this breaks down across forum styles, if they release this information. I found with phpBB that the right column, while higher CTR than some placements, was definitely not as good as immediately following the first post of a thread. But even then, forum CTR is notoriously low in comparison to a non-forum page.

However, forums that manage to get a lot of CPM ads can do quite well revenue wise. So be sure to enable image ads, but also being sure to use one of the ad unit sizes that supports image ads. These are:

  • Leaderboard (728 x 90)
  • Banner (468 x 60)
  • Skyscraper (120×600)
  • Wide Skyscraper (160×600)
  • Medium Rectangle (300 x 250)

The other ad unit sizes will not be able to take advantage of the full range of CPM ads, since while other ad units can display the text CPM ads, you would be missing out on all the image CPM ads.

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Category Posted in Google AdSense, Tips & Techniques

5 Responses to “Best forum placement tips from AdSense”

  1. Paul Wells said:

    October 10th, 2005 at 11:39 am

    As a user I find those adverts after the first post disrupt the flow so much that I’m not encouraged to read further down.

  2. Rebecca said:

    October 10th, 2005 at 1:17 pm

    Does anyone know if there’s a similar heatmap on content pages that are not forums?

  3. Paul Wells said:

    October 10th, 2005 at 3:24 pm

    The Adsense help pages give a heat map for ‘content’ web pages.

  4. Visibility Genie said:

    October 22nd, 2005 at 10:48 am

    AdSense Tips for Forums

    The AdSense blog has posted some tips on how forums can get the highest CTR possible.
    The article contains another AdSense heat map, which are much easier to read than actual maps.
    Anyway, if you run a forum with AdSense, read the article.
    You can …

  5. SEO ???? said:

    December 6th, 2005 at 8:22 pm

    http://www.seochinese.com/?p=108

    Adsense???? - ???

    …