Many Adsense users believe that Adsense revenue derived from forums is not as lucrative as revenue generated from regular content sites (all things being equal). Well, I’m here to set the record straight and say it is very lucrative, but you need to know what you’re doing.
First of all, unless your website is generating at least 1000 unique visitors per day, don’t quit your day job! One you’ve started hitting these visitor numbers then there are a number of opportunities to increase the revenue on your forum (my experience and the content of this post is about Invision Power Board, IPB) a great forum software and one I’ve used to power one of my very large community sites for over 5 years now!
Here are a few tips to help you maximise the revenue generated from your forums:
1) Ensure that your forum is very well targetted, general discussion forums are very difficult to monetise (unless your visitor levels are in the millions per month)
2) Install Google Analytics on your forum (it now has an adsense addon) and know which parts of your forum get the highest amount of traffic.
3) The adsense ad unit that’s worked best for me is the Large Rectangle (336X280) placed on the top left hand corner below the navigation bar (only in the highly trafficed subforums)
4) Do not be tempted to add Adsense code on the index of the forum. it will only increase your ad impressions and decrease your CTR (this will eventually decrease your eCPM and eventually kill your revenue!)
5) Ensure that you’ve also included the same Ad block mentioned above on the lofi version of the forum (again top left hand side of the page above the Navigation).
6) Make sure you include the same block in the forum portal if you’ve activated it (act=home)
7) Finally, and this is really important! Do not use the forum’s internal search engine but instead create a Google Internal search engine and include adsense for search on it, this has worked wonders on my site!
Hope these tips help you to better monetise you IPB forum! Good luck!
